A Girl Walks Into the Forest Quotes

“There is beauty in the body, even in its winter, even in its season of death.”
― Madeleine Roux, A Girl Walks Into the Forest

“The gaps between my fingers spread while things slip through my grasp—girlhood, innocence, the idea of what my life should have been.”
― Madeleine Roux, A Girl Walks Into the Forest

“Their small, spiny arms link around my neck, their chest rising and falling quickly against my throat. Sensations and memories wash over me in rapid succession—the first time I felt sunlight on my face; making grass whistles with Gavril in the dry winter fields; the chirp of insects and frogs rising to meet the starry blanket of night, their chorusing seeping in through the kotte windows, a reminder that nature is close and walls are frail.”
― Madeleine Roux, A Girl Walks into the Forest: A Young Adult Horror Fairy Tale of Deadly Creatures and Survival

“Beg, Ermo. I like to hear it. Though in the end, it will get you nowhere. Whatever kindness and hospitality you extended to me, the forest will show you just the same.”
― Madeleine Roux, A Girl Walks Into the Forest

“You will understand why the storms come, why the droughts kill, why the bright, poisonous thing leads us to temptation, and you will hear what the mushrooms murmur to each other when they carry the messages of the trees. There is a secret world beneath this one; it cares not for the pettiness of human ambition or the blows we land on each other, nor will it ever care for the cities that blight and spread. Nature seeks only to preserve itself; she is a selfish goddess, but your interests align.”
― Madeleine Roux, A Girl Walks Into the Forest

“In their chapel you made a covenant with their god. Now you will make a new covenant—not with their god, but with yourself.”
― Madeleine Roux, A Girl Walks Into the Forest

“And I didn’t put rats in your father’s corpse, but I wish I had! I curse your foul bloodline, Ermo and Leonid. I curse you both, and I will live!”
― Madeleine Roux, A Girl Walks Into the Forest

“I will survive all this cruelty and pain to one day see him suffer.”
― Madeleine Roux, A Girl Walks Into the Forest

“they described falling in love as a swift and furious current sweeping them up, carrying them off. Unguarded hearts could be carried downriver without warning, and my heart is vulnerable, eager for love even as the possibility for it slips away.”
― Madeleine Roux, A Girl Walks Into the Forest

“She should not have survived the creature’s poison, my lord, even with her peasant’s constitution. The same infection has killed men twice her size and strength; there is no earthly explanation for why she yet lives.”
― Madeleine Roux, A Girl Walks Into the Forest

“My own blood speaks. ACROSS HIS THROAT. LET THE BLOOD, SEE IT FLOW, FEED THE FOREST WITH UGLY WORK.”
― Madeleine Roux, A Girl Walks Into the Forest

“Ermo says I am one of the few who have survived the creature’s poison. I am not so sure of that as I feel the weight of the knife in my hands. I’ve never felt like a dangerous person, but the screaming in my blood says that isn’t so. In that moment, it speaks louder than my own panicked thoughts.”
― Madeleine Roux, A Girl Walks Into the Forest

“A small piece of my heart insists that I will miss him when he’s gone. Or I will miss what we might have cultivated had we been less stubborn and more aware of time moving forward, forward to the near moment when we will be separated forever. He will never know my children, and I will never know his. (…) I almost say, I will miss you terribly, brother, miss the idea of us.”
― Madeleine Roux, A Girl Walks Into the Forest