Wicked Like a Wildfire Quotes

“[She] had sounded like the rain. Sometimes storms, sometimes light patters, sometimes the sweet, lashing gales after a long drought. Sometimes even the kind that came with rainbows. The kind you wanted to feel on your face while you held the rest of your body underwater in the summer sea.

Rain could be so warm. No one ever really talked about that.”
― Lana Popović, Wicked Like a Wildfire

“For me, it was the hibiscus flower, the petal red and fleshy as our mother trailed it over the tip of my nose, before she let me gum it to release its tart flavor. For Malina, it was a gleaming, perfect cherry, which Mama crushed into a paste that she let my sister suck from her ring finger. It was bad luck to name a daughter after the thing that first sparked the gleam, Mama said. So I was Iris, for a flower that wasn’t hibiscus, and my sister was Malina, for a raspberry. They were placeholder names that didn’t pin down our true nature, so nothing would ever be able to summon us. No demon or vila would ever reel us in by our real names. Even caught up in the story, Mama could never quite explain what the gleam looked like once she found it.”
― Lana Popović, Wicked Like a Wildfire

“I'd have let him hold me like that until I died.”
― Lana Popović, Wicked Like a Wildfire

“Then he asked her to dance him the tides of the oceans, and vanished while she danced.”
― Lana Popović, Wicked Like a Wildfire

“I would have bet anything that she had exactly as many diamonds as there were daughters sacrificed.”
― Lana Popović, Wicked Like a Wildfire

“She was a Polish witch-goddess who ruled over winter, nightmares, and love. They say even Death was so fascinated by her that she never died.”
― Lana Popović, Wicked Like a Wildfire

“Being sorry doesn't always fix everything, and I know that I- that sometimes I use it like a patch.”
― Lana Popović, Wicked Like a Wildfire

“And beyond, our mother lay like a deathbed princess under fluorescent lights.”
― Lana Popović, Wicked Like a Wildfire

“Like a swarm of moths where there should have been only butterflies.”
― Lana Popović, Wicked Like a Wildfire

“We had been so beautiful together, reflecting one another like a family of mirrors.”
― Lana Popović, Wicked Like a Wildfire

“Each bloomed into a little galaxy that I could cup inside my palm, the sticky stars of its pollen caught between my fingers.”
― Lana Popović, Wicked Like a Wildfire

“As if I had grown into a cactus instead of something softer, and she didn't want to risk my spines.”
― Lana Popović, Wicked Like a Wildfire

“These days, had someone asked me if our mother loved us, any "yes" would have caught in my throat like a fish bone.”
― Lana Popović, Wicked Like a Wildfire

“It was a whimsical thing fit for changeling children, wrought with mermaids trapped in ivy, open seashells with tiny apples growing in them instead of salty flesh.”
― Lana Popović, Wicked Like a Wildfire

“Maybe she was stoic and flawless as ever, Snow White giving birth under glass.”
― Lana Popović, Wicked Like a Wildfire

“The word for “witch,” veštica, meant “deft one,” and that was what we’d been: deft in beauty, versed in its tastes and sounds and textures as it wove like a ribbon through our fingers. It was an heirloom we carried in our blood, a legacy of magic passed down from womb to womb. All the women in our family had it.”
― Lana Popović, Wicked Like a Wildfire

“I felt generally tender, as if the clay casing I'd packed around my heart for years had finally cracked open, and what was beneath it was so raw it felt even the slightest, passing breeze of emotion. Or maybe that was what it always felt like, knowing you might lose everything when you'd only just discovered all there was to live for. The sheer brilliance of the light against the darkness was almost too much to stand.”
― Lana Popović, Wicked Like a Wildfire

“I love her, okay? I've loved her since I was fifteen. Longer than that, really. And she- she loves me, too.”
― Lana Popović, Wicked Like a Wildfire

“The blood flowed through her straight down to us, connecting us to her through ribbons of ink.”
― Lana Popović, Wicked Like a Wildfire

“All hail the misogyny, as if women can't be good at stealing and sacrilege-”
― Lana Popović, Wicked Like a Wildfire

“Mathematics to the rescue!" Niko cheered under her breath, giving a sarcastic fist pump, "Calculus will find a way.”
― Lana Popović, Wicked Like a Wildfire

“They were staring away from each other, Lina's eyes near silver in the dimming light, as if her irises were limned with mercury, Niko's dark and gleaming like a doe's, blackened with liner. There was something glinting right beneath the surface there, a goldfish flicker in a pond, but I lost it just as quickly.”
― Lana Popović, Wicked Like a Wildfire

“She is not a fruit," Luka said, sounding so affronted it actually made me laugh out loud.
"It's true, I'm not," I agreed, still giggling ridiculously, "I am, in fact, a female human.”
― Lana Popović, Wicked Like a Wildfire

“Time shuddered, then slowed to a crawl. It seemed like hours that I watched her falling, the image of every moment sharp and hard like an insect caught in amber, each locking indelibly into my memory like the missing pieces of a terrible puzzle.”
― Lana Popović, Wicked Like a Wildfire

“My thoughts sparked around each other like a school of minnows, slippery and silver, impossible to grasp.”
― Lana Popović, Wicked Like a Wildfire

“but sometimes I couldn't curb myself just to ease her - iris”
― Lana Popović, Wicked Like a Wildfire