Blanca & Roja Quotes

“The story of the ugly duckling was never about the cygnet discovering he is lovely. It is not a story about realizing you have become beautiful.

It is about the sudden understanding that you are something other than what you thought you were, and that what you are is more beautiful than what you once thought you had to be.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Blanca & Roja

“I was a girl who would never exist in a fairy tale, not just because of the brown of my body but because of my heart, neither pure enough to be good nor cruel enough to be evil. I was a girl lost in the deep, narrow space between the two forms girls were allowed to take.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Blanca & Roja

“The biggest lie of all is the story you think you already know.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Blanca & Roja

“We find what is beautiful in what is broken. We find what is heartening in what is terrifying. We find the stars in the woods’ deepest shadows.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Blanca & Roja

“That was the thing neither Roja nor the señoras understood. Sometimes what a story needed was not a girl who would do what the prince told her, who would content herself with meeting him only in the dark, who would not question why she must not open her eyes. Sometimes a story needed the girl who would find him among the crumbling stones where he did pretending all o fit was a castle. It needed the girl who took the prince’s orders and crushed them between her back teeth, who bound his wrists if that was what it took to set him free.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Blanca & Roja

“My hope for you, reader, for all of us, is two sides of the same wish: that the world gives us each the space to write our own story, and that we leave room for each other’s stories. They are where our hearts survive.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Blanca & Roja

“Remember what I always told you."
I let my eyes fall shut. "I have teeth."
I opened my eyes in time to catch his nod.
"So use them," he said.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Blanca & Roja

“Our mother always told us no to tell lies, even to ourselves, because they became truer every time you said them. But we had told ourselves lies, and they had become the truth. We had started to believe that Roja was the sister whose heart was a handful of hard red jewels, and I was the one as insubstantial as the hollow center of a cranberry. The lie of who we were had killed who we might have been. It had buried us. It stripped us down into girls uncomplicated enough to be understood.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Blanca & Roja

“The way you look at me, do you mean it?”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Blanca & Roja

“My sister and I had been born fair and dark, her looking like a girl in a fairy tale who would grow up sweet, a princess, and me like one who would grow into a cruel witch. I had seen the pictures in storybooks. I knew what I was, with my bloodstained hair. Girls like me were marked for the swans. How could they ever take a girl like Blanca?”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Blanca & Roja

“Whether the woods knew my name or not, they took me. So I became blackbirds, birch trees, water. I existed as whatever part of the woods would have me, rocks or crows or fallen leaves. I spent time in whatever creek or poison red-and-white mushrooms let me in.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Blanca & Roja

“That I was a boy, but it was not as simple as me wanting to be called he. That I liked being called he and him. But that I would've liked being called she and her sometimes, too, if it didn't let everyone settle into the assumption that I was a girl. I had never been a girl, would never be a girl...”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Blanca & Roja

“Page set her hand on the small of my back. She did it like it was only to guide me around rocks or fallen pinecones. But when she did it, I was that glass jar with a candle set inside. The heart of me was as soft as the wax of the tea light.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Blanca & Roja

“Good girls had their own way of hitting back.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Blanca & Roja

“In the dark, my sister glowed, but in the dark, I was the dark itself. Blanca, bright and fair Blanca, was the moon and all its stars. I was just her background to shimmer against.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Blanca & Roja

“(...) Even if there is no retracing your path, no unbreaking what has been broken, the heart of you, the heart of everything, can still knit back together.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Blanca & Roja

“It wasn’t that I hadn’t thought of it since the day I went into the woods. But then, I was part of the woods. I was birch trees. I was a yearling bear. I did not have to remember this in my own body. And when I was something other than what I was, the memory didn’t have to be mine. It could belong to anyone.
Now I was me again. The memory wove through the body I’d been in when it happened, and I couldn’t get away from it.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Blanca & Roja

“To boys like this, the world was there to offer them things. But I had said this corner of the world was not his.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Blanca & Roja

“I wasn’t anyone close enough to Page to feel what I felt now, all of me breaking open like I was a pomegranate. All of me spilling everywhere like red-jewel seeds.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Blanca & Roja

“You can scream and cry if you want,” he said. “But what you have in you is power.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Blanca & Roja

“Do you need somewhere to stay?” I asked.
“I’ll figure it out.”
“Want to stay here?”
“Why?” he asked.
“Good point. We’re the del Cisne girls.” I gave him the widened eyes of a vengeful witch. “Who knows what we might turn you into?”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Blanca & Roja

“My mother used to tell Blanca and me stories about nahuales. She said they lived among humans but at night became wolves or owls, flying on the wind like la llorona. Sometimes they made children sick and sucked the blood of their parents. Sometimes they withered crops with the touch of their wasted fingers. They drew souls halfway from their sleeping bodies and then dropped them like handfuls of water.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Blanca & Roja

“My grandmother says real men know their way around a kitchen.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Blanca & Roja

“You two never could follow rules, could you?”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Blanca & Roja

“But the only one I could grab hold of was the one that held on to me, the one that had been written so deep into me that the woods turned me into part of it. "Snow-White and Rose-Red.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Blanca & Roja

“There will always be two daughters. But we will always take one back”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Blanca & Roja

“Don’t give up. You’re not a swan yet.”
― Anna-Marie McLemore, Blanca & Roja