When the Moon Fell in Love with the Sun Quotes

“I wonder for the first time, with a sharply caught breath, if I did love Peeta then. If the grief that poured out of me during his Games had been the outcry of a breaking heart, rendered powerless to prevent her beloved's pain. If I agreed to his bargain not simply to save my family but because my heart desperately wanted to live in the glow of his. If the kiss I clumsily pressed to his cheek after the Reaping – the kiss that sent me sprinting back to the woods to burrow among the roots of an old tree and cry myself sick – had nothing to do with debt or gratitude and everything to do with love and loss.

I wonder if I've loved him since that moment under the apple tree when a boy with a bruised cheek threw burnt bread and life to a dying girl. A girl who grew and thrived because of that boy and that bread, who wished for five years that she could have soothed his cruel bruise with a kiss.

Was that why I kissed him after the Reaping? Had I been carrying that clumsy kiss inside of me all that while? Had Peeta brought life to my heart as well as my body that hopeless day in the rain?

Have I ever not loved him?

I shake away these troubling thoughts with a shiver that reaches to my bones. My love for Peeta is fresh and fragile as a hatchling, I'm sure of it; kindled by his compassion and coaxed into its present brave blaze by the tenderness he shows me at every moment. It's foolish and futile to wonder whether I might have loved him before coming here, let alone when that love might first have flickered into existence. I am a wild creature, devoted to the boy who tamed me with warmth and food and gentle touches, and I accordingly express that love with woodland gifts.

Like a courting bird in an old tale, bringing her sweetheart all manner of odd little presents to feather his nest.”
― Mejhiren, When the Moon Fell in Love with the Sun

“This meal tastes like happiness," he murmurs, curling the tail of my braid around his fingertip. "It's bursting with it, actually; with happiness and affection and…a-and –" He breaks off with a sharp, strange cry, quickly stifled. "With…other wonderful things," he says hoarsely.

That's where the extra love went, I realize in horror. There was never a chance to store it away. It spilled out of me and right into his food.”
― Mejhiren, When the Moon Fell in Love with the Sun

“Star-babes. Baby fawns. A womb swollen and radiant as a harvest moon.”
― Mejhiren, When the Moon Fell in Love with the Sun

“A huntress needs a gentle mate, Dad explained once, a boy she can protect, and such a boy is drawn to her in turn. He loves her strength, her fierce heart and her wild beauty, and she needs his gentleness and warmth and patience, just like the sun and moon in their courtship. The huntress embodies beauty in the manner of a wild thing – a dove or a doe or even a cougar, all dusk and sinew and bright eyes – and her mate creates beauty with his hands, preparing a snug and handsome burrow for his bride and filling it with food and little gifts for her pleasure.

But you're the gentle one, I puzzled, for even as a small child I understood my parents' dispositions well. Does that make Mom a huntress?

My father laughed richly at that. No, catkin, he replied. Your mother is a witch, and I have my suspicions about your sister. They're a bit trickier to love than huntresses, and they require a very different sort of mate, but that's another story altogether.”
― Mejhiren, When the Moon Fell in Love with the Sun