Juniper & Thorn Quotes

“My eldest sister was right; I would smile blithely if someone tried to saw off my leg. But no one ever told me I was allowed to scream”
― Ava Reid, Juniper & Thorn

“I almost laughed. “You would rather me eat your heart than look away in disgust?”
“Of course,” he breathed. “Every time.”
― Ava Reid, Juniper & Thorn

“You let me eat up all papa’s anger so it wouldn’t poison you. you didn’t mind that he ruined me as long as you were unspoiled and safe. If you ever loved me, it was because I was a soft thing you threw down into the bottom of a pit to break your fall.”
― Ava Reid, Juniper & Thorn

“Don’t you see? You can take my heart and liver; split open my belly and eat what’s inside. I would sooner bear it than lose you to those who would call you plain-faced, who makes you kneel and kiss their feet. Do not leave me alone. Do not leave me to lick my wounds like a dog before it’s put down. Do not look at the truth of me and then look away. Please, Marlinchen.”
― Ava Reid, Juniper & Thorn

“Magic is the first sip of good wine that makes the edges of your vision blur. Magic is the cool breeze of the boardwalk at night and organ music in the air. Magic is landing a grand jeté and nearly going deaf with hate crowd's applause. Magic is the low flicker of tavern lights and the girl your courting leaning close so you can kiss.”
― Ava Reid, Juniper & Thorn

“They are not terrible. They are just the truth.”
― Ava Reid, Juniper & Thorn

“Well, you’re my first secret then, my first lie. Does that please you?”
“Only if it pleases you.”
― Ava Reid, Juniper & Thorn

“You should know, of course, that there are only two kinds of mothers in stories, and if you are a mother, you are either wicked or you are dead.”
― Ava Reid, Juniper & Thorn

“I am not afraid of your father’s anger. I am afraid of his gentleness.”
“What?”
Sevas looked down. “Even Derkach was capable of kindness. You heard him say that he loves me. Any predator can choose to smile without teeth.”
― Ava Reid, Juniper & Thorn

“You know the truth, Ms. Vashchenko. What you want is the courage to believe it.”
― Ava Reid, Juniper & Thorn

“It filled me with a terrible pity and guilt, so perfunctory it was as if I'd been made for it, a machine for dispensing grief.”
― Ava Reid, Juniper & Thorn

“The juniper tree looked as stolid as a grave marker, unruffled. Under the dirt was the compact and inside the compact was the black sand and in every grain of sand was Sevas, my first secret, my first lie, safe as death.”
― Ava Reid, Juniper & Thorn

“You are insufferable sometimes. You're not doing me, or yourself, any favors by pretending not to mind when you get hurt. I would have slapped you harder if I didn't know the truth--if I didn't know that you would just blush and bat your lashes as someone tied a tourniquet around your thigh and prepared to saw your leg off. Do you know why the worst thing Papa has ever done to me is push me to my knees? Because I wail and the scream and beat his chest with my fists whenever he tries to do anything more than bark orders at me from the chaise. You think he wants some mute little china doll to cook his meals and wash his sheets? No. He wants daughters with teeth. The hurting is the point. I can't believe it's taken you twenty-three years to figure out--if you even understand what I'm saying at all. It's no fun stamping through old dirty snow. People want to ruin things that are clean and new... He can't stand the idea of anyone spoiling us but him.”
― Ava Reid, Juniper & Thorn

“Wanting anything ended only in misery.”
― Ava Reid, Juniper & Thorn

“Most of the wizards in Oblya took mortal women as their brides, due to the fact that witches have a tendency to become wickeder when they become wives. Some, I had heard, even grew a second set of sharp teeth and ate their husbands.”
― Ava Reid, Juniper & Thorn

“Princes didn’t come for women; they only came for girls with intact and immaculate maidenheads, opening them up like flowers waiting to be plucked.”
― Ava Reid, Juniper & Thorn

“But there’s hardly anything in life worth doing that doesn’t make somebody angry.”
― Ava Reid, Juniper & Thorn

“Stories weren't meant to be questioned; they were answers in and of themselves. They were meant to preempt any question you might ever have, to steal the words right from your mouth. If you were a third daughter your fate was written out before you even drew your first breath. If you thought to ask why certain plums were suffused with poison, well, you might as well be a loathsome scientist. If you began to wonder how a wizard came to own his tower, you were a capitalist, with viperous schemes behind your eyes. Who else would ever dream of asking why?”
― Ava Reid, Juniper & Thorn

“It's the oldest story there is, men wanting things that will kill them.”
― Ava Reid, Juniper & Thorn

“Stories weren't meant to be questioned; they were answers in and of themselves. They were meant to preempt any question you might ever have, to steal the words right from your mouth.”
― Ava Reid, Juniper & Thorn

“what do you do when you’re twenty-one and you’ve already achieved everything that most people can only dream of? You have the rest of your life in front of you, but nowhere else to go.”
― Ava Reid, Juniper & Thorn

“When I blinked again, though, he was Sevas, just Sevas, and I began to weep for how utterly and helplessly I loved him.”
― Ava Reid, Juniper & Thorn

“He believed me, I could tell, or at least he wanted to. I wanted desperately to believe myself. It was better than the alternative: that the ghost of the girl I was still haunted these halls, and she would posses me whenever my body ached like a wound that would let her slip inside. Perhaps she would never let me go.”
― Ava Reid, Juniper & Thorn

“We have lived in Oblya before it was even Oblya... When there was only the long, flat steppe that fell into the sea with nothing to stop it. Since the days of the bogatyrs and their gods, when you couldn't pass by a stream without rusalka calling to you sweetly, when you left your third-born sons in the woods for the leshy, and when you prayed in four directions to please the domovoi that lived in the cupboard.”
― Ava Reid, Juniper & Thorn

“What did I know of any history besides my own, and even that hazy, half-remembered? There was a whole world spreading its roots outside my father’s house, and oaks just as old as the ones in our garden. I grew up with his words and the stories in the codex, but did I really know anything at all?”
― Ava Reid, Juniper & Thorn

“I had always thought of my body as something that needed to be tackled and brawled, pelted and pinned down and bruised into submission, then trussed up like a chicken and laced into a whalebone corset.”
― Ava Reid, Juniper & Thorn

“If you ever loved me, it was only because I was a soft thing you threw down into the bottom of a pit to break your fall.”
― Ava Reid, Juniper & Thorn

“And what was a story except a berry you ate over and over again, until your lips and tongue were red and every word you spoke was poison?”
― Ava Reid, Juniper & Thorn

“Once you turned into one thing, you could no longer be what you once were. A cat turned into a cat-vase lost its whiskers and darting pink tongue. A carriage turned into a gourd lost its wheels and glass windows. And once you became a woman, you gave up all the trappings of girlhood, all its precious bounties.”
― Ava Reid, Juniper & Thorn

“But there was another part of me that wanted to scream his name through empty hallways so I could hear the way it echoed. I wanted to whisper it into the ear of every person I ever met; I wanted to burn it onto me like a brand. i wanted, most of all, for someone to steal the wretched, awful burden of it away from me, and to explain precisely how wretched and awful it was. I wanted someone to write it down like a story in Papa's codex so I could know what lesson there was to be learned.”
― Ava Reid, Juniper & Thorn