The City of Stardust Quotes

“WHAT ELSE IS a curse but this? Love, stretched and warped beyond all meaning.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“In her stories, there would be an answer like a lightning bolt. A cure for the curse, a sword for the monster, a crown for the prince. Perfect and all-encompassing in its simplicity. Long live the king and his happily ever after.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“A curse can be many things. A wish left out to spoil in the sun, putrid and soft, leaving behind only calcified desire and oxidised envy. Or a poisoned chalice, a mistake tattooed across an entire family tree, with every generation promising, vowing to never sip until they do. Sometimes, it’s a deal and bad luck conspiring like old grifters closing in on an easy mark. For the Everlys, it begins with stardust.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“A curse is just a story, just a fairy tale to frighten children into good behavior, to mistake coincidence for causality, to explain why a mother would leave her child without so much as a backwards glance.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“She says that we were once nothing more than the dreams of stars. Then the stars moulded us from clay, and gave us shards of themselves so we might create in their honor. And we were happy, for a time. But, even though we have our feet on the earth, every time we close our eyes, we dream of being stars again.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“As a teenager, she’d envisioned herself as a historian in some grand library, holed up with mountains of books in barely legible handwriting. Then she’d toyed with archaeology when the library hadn’t felt big enough to hold her ambitions. Anthropologist, travel writer, journalist, diplomat, translator—it didn’t matter that she hadn’t quite settled on a choice yet. For a wild, thrilling moment in her life, it seemed the future was opening up to her, and everything had felt possible. How easily it’s been taken from her.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“It is a time for darkness and bitter cold, ghost stories and warnings. The fire crackles and spits, making figures out of smokey shadows.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“A dead world is never really dead. Even when the stars vanish in a great exodus, leaving an inky night that swallows the sky. Even when the sound of silence is a terrible thing to listen to in a city that once groaned with noise.
But it’s not quite silence, is it? There are the birds that soar over bare roof rafters, egrets and jackdaws and scruffy brown scraps that go by a multitude of names calling joyfully to each other. There are the nocturnal animals who claw and scrape over cobblestones, lifting their gazes to the two pale moons impressed against a violet sky. There are the trees that stretch upwards, overgrown and languorous, from leaf-strewn courtyards, extending gracefully through balconies and walkways. And below them, the ferns that unfurl in dark, damp corners that might still bear cracked tiles in parched colours, or spongey wooden skates engraved with toothy chisel marks.
Life, persistent and predictably stubborn, goes on. Close your eyes and the stars might not sing in this hushed city of dust and dreams, but there’s still singing nonetheless.
Even if there’s just one voice left.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“Books have always been her escape. When she couldn’t leave the house, when no one would answer her questions, when she felt so very alone in the world. They have given her a way out before—maybe they can do it again.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“ Yet heavy dreams make for heavy burdens.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“At every crossroad in his life, he seems to have picked the wrong path.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“We are all looking for this world. It’s what the scholars were made for,” Johannes says. “She seeks Elandriel.”
Elandriel. Violet rolls the unfamiliar name on her tongue.
“To be the first person to rediscover it…what a thing that would be. Our ancestral home, untouched for a thousand years. They said the very walls used to be lined with doors leading elsewhere, that scholars from countless worlds came to study in our hallowed halls. Imagine the knowledge we could regain. Imagine the possibilities. The rebirth of an entire world.”
And Violet does imagine, with a kind of longing that stuns her with its ferocity. Her mind is already conjuring a city full of potential libraries crammed wall-to-wall with books, adventure only a step through a doorway. Even though it’s something she’s supposed to have outgrown, she can’t help the thrill that runs through her.
To the effervescent sea under the sun. To the witches in their forests. To mysteries beyond comprehension.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“Curses, after all, are made to be broken.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“That world is full of pretty things, isn’t it?” she agreed. “But it’s an impure, poisoned beauty. They have forgotten the stars above, the gods.” She ruffled his hair with unexpected affection. “Better remember who we are—where we really belong. That world is not for us, little dreamer.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“She closes her eyes and imagines herself as stardust, winging her way through the night sky.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“Her stomach sinks at the knowledge that once again, she’s just missed another glimpse of the extraordinary. To come so close, and then no further.
Her hands wring her apron helplessly. It’ll always be like this. The café, the customers, the empty Everly house, and these fleeting echoes of the other life she might have had. But no more than that. And it’ll never be enough.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“If there’s anyone who can break a curse, it’s her. If there’s anyone who can escape their fate, a treacherous voice whispers, it’s her.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“She doesn’t have to say his surname for him to hear it echoing close behind, the way it has his entire life. Stubborn like an Everly, brave like an Everly, doomed like an Everly. But an Everly nonetheless. If only he could reach into his ribcage and pluck the Everly out, tender and intangible as dreamstuff. If only he could erase that part of himself for good—which is to say, all of him.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“Though she loves her family and her friends, her home, this is what she lives for: the thrilling feeling of the unknown before her. A life where anything can happen, where every day there are new people to meet, new languages to learn, new ways of existing to understand. “Impossible” is a much thinner slice of the world than she’d thought.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“He is always watching her go. He sees her meandering along a river path with explosions of light behind her, walking down a pavement in Prague, striding across a dead city, courage in every step. And now, with the moonlight glinting in her hair, she’s so beautiful it almost hurts to look at her.
Part of him yearns to run after her. It would be an easy choice—to follow her down whatever path she chooses. He’s spent a lifetime following other people’s footsteps. And who is he without his scholar’s tattoo, his quest, his mistress? Who is he without Violet Everly?
Nothing, a voice whispers. But for the first time, the word sits companionably in his head, a curiosity. He says it out loud, and although there’s no one to hear him say it, the question lingers in the air all the same. For now, he decides he can live with it, as he learns to live without everything else.
To be nothing is to be remade, after all.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“The end of the world looks a lot like the beginning of another, it turns out.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“Even then, she’d hoped there would be a magic last-minute reprieve, a way out that would be both bloodless and easy. But she grew up on a feast of fairy tales and myths; there is always blood.
And she is so very tired of curses.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“I will survive it,” he says.
But survival is not living.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“He will always be on the outside, no matter where he is. Always nothing, no matter how hard he has tried to build himself into someone worthy of love.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“No one is coming to save her, and the chance for her to save herself maybe never existed.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“He hears her name and thinks of coffee, sunlight on his shoulders, curiosity burning like wildfire. A curse, a key, a dark room.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“I am centuries old, Violet Everly. I remember when humans were a whim of the cosmos, stardust and clay and idiocy.” Her voice suddenly takes on a strange longing. “I remember when the skies were home.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“We have heard your name whispered amongst the stars, carried by the clouds, sung by dust motes drifting upwards,” the astral says, and her voice is mercifully audible—no compelling whisper cutting across her thoughts. “The skies themselves are curious, it seems, and so it behooves us to answer your call.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“She is holding on to too many threads, and they’re all fraying in her fists.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“They pause by a nook with dozens of maps for sale pinned to the walls. Violet recognizes the outline of Fidelis from her fairy-tale book, but it’s still odd to see it so obviously displayed, and not squirrelled away like a secret. The other maps are all squiggles and vague instructions, with little enough detail that they could be anywhere. Violet’s seen a few of those before, all claiming to lead to fairy realms, or other worlds entirely. Drink this potion at midnight on a blood moon and walk three steps backwards into a stone circle under moonlight, et cetera.
There is a part of her that knows these aren’t real instructions, or even real places. But there is another part of her that imagines all too easily the stone circle, moonlight pouring downwards, the steps backwards into the unknown. To the witches in their forests, to the stairs inside the wardrobe. A word that still rattles around the inside of her skull, clutching the edges of her dreams. Adventure.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust