Marie Rutkoski

“He'd believed it. She couldn't believe that he believed it. Sometimes, she hated him for that.”

“She turned to look at him, and he was already looking at her. “I’m going to miss you when I wake up,” she whispered, because she realized that she must have fallen asleep under the sun. Arin...”

“His dear face, dear to her, dearer still. how could she love his face more for its damage? What kind of person saw someone's suffering and felt her heart crack open even wider, even more swe...”

“She’d felt it before, she felt it now: the pull to fall in with him, to fall into him, to lose her sense of self.”

“An emotion clamped down on her heart. It squeezed her into a terrible silence. But he said nothing after that, only her name, as if her name were not a name but a question. Or perhaps that i...”

“He told himself a story. Not at first. At first, there wasn’t time for thoughts that came in the shape of words. His head was blessedly empty of stories then. War was coming. It was upon him...”

“Happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous.”

“Someone was coming through the velvet. He was pulling it wide, he was stepping onto Kestrel’s balcony—close, closer still as she turned and the curtain swayed, then stopped. He pinned the ve...”

“One of the things that always fascinated me about the Renaissance was that it was a time both of great scientific discovery and also of superstition and belief in magic. And so it was a peri...”

“Why would one ever be so insane as to ditch a perfectly beautiful metaphor? Cut back, of course, prune if you like, so that the best metaphors are clear and sparkling. But I will throw out u...”

“Whether we think of Disney's blonde beauty and her pumpkin carriage or Marissa Meyer's recent recasting of 'Cinderella' as a cyborg in the young adult novel 'Cinder,' we know that there are...”

“Throughout my college years, I'd watch my sister squeal every Christmas as she unwrapped another 'Buffy' DVD set. I didn't know much about the series, but I was filled with that obnoxious se...”