The Reading Room

“By you, I am forever undone.”

““Instead of being afraid, I could become something to fear.” ― The Cruel Prince”

“Have I told you how hideous you look tonight?” Cardan asks, leaning back in the elaborately carved chair, the warmth of his words turning the question into something like a compliment. “No” I say, glad to be annoyed back into the present. “Tell me.”

“Legends need not concern themselves with something as small as happiness”

“Nice things don’t happen in storybooks,” Taryn says. “Or when they do happen, something bad happens next. Because otherwise the story would be boring, and no one would read it.”

“Changing is what people do when they have no options left.”

“I love my parents' murderer; I suppose I could love anyone.”

“What an author doesn't know could fill a book.”

“I need to stop fantasizing about running away to some other life and start figuring out the one I have.”

“It is said we learn more from our failures than our successes.”

“I think of his riddle. How do people like us take off our armor? One piece at a time.”

“She tastes like every dark thought I've ever had.”

“I need you to be happy. I need one of us to be happy.”

“The truth is messy. It's raw and uncomfortable. You can't blame people for preferring lies.”

“People are fragile. They die of mistakes, of overdoses, of sickness. But mostly they die of Death.”

“This, the language of deception, we both understand. We were born to it, along with the curses.”

“Those who really love you don't mean to hurt you and if they do, you can't see it in their eyes but it hurts them too.”

“What I've always loved about faeries is the way that they, unlike so many other supernatural creatures, are not human and have never been human. They have different customs and different taboos, and woe to anyone who breaks them.”

“I can learn to live with guilt. I don't care about being good.”

“If curiosity killed the cat, it was satisfaction that brought it back.”

“Wisdom is for the meek,” he returns. “And it seldom helps them as much as they believe it will. After all, as wise as you are, you still married Locke. Of course, perhaps you are wiser than even that—perhaps you’re so wise you made yourself a widow, too.”

“Death has his favorites, like anyone. Those who are beloved of Death will not die.”

“I don't feel prolific. I feel like I'm plodding along. Each day you sit down, and you hope that you get your work done.”

“People said that video games were bad because they made you numb to death, made you register entrails splattering across a screen as a sign of success. In that moment, Val thought that the real problem with games was that the player was suppossed to try everything. If there was a cave, you went in it. If there was a mysterious stranger, you talked to him. If there was a map, you followed it. But in games, you had a hundred million billion lives and Val only had this one.”

“Telling Sam and Daneca feels like peeling off my own skin to expose everything underneath. It hurts.”

“The moment she was cursed, I lost her. Once it wears off- soon- she will be embarrassed to remember things that she said, things she did, things like this. No matter how solid she feels in my arms, she is made of smoke.”

“Yeah, the whole family knows. It's no big deal. One night at dinner I said, 'Mom, you know the forbidden love that Spock has for Kirk? Well, me too.' It was easier for her to understand that way.”

“I will guard you from Death, for I have no fear of him.”

“One fine day, in the middle of the night, two dead boys got up to fight. Back to back they faced each other. They pulled out their swords and shot one another. One deaf cop, on the beat heard the noise, and came and shot the two dead boys.”

“I’ve stripped my life down,” he told me. “I don’t need much. I have all the company I want to keep right in here.” He shot himself in the head with his fingers. “People don’t understand about the need to live simply. They make appointments all day. They even schedule their own deaths. The first time they’ll have freedom to really be themselves is when they no longer exist. But up here, there’s nothing but me and the sky. A million billion stars.”