Before Midnight: A Retelling of "Cinderella"

Remember that yours is not the only heart that may be wishing for love.

Love so joyfully and freely given can never be taken away. It is never truly gone.

Over and over, we start our own tales, compose our own stories, whether our lives are short or long. Until at last all our beginnings come down to just one end, and the tale of who we are is done.

What do you know about yourself? What are your stories? The ones you tell yourself, and the ones told by others. All of us begin somewhere. Though I suppose the truth is that we begin more than once; we begin many times. Over and over, we start our own tales, compose our own stories, whether our lives are short or long. Until at last all our beginnings come down to just one end, and the tale of who we are is done.

Rilla," Raoul said, and at the sound of my childhood nickname, my heart gave a pang. "Don't I have the right to claim what is mine?" "Of course you do," I said..."But surely not at any cost.

No matter who you are, you are answerable to yourself.

September is a changeable sort of month. One foot in summer and the other in autumn.

Nothing is truly impossible. It's all a matter of looking at things in just the right way.

There are two things in the world you must never give up on...And those two things are yourself and love.

The most powerful wish there is, one that is a birth and death wish, all at the same time.

It live on in all who live and remember, teaching them how to discover such a love for themselves.

Is there some rule that says a young man can't be a handsome prince and a terrible bore all at the same time?

slim and curving sickle of the moon

Not all love is joyful, particularly if it seems hopeless.

The kind of cold that comes when the heart gives up on itself and abandons hope, a cold no fire on on earth could ever warm.

Constanze d'Este loved you and all you might create together. You thought you loved her, but you loved yourself more.

But it is not my mother's heart that is buried there. Instead, I think that it is yours.

My father might never claim me, but here, in this moment, I had finally claimed my mother for my own.

You did not lose! You gave it away of your own free will. You gave me away. You gave away love.

But the scent of my father's hate could not be washed entirely away. It clung to my skin, a faint rotten spell.

And so the child of cinders went to the ball.

Your father threw away the greatest gift your mother could bestow- the gift of what their love created.

Every kind of power has its own boundaries, Etienne. That is you know its strength and its form.

If we treat him like an enemy, that's all he'll ever be.

Their glowed as brightly as any candle in the room.

He had wasted the span of my entire life.

The journey, not the destination, was all that mattered. The sense of freedom, never mind that it was false, that always comes with motion.

Grief and sorrow are one and the same. But until you feel regret for what is now forever out of reach, you do not truly mourn.