Beneath the Sugar Sky

There is kindness in the world, if we know how to look for it. If we never start denying it the door.

Children have always tumbled down rabbit holes, fallen through mirrors, been swept away by unseasonal floods or carried off by tornadoes. Children have always traveled, and because they are young and bright and full of contradictions, they haven’t always restricted their travel to the possible. Adulthood brings limitations like gravity and linear space and the idea that bedtime is a real thing, and not an artificially imposed curfew. Adults can still tumble down rabbit holes and into enchanted wardrobes, but it happens less and less with every year they live. Maybe this is a natural consequence of living in a world where being careful is a necessary survival trait, where logic wears away the potential for something bigger and better than the obvious. Childhood melts, and flights of fancy are replaced by rules. Tornados kill people: they don’t carry them off to magical worlds. Talking foxes are a sign of fever, not guides sent to start some grand adventure. But children, ah, children. Children follow the foxes, and open the wardrobes, and peek beneath the bridge. Children climb the walls and fall down the wells and run the razor’s edge of possibility until sometimes, just sometimes, the possible surrenders and shows them the way to go home.

That's why people shouldn't get too hung up on labels. Sometimes I think that's part of what we do wrong. We try to make things make sense, even when they're never going to.

Sometimes that’s all you can do. Just keep getting through until you don’t have to do it anymore, however much time that takes, however difficult it is.

For others, the lure of a world where they fit is too great to escape, and they will spend the rest of their lives rattling at windows and peering at locks, trying to find the way home.

Adults can still tumble down rabbit holes and into enchanted wardrobes, but it happens less and less with every year they live. Maybe this is a natural consequence of living in a world where being careful is a necessary survival trait, where logic wears away the potential for something bigger and better than the obvious.

Adulthood brings limitations like gravity and linear space and the idea that bedtime is a real thing, and not an artificially imposed curfew.

Nobody promised me a happy ending. They didn’t even promise me a happy existence.

We’re all puzzle boxes, skeleton and skin, soul and shadow.

Breathe. It's going to be okay." Cora took a deep breath, eyeing him. "You really think so?" "No," he said baldly. "It's never okay. But I told myself that every night when I was in Prism. I told myself that every morning when I woke up, still in Prism. And I got through, Sometimes that's all you can do. Just keep getting through until you don't have to do it anymore, however much time that takes, however difficult it is.

Grave robbing was still viewed as socially inappropriate, and doing it when the sun was up was generally viewed as unwise.

We’re teenagers in a magical land following a dead girl and a disappearing girl into a field of organic, pesticide-free candy corn,” said Kade. “I think weird is a totally reasonable response to the situation. We’re whistling through the graveyard to keep ourselves from totally losing our shit.

Everything did, if left long enough to its own devices. Futures, pasts, it didn’t matter. Everything fell apart.

The rules of the school are simple. Heal. Hope. And if you can, find your way back where you belong. No Solicitation. No visitors. No quests.

I'm just a candy corn farmer. My only part in this play was loving your mother and raising you, and I did both of them as well as I could, but that didn't make me worldly, and it didn't make me wise. It made me a man with a hero for a wife and a daughter who was going to do something great someday, and that was all I wanted to be. I never saved the day. I never challenged the gods. I was the person you could come home to when the quest was over, and I'd greet you with a warm fudge pie and a how was your day, and I'd never feel like I was being left out just because I was forever left behind.

He liked the excuse to talk to people about their shared differences, which became their shared similarities when held up to the right light. They had all survived something. The fact that they had survived different somethings didn't change the fact that they would always be, in certain ways, the same.

Everyone who wound up at Eleanor West's School - everyone who found a doorway - understood what it was to spend a lifetime waiting for something that other people wouldn't necessarily understand. Not because they were better than other people and not because they were worse, but because they had a need trapped somewhere in their bones, gnawing constantly, trying to get out.

There's always more than one way to find something out. People only say there's only one way when they want an excuse to do something incredibly stupid without getting called on it. There are lots of ways to find out, and some of them even involve not pissing off a man who goes by 'the Lord of the Dead.

Sugar, flour, and cinnamon won't make a house a home, So bake your walls of gingerbread and sweeten them with bone. Eggs and milk and whipping cream, butter in the churn, Bake our queen a castle in the hopes that she'll return.

Nadya, who had spotted the three of them, was waving her arms frantically over her head, signaling her distress. In case this wasn’t enough, she shouted, “Over here! Next to the naked lady!” “A cake’s a cake, whether or not it’s been frosted,” said the stranger primly. “You are not a cake, you are a human being, and I can see your vagina,” snapped Nadya. The stranger shrugged. “It’s a nice one. I’m not ashamed of it.

Every world gets to make its own rules. Sometimes those rules are going to be impossible. That doesn't make them any less enforceable.

Magical thinking might seem like nonsense to some people, but he had danced with skeletons by the light of a marigold moon, he had kissed the glimmering skull of a girl with no lips and loved her as he had never loved anything or anyone in his life, and he thought he’d earned a certain amount of nonsense, as long as it helped him get by.

You were a mermaid, weren't you? That's what Nadya said." "I still am," said Cora. "I just have my scales under my skin for now.

They can be hard for their families to understand, those returned, used-up miracle children. They sound like liars to people who never had a doorway of their own. They sound like dreamers. They sound... unwell, to the charitable, and simply sick to the cruel.

Elsewhere was a legend and a lie, until it came looking for you.

That makes no sense at all. That means it may well work. Go, my darlings, and bring your lost and shattered sister home.

WHAT WE BURY IS NOT LOST, ONLY SET ASIDE

Frosting isn’t a good medium for lengthy dissertations on fate.

I like existing. I'm not ready to unexist just because of stupid causality. I didn't invite stupid causality to my birthday party, so it doesn't get to give me any presents.

Children, ah, children. Children follow the foxes, and open the wardrobes, and peek beneath the bridge. Children climb the walls and fall down the wells and run the razor’s edge of possibility until sometimes, just sometimes, the possible surrenders and shows them the way to go home.