Hemlock & Silver

Learning just makes you aware of how much there is to learn.

There is a crazy-wild delight that comes over you when you discover something new, something extraordinary. If you try to share that and people look at you blankly, it's crushing. But if there's someone else there to say really?! and take fire with enthusiasm alongside you - well, that will keep you going for a long time.

We discard the writings that don’t work for us and keep the ones that do.

At thirty-five, I was more than old enough to know that evil could present a fair face, but I had never heard that it got tired. Quite the opposite, really. Evil is relentlessly energetic.

I didn’t know how to feel about that, so I put it on the pile of all the other things that I didn’t know how to feel about, and let it go.

That’s humans for you, I suppose. In dreadful danger, with the weight of the world crushing us down, we’ll somehow still find ourselves thinking, I wonder if he likes me?

The problem with being plump, middle-aged, and a woman was that people expected you to be motherly, as if that was your default state.

I was eleven and still believed in the fundamental justice of the world.

I just want to save people and then have those people go away and, ideally, not take arsenic again. Is that really so much to ask?

Potatoes are alive.” There are few things in life more disdainful than a one-eyed cat. I could actually feel my hair withering under the force of his stare. “Potatoes,” he said at last, “do not make gods.

I was a child with a child’s attention span. Many adults think this is no more than a butterfly’s, flittering from thought to thought, but they have forgotten how, in some children, it is as sharp and pointed as a stiletto. Mine was focused now.

If I blurted out something like, By the way, I’m falling in love with you, there was a chance that Javier would reciprocate. There was also another, much larger chance that I’d just have succeeded in making the last hours of our lives incredibly awkward.

Don’t rummage through your daughter’s things or she might run off and become a nun.

I attempted to look like a person who wore decorative scarves. (Honestly, I would like to be that sort of person. I simply never learned the knack.)

I blinked up at him and thought, Shit, I’m in love with you, but what I said was “Oarfish.” Whatever he was expecting, it wasn’t that. “Say again?

It does not matter how many cats there are! Any nonzero number of talking cats is significant!

I. If you discovered a poison that could kill hundreds of people all at once, something you could put in a well or a waterway, say, would it be better to tell everyone so that people could try to find a cure, or to tell no one so that evil people couldn’t use it, but risk someone else discovering it later?

I had never been one to stand around and oversee a recovery. That takes patience and caring and a certain sort of temperament that I absolutely do not possess. Should you happen to be dying and have a choice between me and a cactus to nurse you, the cactus will likely be less prickly and do a better job.

This was like that, only without the flash or the headache. I felt the world shift around me. Javier hadn't been looking at me at all. Why had I believed that he was? Because it was easy. Because it was what the voice of despair whispered all the time, whenever my guard slipped enough to listen. I was too big, too loud, cared too intensely about things that no one else did. Of course he'd find me revolting. Some days I found myself revolting. "Have you been thinking that all this time?

And even if you could know, what gives you the right to say that Anthony’s life was worth trading away? One for sixteen sounds like a bargain, sure, but turn it the other way, and you’re saying that a child should’ve died simply because it was inspirational. I’m pretty sure that’s monstrous. Maybe the point of gods and saints is that they can make the monstrous choices that people can’t.

He had a sword, but there are some circumstances where having a sword works against you, and one of those is when the enemy is quite small and attached to your head.

Monarchy, as the ancient philosopher Margay the Younger wrote, is a terrible form of government, but at least there’s always someone around to blame.)

For as the Key fits unto the Lock, because the Lock is its mirror image, so the Antidote fits unto the Poison as its own mirror image. Look then unto the Poison’s mirror, and so unlock the Curative to match it, each to each.

I just had to find the cat.

I had succeeded in pushing off my fears until later. Now later had arrived

When I was young, my father had tried to teach me the merchant’s art of bargaining, and while it dealt largely with understanding people, which meant I took to it like a duck to arsenic, I did remember a few things. “Anja-bear,” he said once, “there’s a certain kind of person who needs to be smarter than you. It’s mostly men, but I’ve known a few women like that, too. What you do is say something you know is wrong so that they can correct you. That makes them feel smug and in control of the situation.” He’d winked at me. “Then you take them for everything they’re worth.

Prickly pear, edible if you cook it right … Oh hey, a jumping cholla. That doesn’t have to be toxic, it’s nothing but spines and hatred.