Ink Blood Sister Scribe

Cold was easier to bear when you’d never been warm.

When you're growing up, you don't ask whether your family's good, do you? Especially if you don't know anything else. They're just your family.

...it's the steps themselves that make a path, instead of the other way round. We are creating even as we believe we are following.

...when things are very beautiful and comfortable on the surface, it can be harder to see the ugliness underneath.

Cold was easier to bear when you'd never been warm.

She just wanted to take one step that belonged to her, make one move that she had independently decided to make, but at every turn it felt as if her strings were being pulled by unseen hands.

If she left- when she left- Antarctica would be a memory, than a memory of a memory, and eventually it would just be a story. Pearl would be just a story, a swirl of remembered feelings, someone she'd talk about at bars to strangers who would become friends and then strangers again. All these stories, what did they add up to? A life?

It amazed her, how once the unfamiliar became well-known you could never go back.

She was a person made for the present, not the past. She couldn't afford to forget that.

In Gil's world, women found them- selves in mirrors: they became hypnotized and stared into their own eyes until they recognized themselves, and once they did, the mirror ceased to be a trap and became instead a doorway. An escape route. A path.

Collins made a noise of displeasure. "Is Richard hiding a crazy wife up here, or what?" "Why Collins, I didn't have you down as a Bronte fan." "I had a thing for Jane. Hot little weirdo. So, what's up here?

Her whole childhood, she'd devoured stories of children with dead and missing mothers, often easier to find than stories of children whose mothers were alive and well. The absence of a mother was a promise of adventure; mothers made things too safe, too comforting. Children with mothers didn't need to look outside their homes for affirmation of their supremacy in someone's story. They didn't need to write their own protagonism. Esther remembered Cecily complaining about this when they'd watched The Little Mermaid, Cinderella, and Snow White, offended by the lack of loving birth mothers and the prevalence of monstrous stepmothers. She'd squeezed Esther tight and smeared her cheek with red kisses and said, 'This evil stepmother loves you very much.' But despite Cecily's love, which Esther had never doubted, she had already identified within herself the same motherless quality that drove Ariel to shore, Cinderella to the ball, Snow White into the forest. Her motherlessness was intrinsic to her sense of self, and her sense of self was all she had these many years alone. What would it mean if her mother was alive? Not only alive, but aware of Esther and watching out for her, passing notes through magic mirrors and protecting her from afar, her own fairy godmother. What would it mean if her mother had not died, but left her?

Good-looking, blue-eyed men were usually the least trustworthy of anyone

It was like tasting a feeling and the feeling was power.

I mean, the thread looks like it could be a combination of hair and sinew. The glue is likely rendered collagen." He pinched the cover between thumb and forefinger. "The leather's probably human skin." "Okay," Collins said, "great, well, if you need me, I'll be outside screaming.

She didn't know for sure whether she truly remembered this day or only remembered the story of it - but whether the memories were fabricated or not, Esther had them.

But the mass itself had been so boring that even her fantasies of rescuing Jesus and giving him a tender, thorough sponge bath couldn't keep her awake.

He'd never felt so passionately all-caps about another person as Pearl seemed to feel about Esther, and certainly no one had ever felt that way about him. He expected to be sad about this realisation and instead found that he was mostly curious. Maybe if he really did manage to get free of the Library once and for all, if he began to lead a life on his own terms, all-caps was a feeling he himself might someday find.

Being invisible is actually so uncomfortable, it's like bees are crawling inside my skin. I'm really over it.

Joanna had always known that there was quite a lot she didn't understand about the world, about the books, about her parents and their history. But when the physical and emotional boundaries of one's life were small, when one had walked every inch of one's allotted space many times over, it was easy to forget ignorance and feel a sort of mastery, instead. This house, that path, those books, that mountain; Joanna was used to being the expert and used to the safety that came with expertise.

... when the physical and emotional boundaries of one's life were small, when one had walked every inch of one's allotted space many times over, it was easy to forget ignorance and feel a sort of mastery, instead.

Killing had been added, suddenly, to the list of what she was capable of. It had gone from unthinkable to possible. Was this how people tipped over into darkness?

... every word and movement made with a heightened sense of surreality, as if she could reach out a hand and alter the fabric of the world. That's what killing was, wasn't it? To remove someone from existence was to rip a hole in what was real.

Later, as the sisters grew, Esther hyperfocused on their differences, but as a little kid she'd been far more hypnotised by their sameness. They both loved chewing lemon peels and watermelon rinds, loved pictures of goats but not actual goats, loved putting sand in their hair so they could scratch it out later, loved watching their parents slow-dance in the living room to Motown records. They loved the sound of the wind, the sound of breaking ice, the sound of coyotes calling on the mountain. They disliked zippers, ham, the word 'milk', flute music, the gurgling sound of the refrigerator, Cecily's long weekends away, Abe's insistence on regular chess matches, and days with no clouds. They disliked the boxes of books that came to their door daily or were lugged home by their father, disliked their dusty lonesome smell and how they consumed Abe's attention. They disliked when their parents closed the bedroom door and fought in whispers. They hated the phrase 'half sister.' There had been no half about it.

...she sometimes felt so alone she worried she might vanish like the ink in an overused book. But here, with wildlife all around her and magic sweet in the air like good cider, she felt her lines and colours returning, her edges darkening, her core filling in.

...the closet of her sexual subconscious was full of petticoats.

Rather, it spoke of a kind of preordained movement, a socially constructed pathway that forced people, particularly women, into a series of steps they’d been tricked into believing they’d chosen for themselves.

The Library holds power,” said Maram. “And power is always a reflection of the world that has created it, regardless of intention.

Esther had not yet fully examined her own feelings, because they were so big she was worried they’d eat her if she let them open their mouths.

Her whole childhood she’d devoured stories of children with dead and missing mothers, often easier to find than stories of children whose mothers were alive and well. The absence of a mother was a promise of adventure; mothers made things too safe, too comforting. Children with mothers didn’t need to look outside their homes for affirmation of their supremacy in someone’s story. They didn’t need to write their own protagonism.