Looking Glass

Girls like us, we have to save ourselves. Nobody else will get you home.

Your magic is there, if only you would let it be instead of fighting it all the time.

But you can’t escape from shadows or pain. You only find new ones. It’s better, I think, not to try to escape them at all but to accept that they will be there, and to remember that good things happen, too, even if you can’t always see them.

For all the girls who save themselves And all the girls still learning how

But of course the kinds of adventures that happen to young women are never the sort that you tell over cognac, and they usually leave scars

you’ve escaped from certain death before, so your odds are probably better than the average person’s. ... She’d survived before. She’d survive again.

It’s not just your fear, though. You know this house is full of enemies. You knew when you followed that impossible boy through the storm, but you had no choice, because it was either come here or die in the snow.

It wasn't easy to be brave all the time, and it was also, Alice reflected, perfectly alright not to be. The important thing was to keep doing her best.

You weren’t broken, Alice,” Hatcher said. “You were only cast in a new mold, and she didn’t like the shape of it.

She’d taught Alice how to use her magic, how to accept what it could and could not do, how to make it come when she called and lie quiet when she didn’t need it. Much of what she taught Alice had seemed like knowledge Alice already had, only it was hidden under the surface of her skin, waiting for her to peer underneath.

I can help him if he wants to be helped, but perhaps he doesn’t want to

I’m not seeing into your thoughts, silly boy, but into your face. You have such an honest face. A face that tells everything a person could want to know if they only look right... But don’t worry. Most people don’t know how to look right

She should make some light. Sometimes she could do that, if she concentrated hard enough, though the magic place inside her often seemed to shift around, like it was trying to hide from her.

Elizabeth had a feeling that Alice had told too much of her story, and so they’d sent her away.

Little lost Alice decided she didn’t want to be lost anymore. Somehow Elizabeth had gotten the impression that Alice was a broken thing, not someone to be admired. But then she remembered the Voice telling her that Alice “made it all fall down.