“Vane grabbed me. “DuLac, let’s chat.”
Chat. British-speak for “Stand still while I yell at you.”
― Priya Ardis, quote from My Merlin Awakening
“Vane’s lips tightened to suppress a smile. “Why so hostile, love?”
“You whacked me on the head with a ball!”
“You deserved it.”
― Priya Ardis, quote from My Merlin Awakening
“I caught his hand. “What do you want me to do?”
Leaning down, he kissed the pulse beating on my neck just above the damaged skin. “Tomorrow, I need you to die.”
― Priya Ardis, quote from My Merlin Awakening
“Well, can you tell her that?"
He looked down at his feet. "I will. I will."
Guy-speak for, "I plan to keep avoiding her until she gives up.”
― Priya Ardis, quote from My Merlin Awakening
“You'll get fired if anyone finds out about us!"
"So many rules in this century," Vane muttered.”
― Priya Ardis, quote from My Merlin Awakening
“If I were to lock you up in a dungeon, I guarantee you would not be bored.”
― Priya Ardis, quote from My Merlin Awakening
“Plus, I happened to be a history nerd. Why else would I be interested in a guy born in the year 519?”
― Priya Ardis, quote from My Merlin Awakening
“The last declaration he'd made to me hung between us. The L word. The one that had nothing to do with like.”
― Priya Ardis, quote from My Merlin Awakening
“The combination of razor-sharp wit (completely real) and his credentials (completely fake) had won them over in the end.”
― Priya Ardis, quote from My Merlin Awakening
“The Lady may favor
you, but at least I am in charge of my own destiny.”
― Priya Ardis, quote from My Merlin Awakening
“Kristin comes down the stairs, and the pressure on my chest snaps. I take a moment to turn away, inhaling deeply, blinking away tears. She sets the plate on a table behind the couch, and half tiptoes back up the stairs.
Thank god. I don’t think I could have handled maternal attention right this second. My body feels like it’s on a hair trigger.
I need to get it together. This is why people avoid me. Someone asks if I want a drink and I have a panic attack.
“You’re okay.” Declan is beside me, and his voice is low and soft, the way it was in the foyer. He’s so hard all the time, and that softness takes me by surprise. I blink up at him.
“You’re okay,” he says again.
I like that, how he’s so sure. Not Are you okay? No question about it.
You’re okay.
He lifts one shoulder in a half shrug. “But if you’re going to lose it, this is a pretty safe place to fall apart.” He takes two cookies from the plate, then holds one out to me. “Here. Eat your feelings.”
I’m about to turn him down, but then I look at the cookie. I was expecting something basic, like sugar or chocolate chip. This looks like a miniature pie, and sugar glistens across the top. “What . . . is that?”
“Pecan pie cookies,” says Rev. He’s taken about five of them, and I think he might have shoved two in his mouth at once. “I could live on them for days.”
I take the one Declan offered and nibble a bit from the side. It is awesome.
I peer up at him sideways. “How did you know?”
He hesitates, but he doesn’t ask me what I mean. “I know the signs.”
“I’m going to get some sodas,” Rev says slowly, deliberately. “I’m going to bring you one. Blink once if that’s okay.”
I smile, but it feels watery around the edges. He’s teasing me, but it’s gentle teasing. Friendly. I blink once.
This is okay. I’m okay. Declan was right.
“Take it out on the punching bag,” calls Rev. “That’s what I do.”
My eyes go wide. “Really?”
“Do whatever you want,” says Declan. “As soon as we do anything meaningful, the baby will wake up.”
Rev returns with three sodas. “We’re doing something meaningful right now.”
“We are?” I say.
He meets my eyes. “Every moment is meaningful.”
The words could be cheesy—should be cheesy, in fact—but he says them with enough weight that I know he means them. I think of The Dark and all our talk of paths and loss and guilt.
Declan sighs and pops the cap on his soda. “This is where Rev starts to freak people out.”
“No,” I say, feeling like this afternoon could not be more surreal. Something about Rev’s statement steals some of my earlier guilt, to think that being here could carry as much weight as paying respects to my mother. I wish I knew how to tell whether this is a path I’m supposed to be on. “No, I like it. Can I really punch the bag?”
Rev shrugs and takes a sip of his soda. “It’s either that or we can break out the Play-Doh”
― Brigid Kemmerer, quote from Letters to the Lost
“When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better, too.”
― Paulo Coelho, quote from Alkimist
“The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It's not something that committees can do. It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It's done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world.”
― Robert Hughes, quote from The Shock of the New
“Perhaps nothing speaks more eloquently of the variability of spelling in the age than the fact that a dictionary published in 1604, A Table Alphabeticall of Hard Words, spelled “words” two ways on the title page.”
― Bill Bryson, quote from Shakespeare: The World as Stage
“And so,' smiled the Witcher, 'I have no choice? I have to enter into a pact with you, a pact which should someday become the subject of a painting, and become a sorcerer? Give me a break. I know a little about the theory of heredity. My father, as I discovered with no little difficulty, was a wanderer, a churl, a troublemaker and a swashbuckler. My genes on the spear side may be dominant over the genes on the distaff side. The fact that I can swash a buckler pretty well seems to confirm that.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, quote from Time of Contempt
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