Seraphina

We were all monsters and bastards, and we were all beautiful.

Sometimes the truth has difficulty breaching the city walls of our beliefs. A lie, dressed in the correct livery, passes through more easily.

The world inside myself is vaster and richer than this paltry plane, peopled with mere galaxies and gods.

That’s the secret to performance: conviction. The right note played tentatively still misses its mark, but play boldly and no one will question you. If one believes there is truth in art – and I do – then it’s troubling how similar the skill of performing is to lying. Maybe lying is itself a kind of art. I think about that more than I should.

I cannot perch among those who think that I am broken.

He did not know the truth of me, yet he had perceived something true about me that no one else had ever noticed. And in spite of that—or perhaps because of it—he believed me good, believed me worth taking seriously, and his belief, for one vertigi-nous moment, made me want to be better than I was.

For future reference: do not underestimate the seductive power of math.

Who will kiss you? Who will rock you to sleep?" His voice was slow, drowsy. "You never did," I said, trying to tease him. "You were more father to me than my father, but you never did that." "Someone should. Someone should love you. I will bite him if he will not.

I’m attracting small children,” Orma muttered, twisting his hat in his hands. “Shoo it away, will you?

I mistook you for a metaphor.

Your lies didn't stop me loving you; your truth hasn't stopped me either.

I became the very air; I was full of stars. I was the soaring spaces between the spires of the cathedral, the solemn breath of chimneys, a whispered prayer upon the winter wind. I was silence,and I was music, one clear transcendent chord rising toward Heaven. I believed, then, that I would have risen bodily into the sky but for the anchor of his hand in my hair and his round soft perfect mouth.

I was drawn to his aloofness, the way cats gravitate toward people who’d rather avoid them.

He was laughing, silently, and then we were both laughing, and then something changed. It was as if I had been watching the world through oiled parchment or smoked glass, which was yanked abruptly away. Everything grew very clear and bright; the music burst forth in majesty; we stood still and the room turned around us; and there was Kiggs, right in the middle of all of it, laughing.

Love is not a disease...I cannot let them cut you out of me, nor her either. I will cling to my sickness, if it is a sickness. I will hold it close to me like the sun.

He looked up at the reddening sky and said with a self-deprecating laugh, "You put me to shame, Seraphina. Your bravery always has." "It's not bravery; it's bullheaded bumbling." He shook his head, staring off into the middle distance. "I know courage when I see it, and when I lack it.

I barely noticed loneliness anymore; it was my normal condition, by necessity if not by nature.

How dare the world be beautiful when I was so horrifying?

The borderlands of madness used to have much sterner signage around them than they do now.

I scrupulously hide every legitimate reason for people to hate me, and it turns out they don’t need legitimate reasons. Heaven has fashioned a knife of irony to stab me with.

Music is only work when someone else makes you do it.

Peaches and Cheese”: The vagabond sun winks down through the trees, While lilacs, like memories, waft on the breeze, My friend, I was born for days such as these, To inhale perfume, And cut through the gloom, And feast like a king upon peaches and cheese! I’ll travel this wide world and go where I please, Can’t stop my wand’ring, it’s like a disease. My only regret as I cross the high seas: What I leave behind, Though I hope to find, My own golden city of peaches and cheese!

The truth may not be told. Here is an acceptable lie.

Please, Orma, I’ve already gotten you in so much trouble—” “That I can’t possibly get into more. Take it.” He wouldn’t stop glaring at me until I’d put the earring back on its cord. “You are all that’s left of Linn. Her own people won’t even say her name. I—I value your continued existence.” I could not speak; he had pierced me to my very heart.

I was half lawyer; I always noticed the loopholes.

My own survival required me to counterbalance interesting with invisible.

I felt lighter when I had finished, and for once emptiness was a sweet relief and a condition to be treasured.

He looked at me again and his eyes shone in the lamplight, or with the inner light of delighted anticipation. His enthusiasm made him beautiful.

A feeling rose in me, and I just let it, because what harm could it do? It only had another thirty-two adagio bars of life in this world. Twenty-four. Sixteen. Eight more bars in which I love you. Three. Two. One.

Always I hev my fists and my war pipes!