The Book of Blood and Shadow

You don't even realize you're living in a before until you wake up one day and find yourself in an after.

I longed to return to that bloody riverbank, to throw myself in the path of the final arrow, to die ignorant, and so, in love. Better to be killed by an arrow than by the words of the one I most trusted.

I should probably start with the blood.

I believed in happily ever after as much as anyone, because Jane Austen, Prince Charming, and Hugh Grant promised me it could happen. But maybe that particular delusion was universal.

A fundamentalist is someone who wants to substitute what he believes for what you believe," Max said. "And someone who thinks he knows the will of God better than anyone else.

Not that my arms are getting tired or anything, but... how much longer is the hugging phase going to last?

Under the best of circumstances, middle school is a sixth-circle-of-hell situation, sandwiched somewhere between flaming tombs and flesh-eating harpies. It's the kind of situation that doesn't need gasoline on the fire, especially when said gasoline comes in the form of your older brother murdering the older sister of the third-most popular girl in school.

Eli shouted my name, and then his arounds were around me, and I reached for Adriane who held fast to a blistering, burning creature that once had been Max and somehow still breathed and stood and howled. Though he was now nothing but flame, a golem of fire, that lived only because he'd forgotten how to die.

I told myself I deserved some good luck, overlooking the fact that it would call for substantially more than luck to thrust me into one of those narratives where plain-Jane new girl catches the eye of inexplicably single Prince Charming, because somehow the new school has revealed her wild, irresistible beauty, of which she was never before aware.

Sort of pregnant. Sort of dead. Sort of Jewish. These are impossibles.

Eli: 'If a machine like that really existed, people would be willing to kill for it. Lots of people.' Nora: 'Yeah, and if hot vampires really existed, suicide would be a viable option for wrinkle prevention. Your point?

And you know what? If there is a God, and it's that same God who's so eager to have temples built in honor of his greatness, and wars fought over him, and people dropping to their knees telling him what a wonderful, magnificent being he is? If this all-powerful, all-knowing creature for some reason just can't get by without my worship? Then let him give me some proof. Or at least get over himself if I decide to go out and get some.

Chris loved you," I said, and the truth of it was almost a physical pain. She wouldn't look at me. "No he didn't. And he would have figured it out eventually. So would you? Then where would I have been?" "Not here.

They were kids. Kids don't care about totalitarianism. For my parents, Prague is picnics on Petrin Hill and homemade knedliky. It's home. They didn't notice the tanks in the backyard, the blood in the streets.

That was the strange thing about translation, speaking someone else's words in a voice that somehow was and wasn't your own. You could fool yourself into believing you understood the meaning behind the words, but-as my father had explained long before I was old enough to get it-words and meaning were inseparable. Language shapes thought; I speak, therefore I think, therefor I am.

I envied Elizabeth- but I admired Groot. Because if you truly believed in the lightning bolts, why not do everything in your power to take them for yourself.

Even now, I believe that to know how is useless if we do not know why. And there are too many who forbid us to ask.