April Genevieve Tucholke · 247 pages
Rating: (10.1K votes)
“When you look into the darkness, the darkness looks into you.”
“Revenge. Justice. Love. They are the three stories that all other stories are made up of. It's the trifecta.”
“Wink wasn't a villain.
She wasn't a hero.
People aren't just one thing. They never, ever are.
Wink was flesh and blood.
She was bad.
And she was good.
She was real.”
“All good Heroes are scared, if they know the evil they face.”
“You just have to eat a strawberry and then wait for tomorrow.”
“All the strangest things are true.”
“Wink kissed deep. Deep as a dark, misty, forest path. One that lead to blood and love and death and monsters.”
“I'd never get the sound of her screams out of my head, or my heart.
Is this what it meant to be the hero?”
“Leaf once told me that there was absolutely no difference between the Orphans’ fairy tales and the nose on my face, because both were only as real as I thought they were.”
“I used to think that I needed to be part of a story, a big story, one with trials and villains and temptations and rewards. That's how I would conquer it, conquer death."
She sighed again, and nestled in closer to me. "All that matters, in the end, is the little things. The way Mim says my name to wake me up in the morning. The way Bee's hand feels in mine. The way the sun cast my shadow across the yard yesterday. The way your cheeks flush when we kiss. The smell of hay and the taste of strawberries and the feel of fresh black dirt between my toes. This is what matters, Midnight.”
“For your sake I have braved the glen, and had to do with goblin merchant men. Eat me, drink me, love me. Hero, Wolf, make much of me. With clasping arms and cautioning lips, with tingling cheeks and fingertips, cooing all together.”
“Did you think that if you created a fairy tale and made all of us play along, made me defeat a monster and become a hero...you'd have a happy ending, like a princess in a hayloft story?”
“A veces, la gente simplemente se va, Midnight. Se dan cuenta de que están en el camino equivocado o en la historia equivocada, y se marchan en medio de la noche y no regresan más.”
“All good Heroes are scared, if they know the evil they face. Briggs”
“That girl made me feel like I was dreaming. Broad daylight dreaming.”
“Sometimes people just leave, Midnight. They realize they are on the wrong path, or that they are in the wrong story, and they just go off in the middle of the night and leave.” Here”
“We ate the berries ripe and juicy and hot from the sun, like Laura and Lizzie at the Goblin Market, For your sake I have braved the glen, and had to do with goblin merchant men. Eat me, drink me, love me. Hero, Wolf, make much of me. With clasping arms and cautioning lips, with tingling cheeks and fingertips, cooing all together.”
“And eventually I realized that the reason I felt so peaceful was because Wink wasn’t taking stock. She wasn’t trying to figure out if I was sexy, or cool, or funny, or popular. She just stood in front of me and let me keep on being whoever I really was. And no one had ever done that for me before, except maybe my parents,”
“When you look into the darkness, the darkness looks into you. I”
“The sun was streaming in the hayloft opening, low and hazy. Which was the only way I could tell how late it was. Time seemed to have stopped entirely. I hadn’t had a day go by so dreamily, so lazily, since I was a little kid. Since before I understood the concept of time.”
“Maar morgen zal het beter zijn. Eet maar een aardbei en wacht tot het morgen is.”
“انتقام.
عدالت.
عشق.
اینها سه داستانی هستند که تمام داستانها از آنها ساخته شدهاند. سه رکن اصلی و درست به همین ترتیب. مثل سوپ درست کردن برای یتیمهاست. باید ابتدا با پیاز شروع کنید، سپس کرفس و بعد هویج. آنها را قطعه قطعه میکنید و داخل قابلمه میریزید و میپزید. هرچیزی که بعد از این سه داخل قابلمه میریزید بقیهی محتویات هستند. داستانها هم همینطور هستند.”
“Dad wouldn't bother me if my door was closed. He respected privacy. Privacy was like gold to him, as in worth it's weight. He wanted it, and so he gave it to others freely, and without question”
“Poppy was saying my name over and over in the drippy sweet voice that had once set me on fire and now just made me feel cold.”
“Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes
First, her tippet made of tulle,
easily lifted off her shoulders and laid
on the back of a wooden chair.
And her bonnet,
the bow undone with a light forward pull.
Then the long white dress, a more
complicated matter with mother-of-pearl
buttons down the back,
so tiny and numerous that it takes forever
before my hands can part the fabric,
like a swimmer’s dividing water,
and slip inside.
You will want to know
that she was standing
by an open window in an upstairs bedroom,
motionless, a little wide-eyed,
looking out at the orchard below,
the white dress puddled at her feet
on the wide-board, hardwood floor.
The complexity of women’s undergarments
in nineteenth-century America
is not to be waved off,
and I proceeded like a polar explorer
through clips, clasps, and moorings,
catches, straps, and whalebone stays,
sailing toward the iceberg of her nakedness.
Later, I wrote in a notebook
it was like riding a swan into the night,
but, of course, I cannot tell you everything—
the way she closed her eyes to the orchard,
how her hair tumbled free of its pins,
how there were sudden dashes
whenever we spoke.
What I can tell you is
it was terribly quiet in Amherst
that Sabbath afternoon,
nothing but a carriage passing the house,
a fly buzzing in a windowpane.
So I could plainly hear her inhale
when I undid the very top
hook-and-eye fastener of her corset
and I could hear her sigh when finally it was unloosed,
the way some readers sigh when they realize
that Hope has feathers,
that Reason is a plank,
that Life is a loaded gun
that looks right at you with a yellow eye.”
“In a certain sense, you do write to seduce the world, but when it happens, you begin to feel like a whore. The disparity between your life and your work turns out to be as great as ever. And the people seduced by your work are usually seduced by all the wrong reasons.”
“Have ye been naughty or nice?”
“It might be fun to get a little naughty.”
“Well, things can't get much worse -- that's one consolation," the Muskrat groaned. He had hidden himself in a forest of bracken in the bathroom, and had wrapped his head in a handkerchief so that nothing should grow into his ears.”
“Human beings sometimes find a kind of pleasure in nursing painful emotions, in blaming themselves without reason or even against reason.”
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