Quotes from Anne Ursu

There is a way the truth hits you, both hard and gentle at the same time. It punches you in the stomach as it puts its loving arm around your shoulder. Yes, I am terrible to behold, the truth says. But you suspected it all along, didn't you? And isn't better, now that you know? Now, at least, it all makes sense.

She could have taken root. She wanted to be a Rose, somebody's Rose, their Rose—and she would have been company for the flowers. She had new memories to give them, new people to tell them of, people who would help tend to them and keep them. But they warned her. They saved her. Hazel was nobody's Rose. For better or for worse.

Jack hesitated still, and Hazel wanted to say something comforting, give him some bright plastic flowers of words, but Jack would see them for what they were. Jack knew how to see things.

Hazel knew her mother really meant I hope there is something you were dying to do at school today, that you are learning to love it there, and if you are not learning to love it there, can you please try harder? Because her mom seemed to think it was the sort of thing Hazel could choose to do, like she could choose to understand the rules when they weren't even written in her language, like she could choose to make herself fit when she was so clearly shaped all wrong.

She didn't know the answer. But there had to be a way. There was always a way.

Once upon a time, there was a boy named Jack who got lost in the woods. His best friend went after him. Along the way, she had many adventures. She met woodsmen, witches, and wolves. She found her friend in the thrall of a queen who lived in a palace of ice and had a heart to match. She rescued him with the help of a magical object. And they returned home, together, and they lived on, somehow, ever after. It went something like that, anyway.

He squeezed Steve's shoulder possessively. "Oh, Zero. He is not you, I must admit. He does not have your bravery, your nobility, your je ne sais quoi, and all he talks about is this magical place called 'Canada'.

He lifted his hand to knock, but then he stopped. He could go neither forward nor back, so he simply stayed that way—hand frozen in the air.

She had believed that because someone needed saving they were savable.

She hated this place. Nothing made sense. Nothing worked as it was supposed to. She was supposed to be learning things as she went along, gaining strength for her final battle. All she was doing was losing things, one thing at a time.

The house felt strange. Altered. Like someone had come in during the day and shrunk all the furniture just a tiny bit.

Teachers loved to say people had potential; that's what teachers did to keep themselves from getting canned. What were they supposed to say- I'm sorry, your kid has no promise whatsoever? She's utterly mediocre in every way?

This is what happens on journeys—the things you find are not necessarily the things you had gone looking for.

We're starting with the villain," Martin interjected. "Because they are the most fun.

He remembered that part like you'd remember a story someone told to you once, like you might nod in sympathy but it wasn't like it happened to you.

She came in thinking she would rescue him, like some sort of story, like a little kid pretending to be a brave knight. He needed saving; therefore, she would save him. This was the way it used to work. It used to always be so simple, it was just the two of them and they could make shacks into palaces. But things change.

He wanted to leave his mom and her unseeing eyes. He was the invisible boy looking for the place where no one could find him, where he did not have to feel invisible anymore.

The boys wouldn't come to save him. Only Hazel would. And maybe that's why the boys would win.

Hazel should have done something—left a note, pretended she was going to go visit Jack's aunt Bernice. Something. She was so busy thinking about the one she needed to rescue she didn't think at all about the one she was leaving behind. She was supposed to take care of her mother, too. She was not supposed to be sipping honey tea with people who are just like the parents you think you are supposed to have. Her mother was what she had.

It was not supposed to be this easy. This was to be the final confrontation. There was to be struggle, torment, despair. But the witch—who was the only person in the woods who wanted nothing—was not what Hazel had to defeat.

No one took her seriously because she was small and feathered, a strange little dino-bird, but she had a sickle claw and she was not afraid to use it.

Somebody sniggered. From Somewhere int he back of the room someone else sneered, "Yeah, Hazel ," which was not the greatest insult ever, but one thing Hazel had learned at her new school was when it comes to insults it's the thought that counts

The words kept coming and he could not stop them, not while Callie was standing there so indecipherably, and so he was going to keep talking until he used up all the words there were and then no one would be able to talk to anyone else anymore and then all anyone would have left were one another's unintelligible faces, and maybe some weird gesturing, too, and it would be all Oscar's fault.

Hazel could not explain that she had forgotten, that there was Jack and soul-sucking villains, and sometimes you are too scratchy to remember the things you are supposed to do, even if you do feel really bad about it later.