Quotes from Sarah Monette

You're going to eat him alive and never even notice.

There ain't much to be said about walking across Kekropia aside from the boredom of it.

In the January that I turned thirty-five, sleep became a foreign and hostile country. I had never been more than what one might call a refugee in the country of sleep;

I'd seen the way he watched Felix when he thought nobody was paying attention, and it was the kind of look that makes your skin crawl. He laid traps for Felix, too, cunning things that Felix waltzed right out of without seeming to see. Sometimes you could almost hear Lord Shannon's teeth grinding.

He'd learned the key thing about any serious conversation with Felix, which was that you couldn't let him distract you.

My brother, Mildmay, my fox, who'd guided and guarded me all the way across Kekropia.

I liked him better in the mirror. It was tempting and all too easy to imagine him happened there, furious, but unable to cause mischief.

I could feel something slowly shredding itself within me at how innocent they were, at how little of what Malkar had done to me they would be able to comprehend, even if I were able to describe it to them. I found that I did not want to hurt them by showing them their own blindness; this was all in the past, anyway, and it would do me no good to shock them with it.

My vision is warping and splintering again; I can feel the darkness waiting for you, feel myself sliding inch by inch, fingertip by fingertip, back into the world of monsters and ghosts out of which the Curia lifted me. Sometimes when I look at him, Thaddeus has the head of a raven.

The magic of the Mirador is thrashing around like a snake in its death convulsions.

He was older than me and a hocus and educated and he talked flash, and he made like that was all there was to it, and it was him doing me the favor, being out here in the middle of absolutely fucking nothing, with the sky like some kind of monster, just waiting 'til you weren't watching to lean down and swallow you whole.

I took a breath that felt like a scream, and found the real darkness of the Hall of the Chimeras, candlelit and thick with shadows. I called the witchlight in a blazing crown, as if I could force the shadows to fail and die by nothing more than strength of will. Mavortian glanced back, and I could read the look he gave me; I'd seen it a thousand times before: peacock. I gave him my best and most infuriating smirk in return.

Our minds have to translate magic into symbols we understand.

He never liked things that weren't his idea first.

He had been exercising the caution of the fox he resembled, who walked into nothing without checking first to see if it was a trap.

The world is disappearing, piece by piece; the darkness has closed in around me long before the sun sets.

Power games and manipulation were like air in the Mirador and despite a new distaste for their childishness, I was breathing deeply.

It was starting to scare me a little, how easy I could read his face and what he did and didn't say. That ain't the same as being able to handle him, and I wasn't even pretending I had any kind of grip on what he might do when he was topside, but I was getting to where I knew his madness like it was an old friend.

It rattled me. Not just the look or the question-although those were bad enough-but the realization that he'd simply taken a shortcut through the conversation I'd anticipated having and reached the finish line ahead of me. I'd known he was much smarter than he seemed, but I hadn't appreciated before how quick he was, that his mind was not in any way hobbled by the scar that slowed and distorted his speech. It was so terribly easy to forget that.

I can see the darkness winding around me like silk ribbons, streaming and flapping in a wind that is not there.

I had a moment of clarity, a moment when the world snapped into place like a dislocated joint back into its socket.

Felix, you see, doesn't need to worry about who Lord Stephen marries. And that must gnaw at Robert's dry little soul like a rat.

The history of Mélusine is like a massacre in a lunatic asylum, patients and wardens turning on each other, turning on themselves, and turn and turn about.

I ride behind the dog out of the city; the city of burning, the city of ghosts. When the gatemouth has shrunk behind us, the dog stops and come back and ties my hands to the saddle. Then we ride again. I don't know how long we ride. Everything hurts, and the city is screaming behind me.