Quotes from Libba Bray

You try standing up to my mom. She's a force of nature.

I'm Sorry,' he says. It's simple and direct, with none of the nonsense about God calling home an angel too young and who are we to question his mysterious ways.

When it is time for me to visit Brigid, I find her awake in her little room. That's awl righ', luv. I don' care to forget, if it's all the same, she says, and there are no rowan leaves at her window anymore.

Ann turns to me. I know she's waiting for some hint of kindness-a kiss, an embrace, even a smile. But I can't muster any of it. You'll make a fine governess. My words are like a slap. I know, she answers, a slap of her own.

She wears her grief like a coat of feathers too heavy for flight. He crossed out heavy, wrote weighted instead, then decided that was downright pretentious and put heavy back in.

my stomach aches a new. blasted inconvenience. What do young men have to mark their entry into adulthood? Trousers, that's what. Fine, new trousers. I despise absolutely everyone just now.

I thought I was having an existential crisis, but it was nothing. Please don't tailgate: body in trunk.

Sometimes Felicity is as much a mystery to me as the location of the Temple. She is spiteful and childish one minute, lively and spirited in the next; a girl kind enough to bring Ann home for Christmas and small enough to think Kartik her inferior.

He took comfort in the neon signs, the wild strands of jazz creeping out of clubs whenever happy swells of people pushed through the doors in their finery.

But forgiveness...I'll hold on to that fragile slice of hope and keep it close, remembering that in each of us lie good and bad, light and dark, art and pain, choice and regret, cruelty and sacrifice.

Will this be my life forevermore? Careful tea parties and the quiet fear that I don't belong, that I'm a fraud? I held magic in my hands! I tasted freedom in a land where summer doesn't end. I outsmarted the Rakshana with a boy whose kiss I still feel somehow. was it all for naught? I'd rather not have known any of it than have it snatched away after a taste.

Absence is a curious thing. When friends are absent, they seem to loom ever larger, till the lack of them is all one can feel.

I miss Latin. So much fun--all those exciting verbs that don't come until the end of the sentence. It's like a movie trailer for language.

Alliteration. It's when you repeat the same consonant in a phrase," Memphis explained. "Huh. I was hoping it was something dirty.

Why was there so much silence between men?

A guy's gotta live, you know, gotta make his way and find his meaning in life and love, and to do that he needs coffee, he needs coffee and coffee and coffee.

I have met the devil, and her name is Cecily Temple

With each shimmy, the bugle beads on their scandalously revealing costumes swung and shook. It was the sort of display Evie knew her mother would have found appalling—an example of the moral decay of the young generation. It was sexual and dangerous and thrilling, and Evie wanted more of it.

Will was making a speech, something about having been young and careless once, the sort of thing old-timers said when they issued a deathblow, as if they thought their sanctimonious ramblings disguised as empathy would be welcomed, but Evie was only half listening.

The desperation meeting the silence with its unmasked wish.

You couldn't be perfect enough to keep the world from betraying you.

Because the pure girls get rescued. Mary Lou felt something she didn't let herself feel often. She was well and truly pissed off. Why do girls have to be all pure and innocent and good? Why don't guys have to be?

Theta rolled over, facing Evie, their noses nearly touching. "Evil?" "Yes?" "I love you. Now, shut up and go to sleep.

The uncertainty of our future is nothing more than a fog of breath on a windowpane.