I had never been this mad at her before. It was one thing to be attacked by someone you hated, but this was something else. This was the kind of hurt that could only be inflicted by someone you loved, who you thought loved you. It was sort of like being stabbed from the inside out.
I’m just the librarian. I can only give you the books. I can’t give you the answers.
We don’t get to chose what is true. We only get to choose what we do about it.
In Light there is Dark, and in Dark there is Light.
The story you are afraid to write is usually the one you are meant to tell.
I didn’t want to choose one world. I wanted to be part of both. I didn’t want to see only one side of the sky. I wanted to see it all.
Lena’s hair was sticking out in about fifteen directions, and her eyes were all small and puffy from crying. So this was what girls looked like in the morning. I had never seen one, not up close.
Blood of my heart, protection is thine. Life of my life, taking yours, taking mine Body of my body, marrow and mind Soul of my soul, to our spirit bind Blood of my heart, my tides, my moon Blood of my heart, my salvation, my doom
I’ll love you until the day after forever.
I never loved you any more than I do, right this second. And I’ll never love you any less than I do, right this second.
I loved her, atom by atom, one burning cell at a time.
In one moment I was feeling everything and I was feeling nothing.
High school sucked. It was a universal truth, and whoever said these were supposed to be the best years of your life was probably drunk or delusional.
The library was home away from home to my mom, and my family. We had spent every Sunday afternoon there since I was a little boy, wandering around the stacks, pulling out every book with a picture of a pirate ship, a knight, a soldier, or an astronaut. My mom used to say, “This is my church, Ethan. This is how we keep the Sabbath holy in our family.
You’re incredibly, absolutely, extremely, supremely, unbelievably different.
Who burns me and shocks me and shatters me with a single touch.
Jewelry, I’m telling you. It’s a thing. And love. And maybe danger.
I couldn’t look at her. I’d been jealous and hurt, and I had dragged Liv into the middle of my own broken mess of a life. All because I thought Lena didn’t love me anymore. But I was stupid, and I was wrong. Lena loved me so much, she was willing to risk everything to save me. I had given up on Lena, after she had refused to give up on me. I owed her my life. It was as simple as that.
I guess that’s the thing about a hero’s journey. You might not start out a hero, and you might not even come back that way. But you change, which is the same as everything changing. The journey changes you, whether or not you know it, and whether or not you want it to.
The more I learned about the world I thought I knew and all the ones I didn’t, the more everything threaded together, leading everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
The ways I could hurt her and hurt myself. Those two things were intertwined somehow. It’s hard to explain, but when you were as closed off as I was the past few months, opening felt as wrong as stripping naked in church.
Darkness, real darkness, was more than just a lack of light.
So he’s like a human compass? As far as superpowers go, that’s pretty lame. You’re like the Caster equivalent of Aquaman.
When she slept, she looked peaceful, beautiful. Not Lena’s kind of beautiful, something different. She looked content – like a sunny day, a cold glass of milk, an unopened book before you cracked the binding.
The right thing and the easy thing are never the same.
