We're not freaks, Tally. We're normal. We may not be gorgeous, but at least we're not hyped-up Barbie dolls.
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. —Francis Bacon, Essays, Civil and Moral, Of Beauty
The thought of publishing—of the whole world reading Afterworlds—had always made Darcy feel naked and exposed, but loving had left her skinless.
The sight of Ethan - of Scam, since this was a mission - sent a trickle of annoyance down Crash's spine. Not like all the little itches of tech, just the ever-present need to punch him in the face.
The early summer sky was the color of cat vomit. Of course, Tally thought, you’d have to feed your cat only salmon-flavored cat food for a while, to get the pinks right.
The beauty of the world…has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.—Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (part 3, Pretties)
The beauty of the world . . . has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. —Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
Out here, you find out that the city fools you about how things really work.
Necessity is the mother of invention
My compliments, Alek said slowly and evenly. Your contempt was most convincing.I am your servant.
Maybe the trick was not to panic. In life, as in the bewildering business of writing stories and flinging them out into the world, you had to focus on the page in front of you.
Makes perfect sense. In a problematic way. But life is problematic, so novels must be too.
Let others wage war. You, lucky Austria, shall marry.
It’s just . . . it feels like someone’s going to ask me for ID. Like, writer ID. The
It's not the traveling that takes courage Tally. I've done much longer trips on my own. It's leaving home.
It must be horrible to see an ugly face when your surrounded by such beautiful people all the time . In my opinion , it does happens sometimes .
Is it not good to make society full of beautiful people? —Yang Yuan, quoted in the New York Times
In a novel you always knew the moment when something Happened, when someone Changed. But real life was full of gradual, piecemeal, continuous transformation. It was full of accidents and undefineables...
If a meteor falls in the forest and no one realizes it, does it end the war?
I swallowed my screams whole. They went down my throat as sharp-cornered and cold as ice cubes.