Beginning a reading challenge in a few days.

https://bookriot.com/2017/12/15/book-riots-2018-read-harder-challenge/

Thornhollow said,"To me the insane are simply people who have chosen not to participate in the world in the same manner as the majority, and there are days I wonder if they‘ve got the right of it. I think we‘re all quite mad. Some of us are just more discreet about it."

Simply using the words sane and insane is a way for the population to draw a safe line through humanity, and then place themselves squarely on the side of the healthy.”

“Don‘t be deceived by a pleasant setting, Doctor,” Grace warned. “Sometimes the loveliest places harbor the worst monsters.”

Currently reading-

It was quick indeed, nothing like the steaming baths at home, where she had taken care to clean under her nails, scrubbing imagined dirt away. She‘d never known what it was like to be truly dirty until she came here, and she washed away the asylum as best she could in the dark with a stranger only a few feet away.

Thornhollow nodded and then glanced about the room. “You should register a complaint about the lodgings.”
　A bubble rose up in Grace‘s throat, erupting in the form of a laugh, and she clasped her hand down on her mouth in astonishment. Thornhollow smiled.

This is what you ask of me, then?” He raised his eyes to hers. “You want me to cut into you, tear away your skin and your brain, and leave you a desolate, incoherent mess that feels no more?”
　“Yes,” she said, the one word heavy in her throat as a tear slid down her cheek. “Yes, I would have that.”

Thornhollow crossed his arms and studied her for a moment before speaking. She stared back, savoring the appearance of a new face after being denied company for so long. The meager light could hardly penetrate the hollows of his eyes, but she could see the muscles of his jaw tensing as they studied each other, the slightest tic beneath his red sideburns giving him away.

“Grace,” Falsteed chided in the dark. “No.”

　“The roses,” she said, sighing. “The smell of the roses, it undid me. How can I call it a life when I curl in the darkness, covered in my own filth? I was once surrounded by light and smelled as lovely as a garden. I‘d rather forget both than remember either.”

But Grace had sat through many sermons by her father‘s side, heard about the perils of hell and the fiery brimstone that surely awaited her if she took her own life. She doubted that hell was hot and sulfuric. Instead, she imagined it was comfortable and smelled like her own bedroom.

They all had their terrors, but at least the spiders that lived in the new girl‘s veins were imaginary. Grace had learned long ago that the true horrors of this world were other people
#terrors #horror

The new girl wasn‘t learning the efficacy of silence, the art of invisibility. Grace had given up speech long ago. Once the words no and stop had done nothing, the others refused to come out, their inadequacy making the effort necessary to voice them an equation too easily solved.
#amadnesssodiscret #YAnovel