"Grace looks at Ximena. She is Grace‘s steady thing, her roots digging into the earth like an orange grove tree. Grace waits and Ximena‘s fingers tangle in her own. I‘m here, they say. Give me a minute, I‘m here."

"She shoves between the two of them, their solid and steady person. They lean on her, and she lets them."

"I am not your wife anymore, my lord, and I don‘t think you ever truly saw me as a whole woman. I was always a student. A project. An accessory in the legal and decorative sense."

"By the sky above, she wanted to be enough."

"“Camel. He spit,” the man warned, this time in Balladairan. The camel continued to size her up. It didn‘t look like it was coming to any good conclusion."

"It was a sticky thing, his need, with tentacles that would strangle her if they could."

"She had not realised before that she hated men. But she did, and this was one of the reasons why: this incessant demand for sympathy and interest from every woman in the vicinity."

"In hell, as in every other world, man was man's greatest enemy."

"Resignation to unhappiness didn't come naturally—she had to learn it."

"We painted the woods that night. We gave it the colors we were and the colors we borrowed. We were opening our hands. We were giving up the stories we thought we already knew. We were becoming."

"Fairy tales teach you the importance of precise communication."

"I shook my head. I felt stunned and hollow, looking at this stranger my mother might have loved. I would never reach the bottom of what Ella gave up for me. I would never know all the secrets of the life she left behind to run with me."

"It‘s not Peter Pan,” I said firmly. “It‘s freedom.” She looked at my eyes and smiled. “All the ice is out of you,” she said. “Even that little bit I could see way down at the bottom. My angry girl.”

"So far, the verdict was out, the inner workings of one Elle Jones less of a neat little package to be unwrapped and more like a clown car full of increasingly random and terrifyingly endearing quirks."

Sapphic fake dating trope? Hell yeah! Count me the f— in!

Back to (two of) my favorite goth lesbians

"Her heart was poison. It was a close tangle of thorns. Even when it held love, that love came sharp, and she didn‘t know how to offer it to anyone except with the edges out."

"How he looked didn‘t matter to him. In a man, not caring was a draw, a mark of confidence. In Estrella, who‘d worn her eyeliner until it smudged and her ball dress until it wilted, the same not-trying looked sloppy. What shamed a girl was, in a boy, so often worth showing off."

"Gideon marvelled that someone could live in the universe only seventeen years and yet wear black and sneer with such ancient self-assurance.”

“He had the eyes of a very beautiful person, trapped in resting bitch face.”

“But Gideon was experiencing one powerful emotion: being sick of everyone‘s shit.”

My emotional gut took a critical hit by this book and my heart felt like it needed to sit down for a while to recover. 11/10 would recommend if you love suffering

This book was one of the best I've read this year. It's been months and my mind still goes back to it, to the Fernweh women, to that feeling this book evoked inside of me. It definitely touched me and will stay with me for a while. I miss this little world.

"That night, behind the door of that room they had put him in, he broke open. All the color, all the things he did not know, the paths of scarring under his fingers, broke him open. He bit the backs of his hands so he would not cry onto the wooden horses."

"They had pretended they were there to clean it, and because men who stood so proud in pressed slacks and wrinkled shirts were used to having brown-skinned women wait on them, he seemed not to notice."

"Every woman in this house had inherited it, the same way they had inherited the loss and broken hearts written into their blood."

"Something was blooming in my throat, and if I didn‘t open my mouth, it might strangle me from the inside out."

"“This is me.”His hand slips free of hers, and there it is, that old familiar fear, of endings, of something giving way to nothing, of moments unwritten and memories erased. She doesn‘t want the night to end."

"Dalia‘s words came broken. They rose between sobs a few at a time. Estrella caught them and strung them together."

"But now he wanted this. He wanted this painted world that thrilled him even as it frightened him. He wanted to understand the language of women who laughed with tears dampening their cheeks, even if he would never speak it. He wanted the color of this unknown life. He wanted to grow the kind of bright, fearless heart that lived in this girl."

"She turned back, so quickly Reid did not notice. She kissed her fingertips and blew air over her palms at her cousins. It made her look like she was starting off on a trip and would bring them all back glittering stories as souvenirs."

"Darlington was a good talker, but he was happiest when no one was speaking to him, when he didn‘t have to perform the ritual of himself and he could simply be left to watch others. "

"There's a difference between really loving someone and loving the idea of her."

"Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay."

"If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way."

"I‘m sorry that I am back and forth, push and pull instead of effortless simplicity."

"If you see a woman who is working super hard to become who she‘s meant to be and to achieve the things she wants to achieve, and you have nothing to add to her life or to give back to her in any way, please just leave her the fuck alone."

"No, no, let‘s make this look like something I recognize. Let‘s ruin everything."

"You don‘t have a foundation, so you look everywhere for one, which means the weight of any one connection is so heavy, so important, so delicate. If you lose it, what else will you have? And it has definitely kept me in a ton of awful friendships and relationships because I‘d felt like I had nothing or no one else to fall back on."

"(...) I sometimes wonder if my imagination is so intense because I spent so much of my life imagining this was not my reality."

"I knew them growing up and I‘ve seen their photos in photo albums and I know they know who I am and I know what they do for work. Kind of. But mostly I just see them as people who could‘ve saved me and didn‘t."

"When it‘s not that simple, or you don‘t have any of that information, it‘s that much easier to go your whole life thinking it‘s just you; you‘re too sensitive, you‘re wrong, you need too much, you could fix your relationship with them if you wanted to, if you would just do the right thing, whatever that is, only God knows, but you should die trying."

"I always think she‘ll be mad at me, she‘ll hate me now, she‘ll leave. And she doesn‘t!!! That‘s a thing??? You can be not perfect and still be loved? THAT‘S SO COOL!"

"The thought of hearing his windpipe crack was the only thing that kept her going."

"Shoving his hands in his pockets, he rubbed his cheek on his shoulder. “So you think I should listen to her?”“No, you should listen to me.” Adam‘s hastily constructed smile was thin enough to break. “And what do you say?” Blue was suddenly afraid for him. “Keep being brave.”"

"“And you, Ronan,” Niall said. He always said Ronan differently from other words. As if he had meant to say another word entirely — something like knife or poison or revenge — and then swapped it out for Ronan‘s name at the last moment. “When you were born, the rivers dried up and the cattle in Rockingham County wept blood.”

"“When I was born,” Niall Lynch told his middle son, “God broke the mold so hard the ground shook.” "