Sarah Caulfield > Quotes

“There was the jewelled boy with the voice of a nightingale, after all; some sort of modern Bagoas who’d been enchanted to life for an Emperor with alchemy, a blood pact and a bird’s fresh heart, small and slippery as a newly-plucked cherry. When our hero had been a prince, nightingale hearts had been a local delicacy; he remembers the crunch of them between his teeth and gags. The boy was called Artemis and he spoke in cursive, ink and hands, paper and air; the first time he signed shyly in our hero’s direction it was as though his name had been rewritten anew in artificial bone and muscle.”
― Sarah Caulfield, The Myriad Carnival

“Original sin was always never knowing when to stop, sweetheart.”
― Sarah Caulfield, SPINE

“Darling, let’s not lie to ourselves.
You are the most invasive surgical procedure I will ever endure.”
― Sarah Caulfield, SPINE

“Save it for the hangman, darling. Save it for your priest. They’ll only tell you what you’re already told about where we’ll end up. The only repetition I care for is callbacks, being alive in the morning, and your mouth. But go cry wolf to the saints if it’ll help you sleep at night.
But don’t you confess me, darling. Don’t you dare confess me.”
― Sarah Caulfield, Harmonious Hearts 2016 - Stories from the Young Author Challenge

“I wanted them to be angels. I wanted them to be better than me.”
― Sarah Caulfield, Harmonious Hearts 2016 - Stories from the Young Author Challenge

“Yes, I have a terror for the future, blood-and-bone deep, but when I say I don’t know who I am, I mean that I do, and I wish I did not. I mean I am trying to unknow the knowing. I know I am not quite Adam and not quite Eve, both ill-fitting and constricting as a cheap man’s shroud. I know my desires; I see them reflected back in the gloss and glaze of your eyes, Thomas, every night I can. When I say I don’t know who I am, I mean I don’t know what to do with this knowledge. I mean that this is no Eden. I mean that some days, I wish I had never even seen the apple.

I mean, some days I want you to take the apple back.”
― Sarah Caulfield, Harmonious Hearts 2016 - Stories from the Young Author Challenge

“I could always smell the ash on your hands. I could always hear the wolves howling for meat. I could always see we weren’t going nowhere, but that we were going; towards an inexorable fixed point, and I was along for the schadenfreude of it, until I remembered that’s when something bad happens to other people.”
― Sarah Caulfield, SPINE

“I have never claimed to be a scholar of anything but my own feelings.”
― Sarah Caulfield, Harmonious Hearts 2016 - Stories from the Young Author Challenge