Georgia Summers > Quotes

“WHAT ELSE IS a curse but this? Love, stretched and warped beyond all meaning.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“In her stories, there would be an answer like a lightning bolt. A cure for the curse, a sword for the monster, a crown for the prince. Perfect and all-encompassing in its simplicity. Long live the king and his happily ever after.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“A curse can be many things. A wish left out to spoil in the sun, putrid and soft, leaving behind only calcified desire and oxidised envy. Or a poisoned chalice, a mistake tattooed across an entire family tree, with every generation promising, vowing to never sip until they do. Sometimes, it’s a deal and bad luck conspiring like old grifters closing in on an easy mark. For the Everlys, it begins with stardust.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“She says that we were once nothing more than the dreams of stars. Then the stars moulded us from clay, and gave us shards of themselves so we might create in their honor. And we were happy, for a time. But, even though we have our feet on the earth, every time we close our eyes, we dream of being stars again.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“It is a time for darkness and bitter cold, ghost stories and warnings. The fire crackles and spits, making figures out of smokey shadows.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“A curse is just a story, just a fairy tale to frighten children into good behavior, to mistake coincidence for causality, to explain why a mother would leave her child without so much as a backwards glance.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“As a teenager, she’d envisioned herself as a historian in some grand library, holed up with mountains of books in barely legible handwriting. Then she’d toyed with archaeology when the library hadn’t felt big enough to hold her ambitions. Anthropologist, travel writer, journalist, diplomat, translator—it didn’t matter that she hadn’t quite settled on a choice yet. For a wild, thrilling moment in her life, it seemed the future was opening up to her, and everything had felt possible. How easily it’s been taken from her.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“She doesn’t have to say his surname for him to hear it echoing close behind, the way it has his entire life. Stubborn like an Everly, brave like an Everly, doomed like an Everly. But an Everly nonetheless. If only he could reach into his ribcage and pluck the Everly out, tender and intangible as dreamstuff. If only he could erase that part of himself for good—which is to say, all of him.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“If there’s anyone who can break a curse, it’s her. If there’s anyone who can escape their fate, a treacherous voice whispers, it’s her.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“Books have always been her escape. When she couldn’t leave the house, when no one would answer her questions, when she felt so very alone in the world. They have given her a way out before—maybe they can do it again.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“ Yet heavy dreams make for heavy burdens.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“We are all looking for this world. It’s what the scholars were made for,” Johannes says. “She seeks Elandriel.”
Elandriel. Violet rolls the unfamiliar name on her tongue.
“To be the first person to rediscover it…what a thing that would be. Our ancestral home, untouched for a thousand years. They said the very walls used to be lined with doors leading elsewhere, that scholars from countless worlds came to study in our hallowed halls. Imagine the knowledge we could regain. Imagine the possibilities. The rebirth of an entire world.”
And Violet does imagine, with a kind of longing that stuns her with its ferocity. Her mind is already conjuring a city full of potential libraries crammed wall-to-wall with books, adventure only a step through a doorway. Even though it’s something she’s supposed to have outgrown, she can’t help the thrill that runs through her.
To the effervescent sea under the sun. To the witches in their forests. To mysteries beyond comprehension.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“That world is full of pretty things, isn’t it?” she agreed. “But it’s an impure, poisoned beauty. They have forgotten the stars above, the gods.” She ruffled his hair with unexpected affection. “Better remember who we are—where we really belong. That world is not for us, little dreamer.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“At every crossroad in his life, he seems to have picked the wrong path.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“She closes her eyes and imagines herself as stardust, winging her way through the night sky.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“Her stomach sinks at the knowledge that once again, she’s just missed another glimpse of the extraordinary. To come so close, and then no further.
Her hands wring her apron helplessly. It’ll always be like this. The café, the customers, the empty Everly house, and these fleeting echoes of the other life she might have had. But no more than that. And it’ll never be enough.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“A dead world is never really dead. Even when the stars vanish in a great exodus, leaving an inky night that swallows the sky. Even when the sound of silence is a terrible thing to listen to in a city that once groaned with noise.
But it’s not quite silence, is it? There are the birds that soar over bare roof rafters, egrets and jackdaws and scruffy brown scraps that go by a multitude of names calling joyfully to each other. There are the nocturnal animals who claw and scrape over cobblestones, lifting their gazes to the two pale moons impressed against a violet sky. There are the trees that stretch upwards, overgrown and languorous, from leaf-strewn courtyards, extending gracefully through balconies and walkways. And below them, the ferns that unfurl in dark, damp corners that might still bear cracked tiles in parched colours, or spongey wooden skates engraved with toothy chisel marks.
Life, persistent and predictably stubborn, goes on. Close your eyes and the stars might not sing in this hushed city of dust and dreams, but there’s still singing nonetheless.
Even if there’s just one voice left.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“Curses, after all, are made to be broken.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“You’re awfully loud for someone so small.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“She says she’s too old for fairy tales, but if she just believes hard enough, wishes enough—”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“It’s the middle of the night, but Violet is wide awake. Night settles around her in a hush of anticipation—the witching hour, luminous with possibility.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“She’s halfway across the linoleum, menu in hand, when she notes the man sitting at her table. He sits with his head bowed, focused on his hands clasped in front of him. Golden afternoon sunlight kisses his skin, the line of a tattoo barely visible above his collarbones. His profile is all sharp lines, bladed from the bridge of his nose all the way through to his jaw—the bone structure of a Grecian statue. His dark curly hair is pulled into a bun at the nape of his neck. Unfairly pretty, she thinks.
Suddenly, she’s conscious that she’s been working all day, sweat wicking through her shirt, that she smells like stale coffee, and that there’s an unidentifiable stain—probably jam—just underneath her collar.
The world is desperately cruel sometimes.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“He hears her name and thinks of coffee, sunlight on his shoulders, curiosity burning like wildfire. A curse, a key, a dark room.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“So she’d received an education, yes. But no qualifications. No exam results. Not even half a chance to pursue a degree.
“Why?” she’d begged.
Ambrose had given her a long, meandering and utterly unconvincing explanation. But even if she’d believed him, the damage was already done. So she’s tried to let it go. She has.
But she’s never forgotten the door leading to the city, the snow, the song of the mountainside. A secret she’s held even from her uncles, for fear of it unravelling. And she finds herself lingering in the same dark hallway, her chest brimming with the unplaceable feeling that something vital’s slipped through her fingers.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“The stars can be fickle, too.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“I will survive it,” he says.
But survival is not living.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“With the blow of his hammer, or the twist of a screw, he could make magical toys beyond compare. And people loved them. But Ever Everly had a secret, and it was that no one had ever loved him.
He hadn’t minded, at first. If that was the way of the world, then let it be so. Yet as he grew older, and watched couples filter in together in the shy throes of new love, then pregnant, and then perhaps with two children at their side, he yearned for how neatly they fitted into one another, like puzzle pieces. And if he was a puzzle piece, he was the one missing from the box, unable to be part of the picture.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“They glare at each other, fury working its way under her skin. What does he know, anyway? If she wasn’t on her best behavior, she’d settle this in the way they do in her favourite novels: hand-to-hand combat. No mercy—nothing but the firm hand of justice. But as it is she ignores the boy and makes herself a cup of tea, slamming the cupboard doors with as much anger as she can muster.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“The end of the world looks a lot like the beginning of another, it turns out.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust

“ May the stars sing for you one day.”
― Georgia Summers, The City of Stardust