_hellcat > _hellcat's Quotes

“But this is how you walk to the end of the world. This is how you live forever. Here is one day, and here is the next, and the next, and you take what you can, savor every stolen second, cling to every moment, until it’s gone.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Time moves so fucking fast.

Blink, and you’re halfway through school, paralyzed by the idea that whatever you choose to do, it means choosing not to do a hundred other things, so you change your major half a dozen times before finally ending up in theology, and for a while it seems like the right path, but that’s really just a reflex to the pride on your parents’ faces, because they assume they’ve got a budding rabbi, but the truth is, you have no desire to practice, you see the holy texts as stories, sweeping epics, and the more you study, the less you believe in any of it.

Blink, and you’re twenty-four, and you travel through Europe, thinking—hoping—that the change will spark something in you, that a glimpse of the greater, grander world will bring your own into focus. And for a little while, it does. But there’s no job, no future, only an interlude, and when it’s over, your bank account is dry, and you’re not any closer to anything.

Blink, and you’re twenty-six, and you’re called into the dean’s office because he can tell that your heart’s not in it anymore, and he advises you to find another path, and he assures you that you’ll find your calling, but that’s the whole problem, you’ve never felt called to any one thing. There is no violent push in one direction, but a softer nudge a hundred different ways, and now all of them feel out of reach.

Blink and you’re twenty-eight, and everyone else is now a mile down the road, and you’re still trying to find it, and the irony is hardly lost on you that in wanting to live, to learn, to find yourself, you’ve gotten lost.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Dine with me,” Luc says as winter gives way to spring.
“Dance with me,” he says as a new year begins.
“Be with me,” he says, at last, as one decade slips into the next”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“You didn’t come.”

“You didn’t call.”

She looks down at their tangled hands. “Tell me, Luc,” she says. “Was any of it real?”

“What is real to you, Adeline? Since my love counts for nothing?”

“You are not capable of love.”

He scowls, his eyes flashing emerald. “Because I am not human? Because I do not wither and die?”

“No,” she says, drawing back her hand. “You are not capable of love because you cannot understand what it is to care for someone else more than yourself. If you loved me, you would have let me go by now.”

Luc flicks his fingers. “What nonsense,” he says. “It is because I love you that I won’t. Love is hungry. Love is selfish.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“There are days when she mourns the prospect of another year, another decade, another century. There are nights when she cannot sleep, moments when she lies awake and dreams of dying.
But then she wakes, and sees the pink and orange dawn against the clouds, or hears the lament of a lone fiddle, the music and the melody, and remembers there is such beauty in the world.
And she does not want to miss it—any of it.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Her shadow stretches out ahead - too long, its edges already blurring - and small white flowers tumble from her hair, littering the ground like stars. A constellation left in her wake, almost like the one across her cheeks.

Seven freckles. One for every love she'd have, that's what Estele had said, when the girl was still young.
One for every life she'd lead.
One for every god watching over her.

Now they mock her, those seven marks. Promises. Lies. She's had no loves, she's lived no lives, she's met no gods, and now she is out of time.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“She said no, and learned how much the word was worth.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“And then he whispers three words into her hair. “I love you,” he says, and Addie wonders if this is love, this gentle thing. If it is meant to be this soft, this kind. The difference between heat, and warmth. Passion, and contentment. “I love you too,” she says. She wants it to be true.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“You want an ending," she says. "Then take my life when I am done with it. You can have my soul when I don't want it anymore."

The shadow tips his head, suddenly intrigued.

A smile - just like the smile in her drawings, askance, and full of secrets - crosses his mouth. And then he pulls her to him. A lover's embrace. he is smoke and skin, air and bone, and when his mouth presses against hers, the first thing she tastes is the turning of the seasons, the moment when dusk gives way to night. And then his kiss deepens. His teeth skim her bottom lip, and there is pain in the pleasure, followed by the copper taste of blood on her tongue.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“It was just so...permanent.
Choosing a class became choosing a discipline, and choosing a discipline became choosing a career, and choosing a career became choosing a life, and how was anyone supposed to do that, when you only had one?”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Want is for children. If this were want, I would be rid of you by now. I would have forgotten you centuries ago,” he says, a bitter loathing in his voice. “This is need. And need is painful but patient. Do you hear me, Adeline? I need you. As you need me. I love you, as you love me.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“There is a rhythm to moving through the world alone.
You discover what you can and cannot live without, the simple necessities and small joys that define a life. Not food, not shelter, not the basic things a body needs—those are, for her, a luxury—but the things that keep you sane. That bring you joy. That make life bearable.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“And when the girl looks at him, she doesn't see perfect. She sees someone who cares too much, who feels too much, who is lost, and hungry, and wasting inside his curse. She sees the truth, and he doesn't know how, or why, only knows that he doesn't want it to end. Because for the first time in months, in years, his whole life, perhaps, Henry doesn't feel cursed at all. For the first time, he feels seen.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Nothing is all good or all bad," she says. "Life is so much messier than that."

And there in the dark, he asks if it was really worth it.

Were the instants of joy worth the stretches of sorrow?

Were the moments of beauty worth the years of pain?

And she turns her head, and looks at him, and says, "Always.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“She fell in love with the darkness many times, fell in love with a human once.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“She will grow out of it, her parents say - but instead, Adeline feels herself growing in, holding tighter to the stubborn hope of something more.

The world should be getting larger. Instead, she feels it shrinking, tightening like chains around her limbs as the flat lines of her own body begin to curve out against it, and suddenly the charcoal beneath her nails is unbecoming, as is the idea that she would choose her own company over Arnaud's or George'sm or any man who might have her.

She is at odds with everything, she does not fit, an insult to her sex, a stubborn child in a woman's form, her head bowed and arms wrapped tight around her drawing pad as if it were a door.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“They've left his heart too open. Forgotten to close back up the armor of his chest. And now he feels... too much.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“And she wonders what it was that drew her here the first time.
Wonders if they are like magnets, she and Luc.
If they have circled each other for so long that now they share an orbit.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“I am not some genie, bound to your whim." He pushes off the tree. "Nor am I some petty forest spirit, content with granting favors for mortal trinkets. I am stronger than your god and older than your devil. I am the darkness between stars, and the roots beneath the earth. I am promise, and potential, and when it comes to playing games, I divine the rules, I set the pieces, and I choose when to play. And tonight, I say no.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Listen to me." Her voice is urgent now. "Life can feel very long sometimes, but in the end, it goes so fast." Her eyes are glassy with tears, but she is smiling. "You better live a good life, Henry Strauss.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Belief is a bit like gravity. Enough people believe a thing, and it becomes as solid and real as the ground beneath your feet. But when you're the only one holding on to an idea, a memory, a girl, it's hard to keep it from floating away”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“It does,” he admits, before nodding at her attire. “And yet,” he says with an impish grin, “you strike me as someone not easily restrained. Aut viam invenium aut faciam, and so on.”

She does not know Latin yet, and he does not offer a translation, but a decade from now, she will look up the words, and learn their meaning.

To find a way, or make your own.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“He always liked learning. Loved it, really. If he could have spent his whole life sitting in a lecture hall, taking notes, could have drifted from department to department, haunting different studies, soaking up language and history and art, maybe he would have felt full, happy.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“He is all restless energy, and urgent need, and there isn't enough time, and he knows of course that there will never be.

That time always ends a second before you're ready.

That life is the minutes you want minus one.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Three hundred years she's had to learn the color of his moods. She knows them all by now, the meaning of every shade, knows his temper, wants, and thoughts, just by judging those eyes.
She marvels, that in the same amount of time, he never learned to read her own.
Or perhaps he only saw what he expected: a woman’s anger, and her need, her fear and hope and lust, all the simpler, more transparent things.
But he never learned to read her cunning, or her cleverness, never learned to read the nuances of her actions, the subtle rhythms of her speech.
And as she looks at him, she thinks of all the things her eyes would say.
That he has made a grand mistake.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“You belong to me.” There is a sound like thunder in the back of his throat. “With me.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“He doesn't know it, but he's been working on this song for weeks. Well, they have.
Together.

She smiles a little as she plays on. This is the grass between the nettles. A safe place to step. She can't leave her own mark, but if she's careful, she can give the mark to someone else. Nothing concrete, of course, but inspiration rarely is.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Saying good-bye, perhaps to her father -- her favorite person in this world. this is how she would remember him. Not by the sad unknowing in his eyes, or the grim set of his jaw as he led her to church, but by the things he loved. By the way he showed her how to hold a stick of charcoal, coaxing shapes and shades with the weight of her hand. The songs and stories, the sights from the five summers she went with him to market, when Adeline was old enough to travel, not old enough to cause a stir. By the careful gift of a wooden ring, made for his first and only daughter when she was born -- the one she then offered to the dark.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“He assures you that you’ll find your calling, but that’s the whole problem, you’ve never felt called to any one thing. There is no violent push in one direction, but a softer nudge a hundred different ways, and now all of them feel out of reach.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“art is about ideas. And ideas are wilder than memories. They're like weeds, always finding their way up.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue