Emma

“Someone had named the barrio we lived in Hollywood. Maybe it was a joke, maybe it was a prayer.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood

“Ronan Lynch was becoming a jagged, shaggy horror of a thing. She could feel the same wordless dread that the Lace invoked rising in her.

Hennessy hugged him.

She didn't even know where the impulse came from. She was not a sentimental hugger. She had not been hugged as a child, unless the hug was being emotionally weaponized for later. And Ronan Lynch did not seem like the sort of person who would care about getting a hug. Giving someone care and receiving it were two unrelated actions.

At first it did not seem to do anything.

Ronan kept screaming. The hug had not made him appear more human. He seemed more like Bryde than ever--and not Bryde when he was his most man-shaped. He just seemed like a dream entity that hated everything.

"Ronan Lynch, you asshole," Hennessy said.

Once, he'd hugged her. At the time, she had thought it didn't help, but she'd been wrong.

So she held on now, and kept holding on, though he became even less recognizable as Ronan Lynch for a little bit. Then, after a while, the scream gave way to quiet.

She could feel his body quivering. Like a pencil sketch, it conveyed misery with the smallest of gestures.

And then there was nothing at all, just stillness.

Finally, she realized he was hugging her, too, tightly.

There was a strange sort of magic to being a person holding another person after not being held by someone for a long time. There was another strange sort of magic to understanding you'd been using words and silence the wrong way for a long time.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Greywaren

“I wanted to say all those things to her, but I got so caught up in the conversation I was having with myself that I didn't say anything.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood

“Maybe thats why he did heroin, because his dreams were too big.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood