lizzie ⋆｡☽˚｡

“You look ill,” Matthew observed. “Is it my dancing? Is it me personally?”
“Perhaps I’m nervous,” she said. “Lucie did say you didn’t like many people.”
Matthew gave a sharp, startled laugh, before schooling his face back into a look of lazy amusement. “Did she? Lucie’s a chatterbox.”
“But not a liar,” she said.
“Well, fear not. I do not dislike you. I hardly know you,” said Matthew. “I do know your brother. He made my life miserable at school, and Christopher’s, and James’s.”
“Alastair and I are very different,” Cordelia said. She didn’t want to say more than that. It felt disloyal to Alastair. “I like Oscar Wilde, for instance, and he does not.”
The corner of Matthew’s mouth curled up. “I see you go directly for the soft underbelly, Cordelia Carstairs. Have you really read Oscar’s work?”
“Just Dorian Gray,” Cordelia confessed. “It gave me nightmares.”
“I should like to have a portrait in the attic,” Matthew mused, “that would show all my sins, while I stayed young and beautiful. And not only for sinning purposes—imagine being able to try out new fashions on it. I could paint the portrait’s hair blue and see how it looks.”
“You don’t need a portrait. You are young and beautiful,” Cordelia pointed out.
“Men are not beautiful. Men are handsome,” objected Matthew.
“Thomas is handsome. You are beautiful,” said Cordelia, feeling the imp of the perverse stealing over her. Matthew was looking stubborn. “James is beautiful too,” she added.
“He was a very unprepossessing child,” said Matthew. “Scowly, and he hadn’t grown into his nose.”
“He’s grown into everything now,” Cordelia said.
Matthew laughed, again as if he was surprised to be doing it. “That was a very shocking observation, Cordelia Carstairs. I am shocked.”
― Cassandra Clare, Chain of Gold

“We aren’t normal. This place isn’t normal, and you’re not a player, kid. You’re the glass ballerina—or the knife.”
― Jennifer Lynn Barnes, The Inheritance Games

“We do not get to choose when in our lives we feel pain," said Matthew. "It comes when it comes, and we try to remember, even though we cannot imagine a day when it will release its hold on us, that all pain fades. All misery passes. Humanity is drawn to light, not darkness.”
― Cassandra Clare, Chain of Gold

“We deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism, because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House