Ranni

“Don’t start telling yourself stories about me, Esta. I’m not some knight in shining armor. I don’t have some hidden heart of gold. I’m a bastard, in every sense of the word.”
“Who said I want you to be anything but what you are? I like your angles and your edges,” she told him, hoping he could hear the truth in her words. “I have plenty of my own, you know.”
― Lisa Maxwell, The Last Magician

“Regret was for people who dragged their past along with them everywhere”
― Lisa Maxwell, The Last Magician

“They weren’t so different, the two of them. They’d both been abandoned by their parents, but at least she’d had the Professor. He’d seen something in her worth saving, but Harte never had that. She still might not trust him, but she understood him. The drive that made him who he was, the determination to prove himself—the bone-deep need to belong somewhere—those were all things she knew very well. She understood the hurt, too. The fear that there was something intrinsically wrong with you to make the people who were supposed to love you leave. The way that fear either hardened you or destroyed you. It had turned into a sort of armor for her, another weapon in her arsenal, and she suspected the same was true of Harte.”
― Lisa Maxwell, The Last Magician

“He wished . . . He didn’t know what he wished. That he hadn’t seen the intentions behind those honey-colored eyes of hers? That he hadn’t predicted her duplicity so easily? Or maybe, stupid as he was, he wished that he could stop himself from the inevitability of hurting her? But wishes were for children, and he’d grown up a long time ago. Only one of them could win this game, and it had to be him.”
― Lisa Maxwell, The Last Magician