Lily

“I love you. I love you. I love you. I'll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You'll never see, but you will know. I'll be all the poets, I'll kill them all and take each one's place in turn, and every time love's written in all the strands it will be to you.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“She cannot stop herself from reaching out, from trying with a touch to say, I'm here. Sometimes you have to hold a person, though they'll mistake embrace for strangulation.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“I love you and I love you and I love you, on battlefields, in shadows, in fading ink, on cold ice splashed with the blood of seals. In the rings of trees. In the wreckage of a planet crumbling to space. In bubbling water. In bee stings and dragonfly wings, in stars. In the deapths of lonely woods where I wandered in my youth, staring up - and even then you watched me. You slid back through my life, and I have known you since before I knew you.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“You’re beautiful,” I told her. The fountains’ jets bubbled around us.
“You’re foxed,” she said.
“You stare at me sometimes, too. I see you sneaking glances.”
― Marie Rutkoski, The Midnight Lie