ry

“Have I told you how hideous you look tonight?” Cardan asks, leaning back in the elaborately carved chair, the warmth of his words turning the question into something like a compliment.
“No” I say, glad to be annoyed back into the present. “Tell me.”
"I can't.”
― Holly Black, The Cruel Prince

“That was what I'd always loved about reading, what had driven me to write in the first place. That feeling that a new world was being spun like a spiderweb around you and you couldn't move until the whole thing had revealed itself to you.”
― Emily Henry, Beach Read

“Most people don’t know how to starve,” said Ezra.
Silence.
“I guess that’s a weird thing to say, but it’s true. It’s something you learn. People think they have to be born one way, with resilience built in or some incapacity to burn or whatever. Either you are or you aren’t, that sort of thing. Like some people naturally want things and others want nothing, but it’s not true. You can be taught to want. You can be taught to crave. And you can also learn to starve.”
Silence.
“The issue is when you eventually get fed,” Ezra continued. “You’ve heard about the stomach pains and shit when vegetarians eat meat for the first time? It feels like dying. Prosperity is anguish. And of course the body adjusts, doesn’t it? But the mind doesn’t. You can’t erase history. You can’t just excise the wanting, and worse—you forget the pain. Eventually you grow accustomed to excess and can’t go back, because all you remember are the aches of starvation, which you took so long to learn. How to give yourself only as much as you need to continue—that’s a lesson. For some people it’s lifelong, for others it’s developmental if they’re lucky and then eventually it fades. But you never really forget it, how to starve. How to watch others with envy. How to silence the ache in your soul. Starvation is dormancy, isn’t it? The mind still hungers even when the body adjusts. There’s tension, always. Survival only requires so much but existence, completion, that becomes insatiable. The longer you starve the more haunting the ghost of starvation. After you’ve learned to starve, when someone finally gives you something, you become a hoarder. You hoard. And technically that’s the same as having, but it isn’t, not really. Starvation continues. You still want, and wanting is the hard part. You can learn to starve but you can’t learn to have. Nobody can. It’s the flaw in being mortal.”
― Olivie Blake, The Atlas Six

“I wish to know the unknowable. To see what no mortal has seen. To peel back the carpeting of the world and tumble into the stars.”
― Heather Fawcett, Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries