Steff Fox > Recent Status Updates

"You're a liar. You lie about terrible things and you're lucky that terrible things happen in the world so often you can take credit for it—but you can't see a thing. You make the world sound like a nightmare to keep us scared to ever leave, but there are amazing things we're missing, trapped here."

Archie's eyeballs would have rolled right out of his head. Apocalypse! The oldest scheme in the book! But it worked. Father Daily promised fire and brimstone, death and destruction—yet safety for his flock.

You've got to have faith! It had lots of meanings. Sometimes it meant "stop complaining" and sometimes it meant "stop asking questions" but mostly it meant "put your trust in him and the rest will take care of itself."

It makes no sense. Starlight should have put the knowledge of whatever she’s talking about into my brain. My eyes stay fixed on her. Silent. Too stubborn to admit I don’t know what she’s talking about.

It makes no sense. Starlight should have put the knowledge of whatever she’s talking about into m

I wish I was her son in a kinder lifetime.

I wanted them to see a kid just like them, someone who'd done them a good turn, someone they trusted, even though I was nothing like them: an eighteen-year-old runaway getting my first taste of freedom, nothing in my pockets but my two hands, nothing in my mouth but lies.

Invisible, I could walk for hours without anyone bothering me. I could walk the streets at any hour of the night. I could pass by a group of men and not hear a single comment—no catcalls, no leering, no requests to "Smile, beautiful!" that sent a lightning bolt of rage down my spine. I could slip into the night and walk to the lake and lie out on the huge rocks that shored up the promenade and gaze at the stars...

One of the most memorable things I hear is when someone tells me that my books got a reluctant reader to read.

My attitude is come for the love story and stay for the war.

"We think we're sheltering them but what we're doing is putting them at a disadvantage."

"Some days all I do is stare at the wall. That can be productive, too."

I keep having to put this down. That last chapter broke me.

This…is bad.

I recently lost my baby Border Collie to cancer; he had just turned seven years old. Ngl, the first chapter of this book had me in tears. About a year prior, we too, spent thousands of dollars to get him treatment with no guarantee that it would work. Though this treatment only got us about a year more with him, I agree, wholeheartedly, with Rocky. It was the best money I ever spent.

Men. Couldn’t live with ‘em. Couldn’t shoot ‘em.

That rushed introduction plus flashback scenes was so painful.

I don’t know if I’ve just read so much of Marissa Meyer’s work (an absolutely ridiculous number of times, mind you) that I’ve just become an expert at predictions or if it’s that the book, itself, was predictable. Not saying that’s a bad thing, so far, but just something I’m noticing.

“You have to understand [the world] to mess around with it—unless you want to break gravity or something.”

Mom knocked on my door. (Her knocking sounded different from Dad’s. It had a pattern. Dad’s knock sometimes seemed like he forgot what he was doing.)

“If I said touch grass, would you kill me?”

“It’s winter,” I moaned. “The grass is dead.”

Detail your predicament on the back of this card and entrust it to the four winds. Summons will be selected on the basis of payment and personal curiosity. (Our curiosity, not yours.) Utmost discretion guaranteed.

He squinted at her. “I cannot tell if you are lying, and I find that very irritating.”

Cartographers from long ago used to draw dragons, sea monsters, and other made-up creatures in the unexplored territories on maps. It was their way of warning that there could be danger in the unknown, and it’s where the phrase “here be dragons” came from. If this story was a map, this is where the dragons would go.

“You are not tired. You are panicked, and angry, and afraid, and lost. You will continue to be all those things until you get up and do something. Then you will just be angry and afraid.”

Elsewhere in the castle, a man was being murdered.

Anya had been taught to curtsy at the age of two. She thought it absurd (the men did not have to do it), and her face showed it.

“What if unlocking would work for more than doors? For blocked arteries or hearts?”

His younger brother, Claude, had rolled his eyes. “The locksmiths of the island wouldn’t thank you, Argus.”

Oh my word. I can’t take much more of this.

I…hate this so much. Wildflower makes me want to gag. And it’s so painfully insta-lovey.