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"One must always be careful of books and what is inside them, for words have the power to change us. Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry."

Finished "Vampires, Scones, and Edmund Herondale" • 5/5 ⭐️

Finished "The Runaway Queen" • 3/5 ⭐️

Finished "What Really Happened in Peru" • 4/5 ⭐️

"They never said 'I love you' because they didn't need to. Their love existed in the space between words, in the moments when they were apart, before they came back together."

"Historically speaking, important truths often begin their lives as total impossibilities. And just because we can't imagine how something could possibly be true, doesn't mean we can't observe it to be true."

"Books are feelings. They exist to make us feel. To connect us to what's inside, sometimes to things we don't even know are there."

"Librarians and the booksellers ... Custodians of imagination, feeders of hungry hearts, matchmakers of the written word."

"I believe there are far more possibilities than happily ever after or tragedy. Every story has the potential for infinite endings."

"All stories are made of both truths and lies. What matters is the way that we believe in them."

"His brain was a radio that either switched channels frequently or remained set on the same one for far too long, regardless of what he wanted, and the frequency it chose wasn't always the frequency he was supposed to be tuned in to." ... Because same.

"And since it seems like every single 'naturally beautiful' thing about me comes with a downside that needs to be enhanced by store-bought beauty, I'm beginning to wonder if I'm really naturally beautiful at all, or if Mom's use of the term 'naturally beautiful' goes in the same place where others would just use the term 'ugly'."

Casiopea is lowkey getting on my nerves 🥲 And somehow, I just don't think the writing style is working for me here ...

"Did she seem depressed? She was distant. She didn't make many friends. She was struggling in her classes. All true. But would it have mattered if she'd been someone else? If she'd been a social butterfly, they would have said she liked to drink away her pain. If she'd been a straight-A student, they would have said she'd been eaten alive by her perfectionism. There were always excuses for why girls died."

"Our family histories are simply stories. They are myths we create about the people who came before us, in order to make sense of ourselves."

"Usually the secrets we keep deep down, ain't meant to hurt other people. Not saying they won't, but not through intentions. Those deep secrets, we hide away because we're afraid what other people might think. How they might judge us, if they knew. And nobody's judgement we scared more than the ones we give our hearts to. Besides, everybody's got secrets."

"I didn't *fall* in love with you. I walked into love with you, with my eyes wide open, choosing to take every step along the way. I do believe in fate and destiny, and I also believe we are only fated to do the things that we'd choose anyways. And I'd choose you; in a hundred lifetimes, in a hundred worlds, in any version of reality, I'd find you and I'd choose you."

"Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just a little bit to test that it's a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain."

"A person was like a city. You couldn't let a few less desirable parts put you off the whole. There may be bits you don't like, a few dodgy side streets and suburbs, but the good stuff makes it worthwhile."

"Riches allow one to travel, but literature will give one the world."

... "They're the masks we wear every day, the personal histories we write and revise again and again, the future we imagine, the images we project online, the narratives we construct in order to fit in. Then there are the other stories, the stories we don't tell, the ones we lock away within the hidden, dark rooms of ourselves—the secrets. Here's what I also know now: secrets tend to seek the light."

"It's surprisingly easy to pretend to be someone you're not. Writers do it all the time; that's how they write a story—pluck a character from the air and try her on for size. What I know now is that we're all made up of stories, the ones we tell ourselves and the ones we tell each other." ...

"Once we have agreed that true love exists, we may consider its nature. It is not, as many misguided poets would have you believe, an event in and of itself; it is not something that happens, but something that simply is and always has been. One does not fall in love; one discovers it.

"It isn't pain or suffering that unmakes a person; it's only time. Time, sitting on your breastbone like a black-scaled dragon, minutes clicking like claws across the floor, hours gliding past on sulfurous wings."

"Novels are untrustworthy advisers. They aren't concerned with rationality or sobriety; they peddle in tragedy and suspense, in chaos and rule breaking, in madness and heartache, and they will steer you toward such things with all guile of a piler luring rats into a river."