willowmoth > Recent Status Updates

'I forgot the stars above me and the centuries behind. I forgot the Beast and the hunt and the Host of the Archangel, all of them somewhere, somewhere. But not here, now.'

🥺🩶

This is goooooood 🔥😌✨️🤌🏽

'"Good" and "bad" were the wrong words. More like "damaged" or "undamaged." There was a flaw in her. Her mother had seen it early, and then her father sussed it out, something nearly invisible, like a pinhole leak in a copper kettle.'

'Ailbhe never had to put the work in. Like most things in life, the language was handed to her... She doesn't know the struggle of the rest of us. This soul-deep pining for the identity we were robbed of. It used to be a point of pride, my gaeilgeoir wife. I don't take pride in it anymore. It's unbecoming for a wife to hold knowledge inaccessible to her husband.'

Brb, throwing up.

'It was a surrender, and a knight does not surrender until she's told to.'


SCREAMING!!! EXCUSE ME. 🥵🫠

'And I understood finally that a nation is a house with no windows or doors at all. That no matter what I did—no matter how much blood I spilled in its defense or ink I spent in its praise—it would never, ever be my home.'

'Most of my lovers—camp followers and soldiers, crofters' daughters and the idle sons of lords—had wanted only to take or be taken; they came to me warily or arrogantly, shy or swaggering, as to a caged wolf. But you—oh, you would come to me on your knees, as to a king, and you would give and give.'

' God, please, don't ask me to write it all down again.
It's your turn to tell it, love."

I just know this book is going to rip my heart out of my chest, because just this little line made me tear up for some reason.

'On the sixth day Professor Sawbridge and I exchanged a series of telegrams, in which she called me a rude name, committed light treason, and cast aspersions on the veracity of the text. I knew she was at least intrigued, however, because she was taking the early train back to campus, and the only thing she hated more than her country was getting out of bed before ten o'clock.'

Love her.

'But what worse fate could there be? To remember love and know it is unattainable? To know love wanders somewhere light-years and light-years distant, ever knowing it is forever out of reach? Forever hidden?'

'How do you stay with someone when there are no dreams to build? No purpose to accomplish? No meaning? No meaning — that was the monster that drove us away from one another in the end. Always.'

"I guess all small towns have ghosts, but sometimes a town.. it needs to make ghosts."

this book is so damned creepy (positive)

'I would have liked longer. But it was enough. I was enough.'

🥺😭

This book is a DELIGHT. I also have no idea what's going to happen next (which, for clarity, I absolutely love.)

'I shall go to my field and contemplate my own wretchedness. In the rain.'

I am Sol, Sol is me. 😂

'Eat when you can, drink when you can, roll ladders along high shelves when you can. For tomorrow we die.'

1. Complete this trial without dying.
2. Visit the armoury with Fenn and choose weapons.
3. Fight Shal.
4. Visit apartment, solve murder.
5. Cake?

I'm listening to the audiobook (thank you to my library & the Libby app) while reading along with my physical copy of this book, and OH MY GOODNESS, it is unexpectedly hilarious and SO clever. I am having the best time. The audiobook narrator is a master of her craft and is bringing these already extremely well written characters to life for me. 🔥

'It is one thing to admit to being feared, or hated. Quite another to admit that you are unloved, and lonely, and that it is taking all your strength to hide it.'

'She shuttered. She still remembered my touch with revulsion. It made me dizzy with hatred. This was my mother. The woman who raised me. What chance could I have ever had.'

'Love is a bedtime story, a teddy bear, familiar, one eye missing.

...Love is a toy, a token, a scented handkerchief.

...Love is a check, that can be forged, that can be cashed. Love is a payment that comes due.'

'fuck
you
insane
person
dissonant and querulous

my
gas tanks marked FULL

I glued them to sheets of paper. I give them back to you.'

'Sometimes I wish you were dead, so I would know you were safe.'

'I almost said, you're not broken, you're just going through something. But I couldn't. She knew. There was something terribly wrong with her, all the way inside. She was like a big diamond with a dead spot in the middle.'

'Spread a malicious rumor.
Let a beloved old person's dog out of the yard.
Suggest suicide to a severely depressed person.
Tell a child it isn't very attractive or bright.
Put Drano in glassine folded papers and leave them on street corners.
Throw handfuls of useless foreign coins into a beggar's cup, and make sure they thank you profusely. '

'...no matter where I was, I had the urge to exit, to run away. But where would I go? I wanted nonexistence, or maybe I just wanted to return to who I was before my first heartbreak.'

'I was not a girl who pleaded for someone to requite her love. I couldn't be... But I was—I wanted to bruise my knees kneeling at their feet.'

'For the third time, Polly it a cigarette, took a few puffs, then handed it off to a stranger passing by.

"Why do you keep doing that?" I asked.

"The first few steps of a cigarette are beautiful," she said. "The rest are rotten."'

'She reminded me of a certain kind of rose she grew in the garden, called Pristine. It was white with a trace of pink around the outside, and when you picked it, the petals all fell off.'