willowmoth > Recent Status Updates

'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.'

I couldn't tell my mother I'd outgrown my shoes again. I didn't want to remind her that I was the reason she was trapped in electric bills and kid's shoes grown too small, the reason she was clawing at the windows like Michael's dying tomatoes. She was a beautiful woman dragging a crippled foot and I was that foot. I was bricks sewn into the hem of her clothes, I was a steel dress."

"A few years ago, an ancient compass came into my keeping. At some point in time, it's needle had rusted in place," she said. "I was like that compass when you found me. I had finally established a safe place, a home, in Perunta. But the longer you remain still, the more rust starts to cover you, and underneath, you become fragile. And soon it hurts to move at all."

"Death isn't beautiful. Death is filthy and unattractive and unkempt in every way. This is not the death meant for a healthy, youthful girl. This is for perverts, strangers who offer children candy to get into their vans. This is a death for men like my ex-stepfather, who always drunk and once, in my presence, hit my mom, knocking her to the floor.

I want to tell him he is has the wrong house."

"I make my own destiny and determine my own worth.
And I am worth quite a lot."

2026 energy. ✨️

This book is such a fun ride! 🩶

I AM NOT OKAY

While I am very much enjoying this book and the absolutely beautiful prose, I will say that I'm becoming increasingly annoyed by Luiprand's "golden aura." 🫠 It is distractingly repetitive.

I'm so afraid of where this is going. 😭

I haven’t had to use my dictionary yet, but Reid describing the contrast of a long beard and a bald head as “filamentary equilibrium” on page ELEVEN made me get it out in anticipation. 😂

"It wasn't even an alternate version of his life. He hadn't gone back in time and done everything differently to get to this place. It turned out that sometimes it's enough to start doing things differently now."

"No one loves anyone here. They all just scrape against each other, like rocks in a bag."

"For that instant, at least, they seemed one and the same, as though all anguish exists in the same deep well, no matter what loss or misfortune leads us to it. We might be at odds, hate each other, and desire each other's destruction, but in our despair, we are lost in the same darkness, breathing the same air as we choke on our grief."

"Thyon, earthbound, felt every choice he'd made, every action he'd taken, as a weight he carried with him. He wondered: Was it weight he could shed or throw off, or was it forever a part of him, as much as his bones and his hearts?"

"The mind is good at hiding things, but there's something it cannot do: It can't erase. It can only conceal, and concealed things are not gone. They rot. They fester, they leak poisons. They ache and stink. They hiss like serpents in tall grass."

"She watched him look down at their hands—at hers inside his much bigger one, both of them scarred and callused, a far cry from the young hands that had known each other so well. She saw him swallow, and close his eyes, and then gently, gently fold his fingers over hers.

And when her hearts resumed beating, she imagined she could feel a spill of light into the veins that carried her spirit."

"There was a man who loved the moon, but whenever he tried to embrace her, she broke into a thousand pieces and left him drenched, with empty arms."