Samantha Shannon

Maybe not the blacklisted music and forbidden novels, but I could have found a tree to read by, or made coffee before daybreak, under other circumstances.

No woman should be made to fear that she was not enough

“You have tried to turn yourself to stone. Do not be afeared to find that you are not.

She was lost and found and wandering, all at once. At the cusp of dreaming, yet somehow never more awake.

But Ead called fire her friend, and she would plunge into the furnace for Sabran Berethnet, for just one night with her. Let them come with their swords and their torches.

Let them come.

“Do you think me a tyrant?”

“I think you a self-righteous fool whose head is harder than a rock. And I would not change you for the world.”

“Tell me, Eadaz uq-Nāra,” she said softly, “am I a greater fool to want you still?”

Ead crossed the space between them. “No more a fool than I,” she said, “to love you as I do.

Just because something has always been done does not mean that it ought to be done.”

Whose word did he fondly follow

That he dared this perilous voyage,

These raging seas?

“That one day, you will forgive yourself. You are in the spring of your life, child, and have much to learn about this world. Do not deny yourself the privilege of living.”