"The Midnight Library", ("The Cruel Prince")

[fiefoe]

This is a fairly predictable book, no offense to Matt Haig.

• Nora stared down at the small mole on her left hand. That mole had been through everything she’d been through. And it just stayed there, not caring. Just being a mole.
• ‘I’m afraid, Nora’ – he paused for a moment, about the time it takes to lift an axe into the air – ‘I’m going to have to let you go.’
• The town was a conveyor belt of despair.
• She thought of sitting by Leo’s side, teaching him Chopin’s Prelude in E Minor. Happy moments can turn into pain, given time.
• But Mrs Elm shook her head. ‘That isn’t how death works.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘You don’t go to death. Death comes to you.’ Even death was something Nora couldn’t do properly, it seemed.
• When she thought about it – and increasingly she had been thinking about it – Nora was only able to think of herself in terms of the things she wasn’t.
• ‘Regrets ignore chronology. They float around. The sequence of these lists changes all the time.’
• Bertrand Russell wrote that ‘To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three-parts dead’.
• 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.
• Sometimes regrets aren’t based on fact at all. Sometimes regrets are just . . .’ She searched for the appropriate term and found it. ‘A load of bullshit.’
• She looked down at her arm and saw the scars again. It was weird, to have your own body offer clues to a mystery.
• ‘Well, that you can choose choices but not outcomes. But I stand by what I said. It was a good choice. It just wasn’t a desired outcome.’
• Maybe Australia had been her empty fish tank, once Izzy had gone. Maybe she just had no incentive to swim above the line.
• From that moment in that car park she had felt she was really just an extension of the pain in his left knee. A walking wound.
• this other Nora was still talking with the confidence of a self-help Joan of Arc.
• This must be the hardest bit about being a spy, she thought. The emotion people store in you, like a bad investment. You feel like you are robbing people of something.
• The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature (or the ‘tonic of wildness’ as Thoreau called it) solitude took on a different character. It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself and the world. And between her and herself.
• To be part of nature was to be part of the will to live.
• To be a human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple... Minds can’t see what they can’t handle.’
• ‘But you will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life,’ he said, wisely. ‘You’re quoting Camus.’
• Maybe if you lived as many lives as he had, the only person you really had any kind of intimate relationship with was yourself.
• it would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunise you against sadness. And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness.
• Her mind felt different here. She thought a lot in this life, but her thoughts were gentle. ‘Compassion is the basis of morality,’ the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer had written, in one of his softer moments. Maybe it was the basis of life too.
• He loved to gross Molly out with facts – a stomach gets a new lining every four days! Ear wax is a type of sweat! You have creatures called mites living in your eyelashes!
• Thoreau wrote, ‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.’
• We only need to be one person. We only need to feel one existence. We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.

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The faeries in Holly Black's novel are really unpleasant folks, and not that great with intrigue either. Maybe I should stop having high hopes for YA books.

• It was Tatterfell who smeared stinging faerie ointment over my eyes to give me True Sight so that I could see through most glamours, who brushed the mud from my boots, and who strung dried rowan berries for me to wear around my neck so I might resist enchantments. She wiped my wet nose and reminded me to wear my stockings inside out, so I’d never be led astray in the forest.
• We’d talk about the shows we’d watched, rehashing the plots, recalling the dialogue until all our memories were polished smooth and false.
• Faeries make up for their inability to lie with a panoply of deceptions and cruelties. Twisted words, pranks, omissions, riddles, scandals, not to mention their revenges upon one another for ancient, half-remembered slights. Storms are less fickle than they are, seas less capricious.
• I’ve seen the hood, kept under glass in the armory. The fabric is stiff and stained a brown so deep it’s almost black, except for a few smears of green. Sometimes I go down and stare at it, trying to see my parents in the tide lines of dried blood.
• Living in Faerie, it’s impossible not to notice that everyone else smells like verbena or crushed pine needles, dried blood or milkweed. I smell like pit sweat and sour breath unless I scrub myself clean.
• We learn about the movements of constellations in the sky, the medicinal and magical properties of herbs, the languages of birds and flowers and people as well as the language of the Folk (though it occasionally twists in my mouth), the composition of riddles, and how to walk soft-footed over leaves and brambles to leave neither trace nor sound. We are instructed in the finer points of the harp and the lute, the bow and the blade.
• “Do you know what mortal means? It means born to die. It means deserving of death. That’s what you are, what defines you—dying. And yet here you stand, determined to oppose me even as you rot away from the inside out, you corrupt, corrosive mortal creature. Tell me how that is. Do you really think you can win against me? Against a prince of Faerie?”
• The cloying taste of honey is in my mouth. I feel light. I am unwinding. I am unfurling like a banner. “I’d like to stay,” I say, because here is wondrous. Because she is dazzling. I’m not sure I feel good, but I know I feel great.
• “Because you’re like a story that hasn’t happened yet. Because I want to see what you will do. I want to be part of the unfolding of the tale.”
• But watching, I cannot help observing that beneath his defiance is fear. I know what it is to say the clever thing because you don’t want anyone to know how scared you are. It doesn’t make me like him any better, but for the first time he seems real. Not good, but real.
• Truly, he has come by his cruelty honestly in Balekin’s care. He has been raised up in it, instructed in its nuances, honed through its application. However horrible Cardan might be, I now see what he might become and am truly afraid.
• Most of my life is dreadful anticipation, a waiting for the other shoe to drop—at home, in classes, with the Court. Being afraid I would be caught spying was an entirely new sensation, one where I felt, at least, as though I knew exactly what to be scared of. I knew what it would take to win.
• The Roach looks over at the Ghost and shrugs. “This is always the problem with infiltrating the Court. Lots of etiquette taking up time. When can you get away?”
• “Oh, he’d like to make you believe he’s our leader, but it’s more that Nicasia likes power, I like dramatics, and Valerian likes violence. Cardan can provide us with all three, or at least excuses for all three.” “Dramatics?” I echo. “I like for things to happen, for stories to unfold. And if I can’t find a good enough story, I make one.” He looks every inch the trickster in that moment.
• A skirt with a beaded pattern of pomegranates, another that pulls up, like a curtain, to show a stage with jeweled mechanical puppets underneath. There is even one stitched with the silhouette of dancing fauns as tall as the skirt itself.
• And if I laughed louder for the sake of angering him, if I smiled wider, and kissed Locke longer, that is a kind of deceit that even the Folk cannot condemn.