Alaya Dawn Johnson Quotes

Think of it like the best mac and cheese you've ever had. No neon yellow Velveeta and bread crumbs. I'm talking gourmet cheddar, the expensive stuff from Vermont that crackles as it melts into the crust on top. Imagine if right before you were about to tear into it, the mac and cheese starts talking to you?

He turns away and I'm overwhelmed with an echo, with the sense that the words in my mouth aren't my own. But of course they are.

How much of yourself will you give them in exchange?

But I know better than anyone how dangerous trying can be, and how destructive. Maybe it's better to let bad things happen than tear yourself apart trying to stop the inevitable.

So I take my lover, my king, and I put him in a pedestal and I cut him down. A man, like the ones who ruined the world.

I'm nothing but forward momentum and a curse.

I could watch him forever, and he vanishes before I can blink.

The kingdom of sleep demands its forfeits, and the world looks very different through eyes cracked and yellow with its denial.

I've loved you for so long and You're beautiful, won't you dance?

I burn where he last touched me. I stare at the space where he has been until everything fades.

shoulders touching in a way that's only mostly platonic. It's inevitable, she supposes, that God would call her bluff.

The past stands in the path of the future, knowing it will be crushed.

In the dark, I seem to stretch. Without a body to witness, I grow and grow with my pleasure. I feel like a constellation, a concept hung on a scattering of stars.

What is this, Enki?" says the Queen. "Do you not honor me?"
Enki's smile is wide and bright. "I give you the greatest honor," he says.
"You are dressed in the manner of a slave," says she, "in a city where there are none."
"There aren't," he agrees, though now his smile seems too sharp for his words. "But there is the verde."
"And what of it?"
"I am dressed in the manner of my people."
"Are we not your people?" And we see that the Queen is torn between amusement and anger. Enki is leading her in a dance, but has not tapped out its rhythm.
"You are everything to me."
"And yet you come before us hardly as a king."
"I come before you," says Enki, "as a simple verde boy." He takes a quick step back, almost skipping, and his dust-lightened hair bobs around his ears. "I will leave you as a king." And when the drums start, that's how he dances: as a king.

Ieyascu looks bright and flat, heavy strokes on an invisible canvas.

Some mornings I thought I saw your worry frost our blankets, hang in the air with your cloudy breath.

Answering the questions feels like beating my skull against the wall of my carrel,

I watch, nearly shaking with the need to say something and having nothing to say, as she lets a flame incinerate the precious paper to a dusting of ash on the floor.

Hands and lips and teeth, and you'd forgotten-no, you'd never known-this way of knowing someone, this dissolution of self, this autophagy.

I can always tell when Gil's been with Enki, because he moves like he might start dancing at any moment and he hardly hears a word I say to him.

The kings die so that their choice of the next Queen can be irrevocable, unassailable, and unprejudiced.

There's a song", I say.
"There's always a song", he says.

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To love light, you have to love dark. I'm not trying to be profound, I know you'll understand. I don't mean that you have to hate to love, or that you have to die to live.
I mean that sometimes, you turn out the lights just to turn them back on.

The summer kings are gods, and we are finally, in the end, just men.