Colleen Chen Quotes

Then she heard tiny moaning noises coming from the direction of the object. It sounded almost human. She couldn't leave without knowing what it was.
She approached it, reached out, and lifted the branch. About as long as her hand and pink, it resembled a piece of flesh. She identified it immediately…after all, she'd seen another one just this morning.
It was a penis.
One side had a rounded end, bisected by a gentle indentation with a small irregular hole in the center. On the other end, it still bore its testicles in their dark red sac. If it had ever belonged to a man, the wound had disappeared completely, as Vesper could see no place where it appeared hacked off or scarred.

Some of the pain released, and love filled the cleared space, uniting, magnetizing more self-love to it.

Souls aren't discrete units - or even units at all. They're more like reflections of consciousness in a fractured mirror.

Somehow, it bothered her watching Garth's charm directed so effectively at another. Could he convince her so easily of an untruth?

Oh," she breathed. "How silly I've been."
"How silly we've all been," said another of the wives. "We shouldn't be fighting each other. Our problems don't lie in any of the relationships we have with each other."
"The problem is our entire social system," chimed in another.

She would have found it peaceful and relaxing here, but in every town they traveled through, people radiated anxiety under uneasy masks of optimism. Their dependency on magic had made them nearly helpless now that everything magical was corrupted.

To him, she was one of the few girls who was nice to him, the stodgy son of a poor alcoholic shoemaker with such little status that he seemed unlikely to even get one wife, let alone the three or more that designated a man of standing.

Vesper felt herself turning red with humiliation. Then she looked at Allegra - really looked at her. Maybe she'd had such a problem with people not seeing her because she wasn't seeing them. Did Allegra's mask of rage hide pain and doubt that anyone would ever truly love her? She thought that it just might. Vesper didn't quite feel compassion, but she no longer took Allegra's behavior personally.

Then you shouldn't be worried about him being with me. You can have him back when I'm done with him.

The nobles had made reading unpopular, as it showed that one couldn't afford to buy spells or magical devices, since one had to get knowledge to do things the ordinary way; even if this view held little logic, the king himself was known to insult readers as "bookfaces" or "unable to think for themselves, so they need to spout what others have said," and these opinions became popular, as did most views expressed by the king or his son.

Have you heard of the Children of Mae?"
"The cult?" She knew of a religious group whose members went door to door, preaching the benefits of self-discipline - abstinence, celibacy or monogamy, vegetarianism - pretty much anything fun was prohibited. They had never come to Vesper's house because her father was a butcher and probably pretty low on their list of possible converts.

He hasn't really seen you, not as you want to be seen, but he's starting to, a little.

She'd never spoken to anyone before of this business of being seen, loved for who she was; to have it voiced by this man she'd just met sent chills down her spine.

Happily-ever-after monogamy has been reinforced so steadily in literature that we tend to feel like failures when we don't achieve that in reality.

For everything about him fitting her fantasy image of what she wanted, she still didn't feel seen by him…and that made her all the more aware that maybe her fantasy wasn't what she wanted at all.