Melissa Albert Quotes

You might think you have a really good reason, but nothing could be worth this. Nothing could be worth feeling this way. I feel like a changeling wearing someone else's skin. I can't remember what I liked, or what I wanted, why I worked or left the house or did anything. It's all gone... I think whatever I used to be, it dropped through the binding. I wish the rest of me had gone with it.

She talked like a woman who knew more books than people.

Love rose up like a noose and circled my throat.

I hated Tennessee Williams's Laura. She reminded me too much of a fairy-tale character. Not the ones my grandmother wrote, allegedly-- those women drew blood. No, she was the worst type of Grimm Brothers beauty: isolated, soft-spoken, waiting for a man to save her. She probably look like me.

Every time we left a place, I felt the things that happened there being wiped clean, till all that was left was Ella, our fights and our talks and our winding roads. I wrote down dates and places in the corners of my books, and lost them along the way.

You're a story, but that doesn't make you any less true.

I avoided my eyes while brushing my teeth, then climbed into bed with a copy of _The Blind Assassin_, because if you're not with the book you want, you might as well want the book you're with.
--Melissa Albert, _The Hazel Wood_

Life was a big thing to live without a map.

We were each our own island, gathered together into one messed-up archipelago.

My love he wooed me
My love he slew me
My love he buried my bones
His love he married
His love I buried
My love now wanders alone

Everyone is supposed to be a combination of nature and nurture, their true selves shaped by years of friends and fights and parents and dreams and things you did too young and things you overheard that you shouldn't have and secrets you kept or couldn't and regrets and victories and quiet prides, all the packed-together detritus that becomes what you call your life.

I wanted that uncaring, 'here's your blood and guts and your fucked-up happy ending' fairy-tale voice... And it was perfect. There are no lessons in it. There's just this harsh, horrible world touched with beautiful magic, where shitty things happen. And they don't happen for a reason, or in threes, or in a way that looks like justice. They're set in a place that has no rules and doesn't want any. And the author's voice... is perfectly pitiless. She's like a war reporter who doesn't give a fuck.

It's hard, isn't it, to find you're not at all the thing you thought you were?

I walked a block on rubbery knees, feeling the way I did the time a van clipped my bike and sent me reeling into a line of parked cars. Ella had dropped her cigarette and jumped on the fallen bike, screaming at the top of her lungs as she sped after the car. Bleeding in three places, I watched her go, glad she knew I'd rather have retribution than comfort.

Are all these books doors?'
'A book is always a door.

I wanted my mom, in a way you maybe can't ever want anyone else. It was primal and sharp and it made me feel like a needle in the haystack of a cold and terrible world. I wanted my mom.

His expression mirrored what I felt - the black-hole suck of exhaustion that strikes after a trauma. When everything has changed and your messed-up brain is flying around the stars - then your body and all its needs imposes itself, cutting you off from madness.

When in doubt, the answer is always Death. With a capital D.