7
" There are stories where you must wear out your iron shoes to right a wrong, where children are baked into pies, where jealousy cuts off hands and cuts out hearts. We forget, because the stories end with those ritual words—happily ever after—all the darkness, all the pain, all the effort that comes before. People say they want a fairy tale life, but what they really want is the part that happens off the page, after the oven has been escaped, after the clock strikes midnight. They want the part that doesn’t come with glass slippers still stained with a stepsister’s blood, or a lover blinded by an angry mother’s thorns. If you live through a fairy tale, you don’t make it through unscathed or unchanged. Hands "
― Kat Howard , Roses and Rot
9
" It's easier to see the places where things end. Endings are clear, endings are dramatic, endings are obvious events. A pair of panties, not yours, found, a slap of a hand across a face, a ring returned. Something that was, and isn't now.
Beginnings are hidden in the shadows of time, are gradual, are two half-glances in a dark bar. Tiny things that no one even notices, but that hold everything. "
― Kat Howard , Roses and Rot
13
" I don't like the idea of signs and portents. People like to say fate is inescapable, but I believe there's always an escape. We make our own luck,and we do that by bending our will and energy toward what we want. I think that if you look for an omen, you'll find one, and it will tell you exactly what you desire it to, for good or ill. It would have been easy, had I wanted, to think of that tiny, shimmering smudge as some sort of sign, but I didn't need it to be. I didn't need signs. I had myself. "
― Kat Howard , Roses and Rot
19
" Once upon a time, all the clocks chimed midnight.
Cinderella flees from the ball as her illusion unweaves. Beauty races towards her Beast before the last echo of the clock falls silent.
Illusions fall. Magic ends. The clock chimes.
Nothing lasts forever, and midnight is a purposeful stop. A pause to remind you that there is always a clock ticking. There will never be enough time, and for every Beauty who saves her Beast, there will be a voiceless mermaid who dissolves into sea foam.
But there is another thing about midnight. It is when illusions break. When you can see the truth beneath them, if you are looking. There is always a crack in the illusion, a gap in the perfection, even if it is only visible with the ticking of a clock.
Midnight is when you look, if there is a truth you need to see. If you are brave enough to bear what you witness.
For just a moment, the smoke dissipates, the mirrors shatter, and the glamour is gone. All that's left is the truth of the story, the truth in your heart, your darkest secret.
A glass shoe abandoned on the stairs.
Once upon a time.
Tick.
Tock. "
― Kat Howard , Roses and Rot
