1
" In 1891 Ade discovered a tiled archway in the shadows of the Grand Bazaar of Istanbul, and returned with great golden disks she claimed were dragon scales. She visited Santiago and the Falklands, contracted malaria from Léopoldville, and disappeared for several months in the northeast corner of Maine. She accumulated the dust of other worlds on her skin like ten thousand perfumes, and left constellations of wistful men and impossible tales in her wake.
But she never lingered anywhere for long. Most observers told me she was simply a wanderer, driven to move from place to place by the same unknowable pressures that make swallows fly south, but I believe she was something closer to a knight on a quest. I believe she was looking for one particular door and one particular world.
In 1893, in the high, snowcapped spring of her twenty-seventh birthday, she found it. "
― Alix E. Harrow , The Ten Thousand Doors of January
2
" Their daughter was born just before sunrise. She had skin the color of cedarwood and eyes like wheat.
They named her for an old, half-forgotten god from Ade's own world, whom Yule had studied once in an ancient text preserved in Nin's archives. He was a strange god, depicted in the faded manuscript with two faces staring both backward and forward. He presided not over once particular domain but over the places between- past and present, here and there, endings and beginnings- over doorways, in short.
But Ade thought Janus sounded too much like Jane, and she'd be damned if any daughter of hers would be named Jane. They named her after the god's own month instead: January.
Oh, my sweet daughter, my perfect January, I would beg for your forgiveness, but I lack the courage.
All I can ask for is your belief. Believe in doors and worlds and the Written. Believe most of all in our love for you- even if the only evidence we've left you is contained in the book you now hold. "
― Alix E. Harrow , The Ten Thousand Doors of January
6
" Those of you who are more than casually familiar with books- those of you who spend your free afternoons in fusty bookshops, who offer furtive, kindly strokes along the spines of familiar titles- understand that page riffling is an essential element in the process of introducing oneself to a new book. It isn't about reading the words; it's about reading the smell, which wafts from the pages in a cloud of dust and wood pulp. It might smell expensive and well bound, or it might smell of tissue-thin paper and blurred two-color prints, or of fifty years unread in the home of a tobacco-smoking old man. Books can smell of cheap thrills or painstaking scholarship, of literary weight or unsolved mysteries.
This one smelled unlike any book I'd ever held. Cinnamon and coal smoke, catacombs and loam. Damp seaside evenings and sweat-slick noontimes between palm fronds. It smelled as if it had been in the mail for longer than any one parcel could be, circling the world for years and accumulating layers of smell like a tramp wearing too many clothes.
It smelled like adventure itself had been harvested in the wild, distilled to a fine wine, and splashed across each page. "
― Alix E. Harrow , The Ten Thousand Doors of January
14
" And what is the nature of these other worlds? As we have discovered in previous chapters, they are infinitely varied and ever-changing, and often fail to comply with the conventions of our present world, which we are arrogant enough to call the physical laws of the universe. There are places where men and women are winged and red-skinned, and places where there is no such thing as man and woman but only persons somewhere in between. There are worlds where the continents are carried on the backs of vast turtles swimming through freshwater oceans, where snakes speak riddles, where the lines between the dead and living are blurred to insignificance. I have seen villages where fire itself had been tamed, and followed at men's heels like an obedient hound, and cities with glass spires so high they gathered clouds around their spiral points. (If you are wondering why other worlds seem so brimful of magic compared to your own dreary Earth, consider how magical this world seems from another perspective. To a world of sea people, your ability to breathe air is stunning; to a world of spear throwers, your machines are demons harnessed to work tirelessly in your service; to a world of glaciers and clouds, summer itself is a miracle.) "
― Alix E. Harrow , The Ten Thousand Doors of January
15
" The following monograph concerns the permutations of a repeated motif in world mythologies: passages, portals, and entryways. Such a study might at first seem to suffer from those two cardinal sins of academia- frivolity and triviality- but it is the author's intention to demonstrate the significance of doorways as phenomenological realities. The potential contributions to other fields of study- grammalogie, glottologie, anthropology- are innumerable, but if the author may be so presumptive, this study intends to go far beyond the limitations of our present knowledge. Indeed, this research might reshape our collective understanding of the physical laws of the universe.
The central contention is simply this: the passages, portals, and entryways common to all mythologies are rooted in physical anomalies that permit users to travel from one world to another. Or, to put it even more simply: these doors actually exist. "
― Alix E. Harrow , The Ten Thousand Doors of January
19
" Now, tell me, have you ever heard of upyr? Vampir? Shrtriga?" The words rolled and hissed in his mouth. They reminded me, for no clear reason, of the trip I'd taken with Mr. Locke to Vienna when I was twelve. It'd been February and the city was shadowed, wind-scoured, old. "Well, the name hardly matters. I'm sure you've heard of them in general outline: things that creep out of the black forests of the north and feast on the lifeblood of the living."
He was removing the glove from his left hand as he spoke, tugging on each white fingertip. "Lies spread by superstitious peasants, in the main, repeated in story papers and sold to Victorian urchins." Now his hand was entirely free, fingers so pale I could see blue veins threading them. "Stoker should've been summarily executed, if you ask me."
And he reached toward me. There was perhaps half a second before his fingertip touched me when all the fine hairs on my arm stood straight and my heart seized and I knew, in a scrabbling, animalish way, that I shouldn't let him touch me, that I should scream for help- but it was too late.
His finger was cold against my skin. Beyond cold. An aching, burning, tooth-hurting absence of heat. My body warmth drained desperately toward it, but the cold was ravenous. My lips tried to form words but they felt numb and clumsy, as if I'd been out walking in freezing wind. "
― Alix E. Harrow , The Ten Thousand Doors of January
20
" They spent the night tucked beneath a spare scrap of canvas in the boat bottom, listening to the sluicing of waves against the pine-tarred hull and watching the night wheel over them like a dancer's star-studded skirt. Ade nestled into the softness of his arm and thought about happily-ever-afters and sweet-tasting endings. Yule thought about once-upon-a-times and bold beginnings.
At dawn they departed. When asked what she wanted to see, Ade replied, "Everything," so Yule obediently charted a course toward everything. They docked first at the City of Sissly, where Ade could admire the pink domes of the local chapels and taste the pepper-bite of fresh gwanna fruit. Then they stayed three nights on the abandoned Island of Tho, where the ruins of a failed City loomed like broken gray teeth against the sun, before skipping along a string of low, sand-scoured islands too small to be named. They walked the streets of the City of Yef and slept in the cool grottoes of the City of Jungil, and walked across the famed bridge connecting the twin Cities of Iyo and Ivo. They sailed north and west, following the summer currents out of the sweating heat of the equator, and saw Cities so distant even Yule had only read their names on his charts. "
― Alix E. Harrow , The Ten Thousand Doors of January
