Home > Work > Perfect Ruin (The Internment Chronicles, #1)
1 " A strange thing, words. Once they're said, it's hard to imagine they're untrue. "
― Lauren DeStefano , Perfect Ruin (The Internment Chronicles, #1)
2 " Her hair is full of icy wind and daylight. She is every princess, every queen, in the history book. "
3 " The madness of youth made me unafraid. "
4 " You aren’t crazy,’ he says. ‘What?’ ‘I’ve known you all your life, and you’ve always tried to hide the parts of yourself that you think are wrong. But nothing is wrong with you.’ Those may be the best words he’s ever said to me. "
5 " People die, and everything they've ever said just echoes around and around. There's nothing new. Only the same nonsense from their lives. "
6 " With free will comes inevitable error and misjudgement "
7 " We didn't make ourselves," she says. "We aren't the greatest things to exist. I can't believe that. I won't believe that. We have too many faults. "
8 " Every star has been set in the sky. We mistakenly think they were put there for us. "
9 " So many of the things I've wanted are the things I've been taught to fear. "
10 " Time was our very first king. We all live our lives to the aggressive ticking of the clock. We don't question that our lives are a grid of seconds; even our pulses oblige. No succeeding king can hope to hold this kind of power. "
11 " We accept gods that don't speak to us. We accept gods that would place us in a world filled with injustices and do nothing as we struggle. It's easier than accepting that there's nothing out there at all, and that, in our darkest moments, we are truly alone. "
12 " Forget who you are and what you think is there, and you'll discover things that don't exist to be known. "
13 " They never exhale, the trees; on a very windy day, they rustle and inhale, and then the leaves and the branches all tremble as though something means to strangle the life from them. The sky watches on. The world is filled with anticipation, as if to wonder if this day will be a great day, or a horrible day, or the last day. "
14 " You can’t be afraid. You can be sad if you like. You can be angry. But it’s the fear that’ll freeze you in place. "
15 " He gathers me up and I'm weightless before he sets me on the railing. He's the only thing keeping me from falling back, out of the reach of daylight. I'm not afraid of falling. I don't fear the sky beyond the train tracks like I did before. I can go anywhere just so long as it's with him. "
16 " Maybe what frightens us about the edge isn't our fear of morality, but the thoughts it leads us to have. "
17 " and I've always known it, the way I love a song I hear for the first time, even before I know all the words, the way I love my favorite color, and the way that the train would speed past my bedroom when it was very quiet and I'd feel it in my stomach rushing through me. I love you in a way that I've never felt needed to be said. "
18 " I stare at her collarbone that's framed with lace, the hollow of her throat, her shoulders that rise with each rise with the weight of her next breath. We're fragile things. Our bones show through our skin. What would any god want with us? "
19 " I wonder if the people of the ground ever feel that their children are too big for their world, too. "
20 " Whenever there's something I don't like about a stranger, I try to imagine that someone out there loves them, and it puts them in a different light. "