Home > Work > Perfect Ruin (The Internment Chronicles, #1)
41 " You have all heard the warnings about the edge. We have been told its winds are a song that will hypnotize us, and by the time we awaken from that trance, it will be too late. "
― Lauren DeStefano , Perfect Ruin (The Internment Chronicles, #1)
42 " I'll never disappear. I promise that every time I leave, I'll always come back. "
43 " Only bottles and locks and drawn curtains," Pen says, trying to balance on the edge of the sidewalk to little avail. "This cold is drawing the burn right out of my veins,“ she sulks. “I think I'm already sober.““You aren't,“ I assure her. "
44 " Every moment is a gift, from the frivolous to the dire. The taste of sweetgold, and the rough paper of our favorite books. I find a god in these things- which god I cannot say, but I'm grateful to it. "
45 " But I know all the things you're too sweet to know. "
46 " It's your way,' he says. 'When you were little, you were like a question mark with eyes. "
47 " Violence is the only way to achieve freedom, it seems. I wouldn't have thought so before all of this. My escape plan was a more peaceful one, but I know now that it wouldn't have been successful. "
48 " I thought for sure she was gone. But there was a little bit left in her, wasn't there? Just enough. "
49 " The madness of youth had made me unafraid. "
50 " The portrait rattles and goes still. I wonder if the dream would do my mother any good. I wonder if all that blackness has ever frightened her. I'd always assumed the children were on Internment, but do dreams have to be confined to the same place as the dreamer? "
51 " The princess stops us walking. She holds the lantern up between us, and she looks at me with the eyes of all the princesses and queens in the history book. Eyes as old as Judas The Hero and Micah's boat of stars. She is ancient and profound, and she has Internment fascinated, copying her hair and her clothing in an attempt to understand. She looks at me now the way the whole floating city looks at her--hoping for some sort of answer that doesn't exist. "
52 " Maybe it really was a spirit," Pen offers.“Spirits aren't real,“ he says. "The living invent them to console themselves. If you girls ever see a spirit, you'll know for certain you're alive."Pen crinkles her nose. "Well that's grim. "
53 " I don't know how it happens. We move our faces at the same time, and then our lips are touching. I've lost my worries. Traded them in for the sun and the taste of his tongue and the thought that in sixty years we'll be ashes - we'll be tossed into the air and after a moment of weightlessness we'll be everywhere and nowhere. But for now there's quick breathing and the feeling like he has my heart in his palm as it beats outside my chest. "
54 " They just want to make sure we haven't gone mad. You haven't gone mad, have you? "
55 " On Internment, you can be anything you dream--a novelist or a singer, a florist or a factory worker. You can spend entire afternoons watching clouds so close it's as though you're riding on them. Your life is yours to embrace or to squander. There's only one rule: You don't approach the edge. If you do, it's already over. My brother is proof of that. He has successfully quieted my delusions I held about seeing the ground for myself. "
56 " Basil would never go for this - me chasing after an accused murderer in the darkness. He says there's nothing wrong with me, but it's entirely possible he hasn't been paying enough attention. "
57 " For a while, it's just the sound of the water, and then Pen says, "I didn't want him to die. "
58 " So many of the things I've always wanted are the things I've been taught to fear "
59 " The evening sun catches every bolt and scrap of metal on the train, and for an instant we are suspended in an atmosphere of stars. "
60 " I have seen my father concede to utter defeat in the hospital room. I've heard him choke on sobs and whisper angry things to the god of the sky when he thought I was asleep at Lex's bedside. I know that those uniforms are worn by men - only men. "