Home > Work > Hero at the Fall (Rebel of the Sands, #3)
21 " But the storytellers would never know that. Even if people had known the truth, they wouldn't have been interested in telling it. Flowers pouring from Windows like falling stars made a better tale. "
― Alwyn Hamilton , Hero at the Fall (Rebel of the Sands, #3)
22 " I’m so sorry, Noorsham,” I said. And then I punched him in the face. "
23 " All that I am I give to you, and all that I have is yours. Because the day that we die, it’s not going to be tomorrow. "
24 " She had done it. Delila had saved us. And she'd done it without a single weapon. I'd forgotten how powerful a story could be. "
25 " That was what we did. Survive one fight to get to the next. Over and over again until you didn’t survive. And all that you could hope for when dying was that some people wouldn’t have to see another fight. That eventually, somewhere, this country would find peace. "
26 " had seen Jin half-undressed a hundred times. But everything felt different now. And for the first time since that day in the store in Dustwalk, I was keenly aware of how much of him there was. He was a whole kingdom of bare skin and ink under my hands. I leaned close to him, tracing the outline of the sun over his heart. "
27 " The stories might tell that we love each other. But the stories would never remember what that felt like. They would never know that when we lay together in his tent the night before we died, he traced the small scar along my collarbone. That when he kissed me, he smiled against my mouth. Or what it sounded like when he said my name. We contained our own stories. A thousand tiny parts of the story would die with us. "
28 " This felt like the first time all over again, when he’d pinned me up against the side of a train carriage that shook around us like it might fall apart at any second, as we clung to the only other thing in the world that seemed sturdy, both of us on that train rushing ahead into something we didn’t wholly understand. When everything in me had seemed to come alive under his hands. When he turned me from a spark into a fire, and I didn’t know how anyone could have enough power to do that to me. "
29 " They both die tragically at the end. That's what happens in all great love stories. "
30 " But he wondered if a boy from the sea and a girl from the desert could ever survive together. He feared that she might burn him alive or that he might drown her. Until finally he stopped fighting it and set himself on fire for her. "
31 " Didn't I tell you?" He forced a broad smile. "All the greatest love stories end like this. "
32 " The freedom of gliding through the world, forgetting for a moment where you had come from and not worrying about where you were going. Being, just for a moment, nowhere at all. "
33 " Once there was a boy from the sea who fell in love with a girl from the desert. "
34 " In the stories, it was always the monster who lost. But I knew better than anyone that stories and truth weren't the same thing. "
35 " And Shazad...'He hesitated. 'She didn't come back up. "
36 " We'd known each other long enough that I was used to him now, but in this moment it was like I was seeing him for the first time again, fascinated by him without entirely knowing why. "
37 " All that I am I give to you, and all that I have is yours. "
38 " I think they burn us and we become dust and ash." He ran a finger across the edge of my lips. "And I think that the dust that was me will spend until the end of time trying to get as close as possible to the dust that was you out in that vast desert. "
39 " The First Beings might be all-powerful, but they had made us for the one thing that they could not do: to lay down our lives for what we believed in. "
40 " I might know better than anyone the distance between legends and the truth, that stories were not always told whole. The monsters in them were less fierce in reality, the heroes less pure, the Djinn more complicated. But there were some things you didn't prod at to find out if their teeth were really as big as the stories said. Because on the off-chance that the stories were really true, you were about to lose a finger. "