Home > Work > The Brilliant Death (The Brilliant Death, #1)
1 " Understanding rustled through me, soft as leaves. It wasn’t quite the same, but I’d often felt I didn’t fit inside the boundaries of the word girl. It reminded me of a country I could happily visit, but the longer I stayed, the more I knew I couldn’t live there all the time. There were moments when I sorely wished to be free of the confines of this body, the expectations it seemed to carry. "
― A.R. Capetta , The Brilliant Death (The Brilliant Death, #1)
2 " Now that I was a boy words flowed out of me with no obstruction. As a girl I'd had to swallow at least half of what I wanted to say. Being allowed to speak my mind felt like running wild down a mountain slope. I might fall and break myself on the rocks at any moment, but for now all I felt was a heady rush. "
3 " But that’s it,” Cielo said. “We’re not like them. Or rather, we are and we aren’t. People hold a deep fear of complication. "
4 " I had discovered a special way that women could be dangerous. They were trained to play close attention to people. To take them apart, like Luca had done with his clockworks, and study how they ran. "
5 " But that wasn't right: I'd simply wanted to be all the parts of myself at once. To learn about magic and master my di Sangro lessons. To enjoy my life was a girl without having to feel like a girl in every moment. to follow the strega, and run home to the castle. "
6 " This was the truest magic in Vinalia at work—any problem, no matter how large or small, could be solved with food. "
7 " I was a boyAnd then I looked down. I found long feet with bones that I could pick out in the moonlight. Startling muscles lined my legs, and between them sat something that looked like a close cousin to a large, undercooked noodle. "