Her only way home was to betray her friend.
The war will end one day. Wars always do.
Listen, you bubblehead-up-until-five-minutes-ago...
Sometimes it felt like her life was a series of falls from ever-greater heights.
Ignorance doesn't lead to salvation, nor does knowledge pave the way to sin. - Cinda Williams Chima.
I stayed against the back wall, as far away as I could get. Not just to stay away from the Plague Lady but to be farther away from the weird old dolls that lined the shelves of her office. Real-looking hair sprouted from their crumbling heads and all their faces were painted with smiles. Kids in the old days must have loved nightmares or something.
My name is tally youngblood and my mind is very ugly.
Aya, that's the barking strangest thing about battle - that it's real.
The thought of publishing—of the whole world reading Afterworlds—had always made Darcy feel naked and exposed, but loving had left her skinless.
If Chizara was agreeing with Ethan, things were bad.
The human heart is a strange vessel. Love and hatred can exist side by side.
Maybe she still was a pretty-head, making up irrational stories about the empty forest. The longer she stayed alone out here, the more Tally understood why the Rusties and their predecessors had believed in invisible beings, praying to placate spirits as they trashed the natural world around them.
A milli-Helen is enough beauty to launch exactly one ship.
Ninety percent of the research comes first. I mostly blunder around reading stuff and talking to smart people until an idea batters or oozes its way through to my narrative brain.
The early summer sky was the color of cat vomit. Of course, Tally thought, you'd have to feed your cat only salmon-flavored cat food for a while, to get the pinks right.
Never give us what we really want. Cut the dream into pieces and scatter them like ashes. Dole out the empty promises. Package our aspirations and sell them to us, cheaply made enough to fall apart.
I'd watched too many schoolmates graduate into mental institutions, into group homes and jails, and I knew that locking people up was paranormal - against normal, not beside it. Locks didn't cure; they strangled.
It's not always about writing more words or drinking more coffee. Sometimes getting to the end of a novel simply takes remembering that the world is more complicated than we know, and then sticking some of those complications into the story.
Moxie's wifi network is You_Suck_at_Writing, with underscores. The password's ‘DearGenius,' no space. You found the note on her desk, right?
The world rests upon a turtle, which itself stands on the back of an elephant!
She imagines herself as the long-dead Descartes, staring into his fireplace and building a world in his own mind.
Even bloody and bruised, he had an odd sort of swagger, as if he crash-landed in giant air ships every day.
She looked at David closely, and the feeling was still there. She could see that his forehead was too high, that a small scar cut a white stroke through his eyebrow. And his smile was pretty crooked, really. But it was as if something had changed inside Tally's head, something that had turned his face pretty to her.
Without lesions making everyone agreeable, society was left roiling in a constant battle of words, images, and ideas. All around her Tally felt the city seething, all those unfettered minds bouncing their opinions off each other, like something ready to explode.
Okay... That's still blind-making.
Maybe this was how you stayed sane in wartime: a handful of noble deeds amid the chaos.
Reality had no gears, and you never knew what surprises would come spinning out of its chaos.
Yeah, you should have seen your face. Actually, I should have seen your face. Stupid sneak suits.
But books don't happen by accident.
Tally turned away. Five minutes was suddenly too long to stand here, eyes burning, unable to cry.
Two weeks of killer sunburn is worth a lifetime of being gorgeous.
And even though her journal was just random sentences, she did spin stories in my head. The sound of her voice made dreams happen.
Adulation is like rain. You can only get so wet.
I've always thought that science and fiction writing have a lot in common because they're both about modeling reality.
Her parents didn't understand that braille meant big clunky books that marked you as different, while audiobooks live invisibly on your phone and text-to-speech gave you the whole damn internet.
Sometimes you have to delete characters from a scene just to keep from overcrowding the image.
Luckily for writers - and unluckily for history - every scientific idea creates human conflict.
There was something magic in their large perfect eyes, something that made you pay attention.
But doesn't real love work the other way round? Kiralee asked. You start by thinking someone's fabulous, and by the end of the piece you realize he's a monster!
Their bodies fit perfectly like this, two continents pulled eons ago but now rejoined.
It didn't matter what you looked like. It was how you carried yourself, how you saw yourself.
Most men's awareness doesn't extend past their dinner plates.
I wonder why they never come back, Shay said. Just to visit.
God, you mean I lost my virginity to the apocalypse?!
She wondered if if there was anyone out there, really, or if David was just some story the Uglies made up to scare each other.
The guy walking past was wearing a shit five sizes too big (innovated by gangbangers to hide guns in their waistbands), shorts down below his knees (innovated by surfers to keep their thighs from getting sunburned), and oversized shoes (innovated by skaters to save their feet from injury).
Some mornings when I wake up, it takes a long time to remember who I am. Like, it takes a while for everything that's happened in last month to download into my brain. It's nice, not knowing. Even if it's just for five minutes.
But I'll do anything in my power to stop them from taking you away.
It doesn't take much convincing to make someone believe they're better than everyone else.
