A Spindle Splintered Quotes

I see her choosing now whether to make her love into a cage or a key.

Maybe the universe doesn’t naturally bend toward justice either; maybe it’s only the weight of hands and hearts pulling it true, inch by stubborn inch.

I should have spent more time thinking about your life than worrying about your death.

I never stopped trying to save you, so don't you fucking dare stop trying to save yourself.

Their love has hung above me like the sun, a burning brightness I could survive only if I never looked straight at it, never flew too close.

Hey, it's okay, alright? I'll walk with you, every step. You won't be alone." We might not be able to fix our bullshit stories, but surely we can be less lonely inside them, here at the end. "Just go to sleep. I'm right here.

In that moment he reminds me of Charm’s parents, or maybe my own: a person whose love is a burdensome thing, a weight dragging always at your ankles.

I'm turning away when Prince Harold says, his voice thick and fleshy through his swollen nose, "I don't understand." His eyes are on Primrose and Charm, on the place where their hands are joined together so tightly they look like a single creature. "Well, Harold," I say gently. "They're lesbians.

Sleeping Beauty is the worst fairy tale, pretty much any way you slice it. It’s aimless and amoral and chauvinist as shit. It’s the fairy tale that feminist scholars cite when they want to talk about women’s passivity in historical narratives. (“She literally sleeps through her own climax,” as my favorite gender studies professor used to say. “Double entendre fully intended.”)... ..Even among the other nerds who majored in folklore, Sleeping Beauty is nobody’s favorite. The romantic girls like Beauty and the Beast; basic girls like Cinderella; goth girls like Snow White. Only the dying girls like Sleeping Beauty.

let’s not pretend girls with swords don’t get shit done.

If you like something, like it hard, because you don't have a lot of time to waste

I riffle through my mental box of inspirational quotes and come up with a Dylan Thomas line that I actually know from Interstellar. “Do not go gentle into that good night, princess.

You know it wasn't originally a spinning wheel in the story?' I offer, because alcohol transforms me into a chatty Wikipedia.

I'm at least three-fourths straight, but her lashes are very long, and very golden, and I'm not made of stone.

All of them stepped out of their own narratives to save someone else

It's one of the rules for dying girls: if you like something, like it hard, because you don't have a lot of time to waste.

I hope you find your happily ever after, or whatever." "Already did. I'm just looking for a better once upon a time.

I can't remember if they did the "speak now or forever hold your peace" thing in Medieval times, or if it's one of those Victorian inventions, like brides wearing white or homophobia.

Even among the other nerds who majored in folklore, Sleeping Beauty is nobody's favorite. Romantic girls like Beauty and the Beast; vanilla girls like Cinderella; goth girls like Snow White. Only dying girls like Sleeping Beauty.

It was like a spark falling into my mind, catching me on fire. I asked for your help because it was the first time I thought anyone could help me.

Primrose is watching me as if I'm a grisly car accident or a public marriage proposal: gruesome but mesmerizing.

Dad is the established crier of the family. He was asked to 'get a grip or leave the theater' during the last twenty minutes of Coco.

A traveling magician sold it to me when I was sixteen. He swore to me that a single cut was enough to end a life." She says it flatly, matter-of-factly, but her eyes have gone hollow and her face is waxy again and suddenly I don't feel jokey at all. Suddenly I wonder why a princess would sleep with a poison blade beneath her bed, why she would purchase it in the first place. I picture myself at sixteen, a scarecrow of a girl stuffed with hormones and hunger instead of straw, so sick of dying I would do anything to live. I ran very different calculations in those days, comparing the Greyhound bus schedule to the number of hours before my parents would report me missing, multiplying hoarded pills by the number of days I would have on the run. I figured I could make it to Chicago before the cops were even looking for me, and from there I could go—anywhere. Do anything.

And it was like—I don't know. A beacon being lit, a flint being struck in my chest. [...] It was my own shitty story made mythic and grand and beautiful. A princess cursed at birth. A sleep that never ends. A dying girl who refused to.

When I was eleven, I used my Make-a-Wish Foundation wish to spend a night in the Disney castle and get the full princess experience. It was a total letdown. I think I waited too long: eleven is old enough to see the cracks in the plaster, to sense the pity behind the megawatt smiles of the staff. It was like trying to play with my Barbies a year after I'd outgrown them, perfectly remembering how it used to feel but unable to feel it again.

I make myself keep listening to Zellandine, unflinching. I always hate it when people flinch from me, as if my wounds are weapons.

Sick kids learn to calibrate their expectations early, to negotiate with their shitty luck again and again.

Behind her, in her absence, the house was grinding along, its cogs turning and teeth linking, belts creaking, and there must come a moment—any moment now—when a cog would bite on nothing, and spin on air: some necessary act would go unperformed, some service would not be provided; the whole mechanism would crunch and splinter and shriek out in protest, and come to a juddering halt, because she was not there. And all the time she was pulling further and further away, like a spindle twisting out upon a thread of flax. Pull far enough, twist and stretch it too thin, and the thread would snap.

This time, when I press my finger to the end of a splintered spindle, I’m smiling.

Close your eyes and go to sleep and let the world go on without you?

Well, Harold,” I say gently. “They’re lesbians.

sometimes lies are lifeboats.