Alex Stern Quotes

Mors irrumat omnia. Death fucks us all.

I want to survive this world that keeps trying to destroy me.

All you children playing with fire, looking surprised when the house burns down

That was what magic did. It revealed the heart of who you'd been before life took away your belief in the possible. It gave back the world all lonely children longed for.

I let you die. To save myself, I let you die. That is the danger in keeping company with survivors.

He needed her and she needed him. That was how most disasters began.

There were always excuses for why girls died

Not every flower belongs in every garden.

And maybe he wanted her to be the kind of girl who dressed as Queen Mab, who loved words and had stars in her blood.

Peace was like any high. It couldn't last. It was an illusion, something that could be interrupted in a moment and lost forever.

But would it have mattered if she’d been someone else? If she’d been a social butterfly, they would have said she liked to drink away her pain. If she’d been a straight-A student, they would have said she’d been eaten alive by her perfectionism. There were always excuses for why girls died.

They'd made the mistake of teaching him he could survive

She read paperbacks too, one after the next like she was chain-smoking—romance, science fiction, old pulp fantasy. All she wanted to do was sit, unbothered in a circle of lamplight, and live someone else’s life.

I am a daughter of Lethe, and the wolves are at the door.

Take me back. Make me into someone who has never been done harm. Go as far as you can. Make me brand-new. No bruises. No scars.

If Alex could have told Darlington anything, it would have been, Come back. She would have said it in English and Spanish. She would have used the imperative.

Welcome home. Welcome back. We missed you. I missed you more than I should have, more than I wanted to. I went to hell for you. I’d do it again.

You couldn’t keep sidling up to death and dipping your toe in. Eventually it grabbed your ankle and tried to pull you under.

We all have spaces we keep blank.

A lie isn't a lie until someone believes it. It doesn't matter how charming you are if there's no one to charm.

That was the problem with love. It was hard to unlearn, no matter how harsh the lesson.

Galaxy Stern,” Darlington said, his eyes flashing gold, “I have been crying out to you from the start.

Maybe all rich people asked the wrong questions. For people like Alex, it would never be what do you want. It was always just how much can you get?

Darlington was a good talker, but he was happiest when no one was speaking to him, when he didn’t have to perform the ritual of himself and he could simply be left to watch others.

She was more beautiful than he remembered. No, that wasn’t true. It wasn’t that she had changed or that his vision had sharpened. He was just less afraid of her beauty now

Didn’t someone say love is a shared delusion?

Only two things kept you safe: money and power.

His monstrous queen. His gentle ruler.

Even alligators have parents, Dawes. That doesn't stop them from biting

What do you want?" Belbalm had asked her. Safety, comfort, to feel unafraid. I want to live to grow old, Alex thought as she pulled the curtains closed. I want to sit on my porch and drink foul-smelling tea and yell at passersby. I want to survive this world that keeps trying to destroy me.

I will serve you ’til the end of days.

I’m bound to you, Stern. To the woman who brought me out of hell. I will serve you ’til the end of days.

All worlds are open to us. If we are bold enough to enter.

Stories were immutable. And what was a library but a house full of stories?

I c-c-class p-p-profanity with declarations of love. Best used sparingly and only when wholeheartedly m-m-meant. -Darlington

Stories exist in all worlds. They are immutable. Like gold.

Have power on this dark land to lighten it, and power on this dead world to make it live.

All whiteboards are magical.

My name is Galaxy, you fucking glutton.

They tried to kill me, Hellie,” she rasped as she slid into the dark. That means I get to try to kill them.

If you were going to hell together, murder seemed like a good place to start.

Why raise children on the promise of magic? Why create a want in them that can never be satisfied—for revelation, for transformation—and then set them adrift in a bleak, pragmatic world?

Do you know what my mother said?" Turner asked. "She told me there's no doorway the devil doesn't know. He's always waiting to stick his foot in. I never really believed her until tonight

Alex felt something dark inside her uncoil. “You’re a flat beast,” Hellie had once said to her. “Got a little viper lurking in there, ready to strike. A rattler probably.” She’d said it with a grin, but she’d been right.

This is where you belong. This is where you were meant to bloom. Don't roll your eyes, Galaxy. Not every flower belongs in every garden.

Maybe they were just two killers, cursed to endure each other’s company, two doomed spirits trying to find their way home. Maybe they were monsters who liked the feeling of another monster looking back at them. But enough people had abandoned them both. She wasn’t going to be the next.

Alex watched in the mirror as her history spilled over her skin. The scars she had chosen for herself. We are the shepherds. The time for that was done. Better to be a rattler. Better to be a jackal.

You know your problem?” “A predilection for first editions and women who like to lecture me about myself?

I was a really lonely kid. The advantage to being unpopular is you get a lot more reading done.

They watched each other in the quiet of the kitchen. They knew everything about each other. They knew nothing at all. He had a sense that they had entered into an uneasy truce, but he couldn’t quite name the war.

She's sealed herself away from the world of the living, for the sake of being free of the dead.

Life is cruel. Magic is real. And I’m not ready to die

Darlington liked to say that dealing with ghosts was like riding the subway: Do not make eye contact. Do not smile. Do not engage. Otherwise, you never know what might follow you home.

He didn't know how precious a normal life could be, how easy it was to drift away from average. You started sleeping until noon, skipped one class, one day of school, lost one job, then another, forgot the way that normal people did things. You lost the language of ordinary life. And then, without meaning to, you crossed into a country from which you couldn't return. You lived in a state where the ground always seemed to be slipping from beneath your feet, with no way back to someplace solid.

Alex slept in Darlington's bed and dreamed that he was curled behind her on the narrow mattress. He pulled her close, his fingers digging into her abdomen, and she could feel claws at their tips. He whispered in her ear, "I will serve you 'til the end of days." "And love me," she said with a laugh, bold in the dream, unafraid. But all he said was, "It is not the same.

Come on Darlington,' she said. 'Let's give them hell.

You rescue me. I rescue you. That’s how this works. To pay your debts, you had to know who you owed. You had to decide who you were willing to go to war for and who you trusted to jump into the fray for you. That was all there was in this world. No heroes or villains, just the people you’d brave the waves for, and the ones you’d let drown.

Psycho.” “So I hear,” said Alex. But crazy survived.

If she died, her petty heart wanted to know who to haunt.

If you don't know a name," Darlington had explained, "you can't think it, and then you won't be tempted to say it." A name was a kind of intimacy.

Her map had been changed. Her coastline altered. Mors irrumat omnia. Death fucks us all.

You're all right Alex.' He put up his hand for a fist bump. 'I just really want to eat you.' Alex nudged her knuckles against his. 'I know, buddy.

Quien no sabe de mar no sabe de mal!

Because he doesn't want girls who want him. Because he grew weary of desire and developed a taste for causing shame. Alex didn't know what lived in boys like Blake, beautiful boys who should be happy. Who wanted for nothing but still found things to take.

This was why he had done it, not because of guilt or pride but because this was the moment he'd been waiting for: the chance to show someone else wonder, to watch them realize that they had not been lied to, that the world they'd been promised as children was not something that had to be abandoned...that everything was full of mystery.

Who are these people? Alex wondered. Who are these happy, frantic, funny people? How are they so unafraid?

Omnia mutantur, nihil interit. Everything changes, nothing perishes.

If she suddenly threw herself in a river or off a building or into traffic, there would be plenty of warning signs to point to. Did she seem depressed? She was distant. She didn’t make many friends. She was struggling in her classes. All true. But would it have mattered if she’d been someone else? If she’d been a social butterfly, they would have said she liked to drink away her pain. If she’d been a straight-A student, they would have said she’d been eaten alive by her perfectionism. There were always excuses for why girls died.

There should be more magic. Not the creased-greasepaint performances of clowns and hack illusionists. Not card tricks. The magic he'd been promised would be found at the backs of wardrobes, under bridges, through mirrors. It was dangerous and alluring and it did not seek to entertain.

That was what magic did. It revealed the heart of who you’d been before life took away your belief in the possible.

Cautious was helpful; paranoid was just another word for distracted.

That was the truth of magic—blood and guts and semen and spit, organs kept in jars, maps for hunting humans, the skulls of unborn infants. The problem wasn’t books and fairy tales, just that they told half the story, offering up the illusion of a world where only the villains paid in blood, the ogre stepmothers, the wicked stepsisters, where magic was just and without sacrifice.

Magic had almost killed him, but in the end it had saved him. Just like in stories.

Comfort was the drug she hadn’t understood until it was too late and she was hooked on cups of tea and book-lined shelves, nights uninterrupted by the wail of sirens and the ceaseless churning of helicopters overhead.

With each life I took, I soon saw a new temple raised to my glory - built by boys who never stopped to wonder at the power they claimed, only took it as their due. They toy with magic while I fashion immortality.

And what tools did Alex have? A little magic. A talent for misfortune. The ability to take a beating. It would have to be enough. 'This is my home,' she vowed, and nothing will take it from me.

Why is it always blood? Why can’t it ever be jam or blue crayon?

The purest Marxists are always men. Calamity comes too easily to women. Our lives can come apart in a single gesture, a rogue wave. And money? Money is the rock we cling to when the current would seize us.

I like this life better.” “Better than what?” “Better than what I was living before. Better than a world without magic. I think I’ve been waiting my whole life for the moment someone would see something in me that wasn’t ordinary.

he could never shake the thought that he was seeing only one world when there might be many, that there were lost places, maybe even lost people who might come to life for him if he just squinted hard enough or found the right magic words. Books, with their promises of enchanted doorways and secret places, only made it worse.

Cuando ganeden esta acerrado, guehinam esta siempre abierto. While the Garden of Eden may be closed, Hell is always open.

She'd glimpsed true power and she knew it was her one chance to take it.

once you have money, once you can stop clinging to the rock and can climb atop it, what will you build there? When you stand upon the rock, what will you preach?

He shouldn't look. He knew that. You should never look into the face of the uncanny, but had he ever been able to turn way? No. He'd courted it, begged for it.

As for opportunity, she knew better than anyone: You had to make it for yourself.

I didn’t hurt her. I loved her.” Like those things couldn’t go hand in hand.

She'd never broken a bone, had surgery. But the worst damage didn't leave a mark. When Hellie died, it was as if someone had cut into Alex's chest, cracked her open like balsa wood. What if it really had been like that and she'd had to walk down the street bleeding, trying to hold her ribs together, her heart and her lungs and every part of her open to the world? Instead, the thing that had broken her had left no mark, no scar for her to point to and say, This is where I ended.

To get some clothes, Stern,” he said, climbing the steps and leaving bloody footprints behind. “A man can spend only so much time without trousers on before he begins to feel like a deviant.

It’s not an insult. If I wanted to insult you, I’d call you two pounds of shit in a one-pound bag. For example.

Because people who can’t be bothered with manners pretend to be amused by them.

While the Garden of Eden may be closed, Hell is always open.

Suffocating beneath a pile of books seems an appropriate way to go for a research assistant.

You mistake me Alexandra. There is no crime in wanting these things. Only people who have never lived without comfort deride it as bourgeois.“ She winked. “The purest Marxists are always men. Calamity comes too easily to women. Our lives can come apart in a single gesture, a rogue wave. And money? Money is the rock we cling to when the current would seize us.

Alex didn’t have money. But she did have power. She’d been afraid of it, afraid of staring directly at that blood-soaked night. Afraid she’d feel regret or shame, of saying goodbye to Hellie all over again. But when she’d finally looked? Let herself remember? Well, maybe there was something broken and shriveled in her, because she felt only a deep calm in knowing what she was capable of.

He’d told himself he was giving her a chance, being fair to this girl who had washed up on his shore. But he’d let himself think of her as someone who had made all of the wrong choices and stumbled down the wrong path. It hadn’t occurred to him that she was being chased.

Do we all hunger for this? Alex wondered as she shepherded Mercy into Il Bastone, watching her eyes grow wide at the sight of the sunflower staircase, the stained glass, the painted tiles that framed the fireplace. Why raise children on the promise of magic? Why create a want in them that can never be satisfied—for revelation, for transformation—and then set them adrift in a bleak, pragmatic world?

Alex smiled then, a small thing, a glimpse of the girl lurking inside her, a happy, less haunted girl. That was what magic did. It revealed the heart of who you'd been before life took away your belief in the possible. It gave back the world all lonely children longed for. That was what Lethe had done for him. Maybe it could do that for Alex as well.

Her gaze turned distant. 'Have you ever heard of the arsenic eaters?' Alex blinked, confused. 'No?' 'They would ingest a little bit of arsenic every day. It made their skin clear and their eyes bright and they felt wonderful. And all the while they were just drinking poison.' When Mira turned her eyes back to Alex, they were sharper and steadier than Alex ever remembered them being, free of the usual determined cheer. 'That's what being with your father was like.

Is that what those things are?” she asked. “Around your wrists and neck? Marks?” “These?” He leaned forward, and the change in him was instant, the glowing eyes, the curling horns, the broadening of the shoulders. Without meaning to, Alex found herself scooting back in her chair. He was man and then monster in the space of a breath. The golden bands glowed at his wrists and throat. “Yeah,” she said, trying not to show her fear. “Those.” “These marks mean I am bound in service. Forever.” “To hell? To Golgarot?” He laughed then, the sound deep and cold, the thing at the bottom of the lake. “I’m bound to you, Stern. To the woman who brought me out of hell. I will serve you ’til the end of days.

In the mirror, he saw himself, a knight with bowed head, offering his service, a sword in his hand, a sword in his back. He felt no pain, only the ache in his heart. Choose me. There were tears on his cheeks, even as he felt the shame of it. She was no one, a girl who had lucked into a gift, who had done nothing to earn it. She was his queen. "Darlington," she said. But that was not his true name any more than Alex was hers. If only she would choose him. If only she would let him... She touched her fingers to his face, lifted his chin. Her lips brushed his ear. He didn't understand it. He only wanted her to do it again. Stars poured through him, a cold and billowing wave of night. He saw everything. He saw their bodies entwined. She was above him and beneath him all at once, her body splayed and white as a lotus flower.