Ninth House Quotes

Mors irrumat omnia. Death fucks us all.

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

I have tried to dismantle you, Gideon Nav! The Ninth House poisoned you, we trod you underfoot—I took you to this killing field as my slave—you refuse to die, and you pity me! Strike me down. You’ve won. I’ve lived my whole wretched life at your mercy, yours alone, and God knows I deserve to die at your hand. You are my only friend. I am undone without you.

Her adept said: "I'll keep it off you. Nav, show them what the Ninth House does." Gideon lifted her sword. The construct worked itself free of its last confines of masonry and rotten wood and heaved before them, flexing itself like a butterfly. "We do bones, motherfucker," she said.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

So I’m shut in here—walled in, really—to prevent the Nine Houses becoming none House, with left grief.

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.

Didn’t someone say love is a shared delusion?

Only two things kept you safe: money and power.

There was so much I should have told you. I just didn't have time. I didn't know. I didn't know I'd have to say: A sword doesn't hold an edge on its own, you sack of Ninth House garbage. I didn't know I'd have to say, if you dip a sword into melty bone, the metal gets more pitted than an iron mine, you cross-patched necromantic shit. I think the main thing I should have said was, You sawed open your skull rather than be beholden to someone. You turned your brain into soup to escape anything less than 100 percent freedom. You put me in a box and buried me rather than give up your own goddamned agenda. Harrowhark, I gave you my whole life and you didn't even want it. Actually, scratch that, the main thing I should have said was, SQUATS ARE A START, OR A COUPLE OF STAR JUMPS, THEY'RE NOT DIFFICULT.

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

You look ridiculous,” Wren said. “What?” “That shirt.” It was a Hello Kitty shirt from eighth or ninth grade. Hello Kitty dressed as a superhero. It said SUPER CAT on the back, and Wren had added an H with fabric paint. The shirt was cropped too short to begin with, and it didn’t really fit anymore. Cath pulled it down self-consciously. “Cath!” her dad shouted from downstairs. “Phone.” Cath picked up her cell phone and looked at it “He must mean the house phone,” Wren said. “Who calls the house phone?” “Probably 2005. I think it wants its shirt back.

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.

Harrow laughed. It was the first time she had ever heard Harrow really laugh. It was a rather weak and tired sound. "Gideon the Ninth, first flower of my House," she said hoarsely, "you are the greatest cavalier we have ever produced. You are our triumph, The best of all of us. It has been my privilege to be your necromancer.

It had bewildered her, back at Canaan House, how the whole of her always seemed to come back to Gideon. For one brief and beautiful space of time, she had welcomed it: that microcosm of eternity between forgiveness and the slow, uncomprehending agony of the fall. Gideon rolling up her shirt sleeves. Gideon dappled in shadow, breaking promises. One idiot with a sword and an asymmetrical smile had proved to be Harrow’s end: her apocalypse swifter than the death of the Emperor and the sun with him.

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

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

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.

All whiteboards are magical.

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

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.

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.

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

I'm not fucking dead," I said, which wasn't even true, and I was choking up; everything I'd ever done, everything I'd ever been through, and I was choking up. As the Emperor of the Nine Houses, the Necrolord Prime, stood from his chair to look at you-- at me; looked at your face, looked at my eyes in your face. It took, maybe, a million myriads. The static in your ears resolved into wordless screaming his expression was just--gently quizzical; mildly awed. "Hi, Not Fucking Dead," he said. "I'm Dad.

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.

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.

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.

I pray the tomb is shut forever," recited Harrowhawk, with the curious fervidity she always showed in prayer. " I pray the rock is never rolled away. I pray that which was buried remains buried, insensate, in perpetual rest, with closed eye and stilled brain. I pray it lives, I pray it sleeps ... I pray for the needs of the Emperor All-Giving, the Undying King, His Virtues and his men. I pray for the Second House, the Third, the Fourth, the Fifth; the Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth. I pray for the Ninth House, and I pray for it to be fruitful. I pray for the soldiers and adepts far from home, and all those parts of the Empire that live in unrest and disquiet. Let it be so.

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

You apologise to me?” she bellowed. “You apologise to me now? You say that you’re sorry when I have spent my life destroying you? You are my whipping girl! I hurt you because it was a relief! I exist because my parents killed everyone and relegated you to a life of abject misery, and they would have killed you too and not given it a second’s goddamned thought! I have spent your life trying to make you regret that you weren’t dead, all because—I regretted I wasn’t! I ate you alive, and you have the temerity to tell me that you’re sorry?” There were flecks of spittle on Harrowhark’s lips. She was retching for air. “I have tried to dismantle you, Gideon Nav! The Ninth House poisoned you, we trod you underfoot—I took you to this killing field as my slave—you refuse to die, and you pity me! Strike me down. You’ve won. I’ve lived my whole wretched life at your mercy, yours alone, and God knows I deserve to die at your hand. You are my only friend. I am undone without you.

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

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

Quien no sabe de mar no sabe de mal!

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

All I can say is that it was complicated back in Canaan House, and sometimes a cute older girl shows you a lot of attention, because she’s bored or whatever, and you sort of have this maybe-flirting maybe-not thing going on, right, and then it turns out she’s an ancient warrior who’s killed all your friends and she’s coming for you, and then you both die and she turns up ages later in the broiling heat on a sacred space station and like, it’s complicated. Just saying that it happens all the time.

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

In the myriadic year of Our Lord--the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death!--Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

Turner rested his gloved hands on the steering wheel. “I'm pretty sure when my mother was talking about the devil, she had you in mind.” “I'm a delight.

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.

Her eyes raced over us, counting. "So our son would be ninth in line, even though he's a boy? You never mentioned anything about this." His eyebrows furrowed. "I didn't realize I needed to.

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

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

New Haven was a town forever on the brink of things.

It was one thing to be a murderer, quite another to work for one.

I didn’t know I’d have to say: A sword doesn’t hold an edge on its own, you sack of Ninth House garbage. I didn’t know I’d have to say, If you dip a sword into melty bone, the metal gets more pitted than an iron mine, you cross-patched necromantic shit.

Her adept said: “I’ll keep it off you. Nav, show them what the Ninth House does.” Gideon lifted her sword. The construct worked itself free of its last confines of masonry and rotten wood and heaved before them, flexing itself like a butterfly. “We do bones, motherfucker,” she said.

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, Bearded with moss, and in garment green, indistinct in the twilight, Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic …

Mirror magic is all about reflection and perception. 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.

Darlington looked at her. Undine with her slick black hair, the center part like a naked spine, her devouring eyes.

There are worse things than death, Miss Stern.

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.

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.

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.

Didn't someone say love is a shared delusion?" "Cynical, Darlington. Doesn't suit you at all." "Call it magic if you prefer. Two people reciting the same spell.

She's seen the dead, he thought. She's witnessed horrors. But she's never seen magic.

Hail to the Lady of the Ninth House,” warbled a voice delightedly, bringing the count of people who had ever been happy to see Harrow up to three.

Turner twisted in his seat to give her a long stare. "You don't always have to come out swinging. What are you so angry at?" Alex felt an irritating jolt of embarrassment. "Everything." she muttered, gazing at the fogged-up windshield.

Harrow laughed. It was the first time she had ever heard Harrow really laugh. It was a rather weak and tired sound. "Gideon the Ninth, first flower of my House," she said hoarsely, "you are the greatest cavalier we have ever produced. You are our triumph, The best of all of us. It has been my privilege to be your necromancer.

It is only through mystery and madness that the soul is revealed,

Before you walked into a deal, you had to know if you would walk out.

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

His relief gusted through the room like a warm front, the kind that New Englanders welcome and that Angelenos know means wildfires.

Alex didn't really know what she missed, only that she was homesick for something, maybe for someone, she'd never been.

...if there are such places, they remain opaque to us. Unknown and undiscovered. For there is no explorer so intrepid or daring that he would dare to walk the road to hell, no matter how it may be paved.

She smoothed her hair, tugged down the hem of her dress. She would have to act normal, pretend nothing had happened. But Alex knew that wouldn't be a problem. She'd been doing it her whole life.

I’ll get the whiteboard,” said Dawes. “Is it a magical whiteboard?” asked Turner sourly. Dawes cast him a baleful look. “All whiteboards are magical.

We all have spaces we keep.

Danny spent most of his time at the museum or in his room with the door locked, lost in books he consumed like a flame eating air, trying to stay alight.

Mors irrumat omnia,” Alex whispered. Death fucks us all.

She was torn between wanting to slap him or put him to bed with his favorite binky and a cup of warm milk.

Being left-handed was seen as a sign of demonic influence. The sinister hand and all that.” “Was it?” “Was it what?” “A sign of demonic influence.” “Not at all. Demons are ambidextrous.

What is wrong with you?” Dawes spat as Alex joined her at the nondescript door that led to the temple room, the Bridegroom trailing behind. “I’m a bad dancer and I don’t floss. What’s wrong with you?

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.

What did the dead have to fear?

During the day its panels glowed amber, a burnished golden hive, less a library than a temple. At night it just looked like a tomb.

If you want to live. And wasn't that the worst of it? She did. She did want to live and always had.

[...] cause by itself is an empty concept. [...] choices cause all sorts of things to happen. That doesn't make you responsible.

...but he’d let himself [Darlington] 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.

Gentleman scholar’ seems like a good description for you.” “A true gentleman doesn’t boast of the title, and a true scholar has better uses for his time than downing flaming Dr Pepper shots.

You shouldn’t be ashamed to be different,” her mother had said when Alex had summoned the courage to ask for the name change. “I called you Galaxy for a reason.” Alex didn’t disagree. Most of the books she read and the TV shows she watched told her different was okay. Different was great! Except no one was different quite like her.

She told me there’s no doorway the devil doesn’t know. He’s always waiting to stick his foot in.

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

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.

Who’s ready to go to hell?

She was no one, a girl who had lucked ito a gift, who had done nothing to earn it. she was his queen

She didn't know why. If you were going to hell together, murder seemed like a good place to start.

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

Johnny Cash singing, “We are the shepherds, we walked ’cross the mountains. We left our flocks when the new star appeared.

From my blood and bone and vomit I conjured up a beautiful labyrinth to house you in. I was terrified you’d find some way to escape before I was done. I made you look like a Christmas-tree fairy … I made you look like a Renaissance angel … I made you Adam and Eve … Galatea. Barbie. Frankenstein’s monster with long yellow hair.. As the world went up I remade us both. I hid me in you … I hid you in me. And when we were together … once the shaman had claimed the sun … I became God.

She had found a nasty, forbidden little book in the great Ninth repositories of nasty, forbidden little books, and all the Houses would have had a collective aneurysm if they knew she’d even read it.

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.

Sometimes it took Alex and Hellie hours, sometimes days, but they always came back. There was too much world. There were too many choices, and those only seemed to lead to more choices. That was the business of living, and neither of them had ever acquired the skill.

Too many words,' said Gideon confidentially. 'How about these: One flesh, one end, bitch.' The Ninth House necromancer flushed nearly black. Gideon tilted her head up and caught her gaze: 'Say it, loser.' 'One flesh - one end,' Harrow repeated fumblingly and then could say no more.

Only people who have never lived without comfort deride it as bourgeois.

There were plenty of human monsters out there. Alex had met a few.

People didn’t go looking for lies that didn’t have a reason.

I refuse to let you build your house on such shiftless & ureal sand.

Winston Churchill’s last words were ‘I’m bored with it all.

How glib you are. How sure of yourself. There was a time when I had the same confidence. Time took it. Time takes everything, Miss Stern.

You killed them," he said. "All of them. Leonard Beacon. Mitchell Betts. Helen Watson. Hellie." The silence stretched. But all she said was, "Not Hellie.

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 there really was something lurking in the wood, beneath the stairs, between the stars, that everything was full of mystery.

You’re going to the Ninth House, right? I want in.” “Why?” said Camilla. The Prince shrugged. “Why not? Nostalgia. Boy, how I miss the old place. There’s no skeleton like a home skeleton, you know? I have so many happy memories there.

She remembered the jackals, spirit hounds, bound to serve the delegates of Lethe. We are the shepherds. Alex's hand lay against the floorboards. She could feel the cool, polished wood beneath her palm. Please, she begged the house silently. I am a daughter of Lethe, and the wolf is at the door.

Whether you made a deal with the living or the dead, best not to come up short

There were always excuses for why girls died.

Somehow the men and women of this city knew: Their streets were home to other gods.

Estrea Stern didn’t trust handsome men, particularly the well-dressed ones.

Is it a magical whiteboard?” asked Turner sourly. Dawes cast him a baleful look. “All whiteboards are magical.

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.

Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion.

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.

Perhaps there would have been something in rocking up to the First House with an octogenarian in tow: a sort of wild and confident fuck-you–Oh, your cavaliers are young? And they fight? How classic! So jejune!--but that would not have been the wild and confident fuck-you of the Ninth House. The Ninth House character, she was forced to admit, had always been low on wild and confident fucks.

She could hear Darlington's voice in her head: When was the first time you saw them? Low and halting, as if he wasn't sure whether the question was taboo. But the real question, the right question, was: When was the first time you knew to be afraid? Alex was glad he'd never had the sense to ask.

This was the math she ran every night, every moment. How much time to try to get the work done? How much time to rest? She could never quite make the numbers work. She was always just scraping by, stretching the budget, always coming up a little short, and the panic clung to her, dogging her steps.

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.

The library was also a little temperamental. If you weren’t specific enough in your request or if it couldn’t find books on your desired subject, the shelf would just keep shaking and eventually start to give off heat and emit a high, frantic whine, until you snatched the Albemarle Book and murmured a soothing incantation over its pages while gently caressing its spine.

You're vow of silence is conveniently variable, Ninth, I'm very grateful." "Turns out I'm variably penitent. Hey you should be talking to Nonagesimus." "If I wanted to talk to Nonagesimus, I'd talk to Nonagesimus," he said, "or I'd talk to a brick wall, because honestly, your necromancer is a walking Ninth House cliche. You're at least only half as bad.

What do you see? People in costumes, horns, false jewels, adorning themselves in tiny layers of illusion. They stand up straighter, suck in their stomachs, say things they don’t mean, indulge in flattery. They commit a thousand small acts of deception, lying to each other, lying to themselves, drinking to the point of delusion to make it easier. This is a night of compacts, between the seers and the seen, a night when people enter false bargains willingly, hoping to be duped and to dupe in turn for the pleasure of feeling brave or sexy or beautiful or simply wanted—no matter how fleetingly.

Her startled “Shit!” had gone off like a shotgun blast in the quiet of the library,

a purebred golden retriever—dopey, glossy, and expensive.

If any of the other Houses knew of what we’d done they would destroy us from orbit without a second’s thought.

The Emperor of the Nine Houses said, “I ate peanuts, discreetly, the once.

Bullshit. You were testing me.” “It’s my job to test you.” “I thought it was your job to teach me. That’s not the same thing.

Make people live like animals, they start acting like animals

Maybe good things were the same as bad things. Sometimes you just had to let them happen.

covered their ears. “See, in the white of the winter air,” he cried. “The day hangs like a rose. It droops down to the reaching hand. Take it before it goes!

If you want to get Child Protective Services called fast, just start talking about ghost dick.

This is where you belong. This is where you were meant to bloom. [...] Not every flower belongs in every garden.

I'm pretty sure when my mother was talking about the devil, she had you in mind.

The House of the First had been abandoned, and breathlessly waited to be used by someone other than time.

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

Ambition rolled off him like thunder.

Daniel Tabor Arlington, always the gentleman, a boy of infinite manners. But what had he become?

Well, maybe there was something broken and shriveled inside of her, because she only felt a deep calm in knowing what she was capable of.

The Sixth House owes Pyrrha Dve everything barring tenure.

She gave him her sweetest, warmest smile. “And don’t grab me like that again. I may be shit, but I’m the kind that sticks.

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

Contact with the uncanny takes a toll. The older you get, the harder it is to endure that contact.

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.

- Why did they even have me? - They liked the idea of being parents,[..]

Alex remembered Darlington’s delicate feet, his scream as he’d vanished.

I'd say you're an angel, but you're so much more interesting.

His relief gusted through the room like a warm front - the kind that New Englanders welcome, and that Angelinos know means wildfires.

Here,” she said. She pulled the shirt over her head, revealing a black bra and ribs shadowed like the furrows of a tilled field. “Don't get Dawes.” Why was she so willing to put herself in his hands? Was she unafraid or just reckless? Neither trait boded well for her future at Lethe. But he had the sense it was neither of those things. It felt like she was testing him now, like she'd laid down another challenge. “Some propriety wouldn't kill you,” he said. “Why take the chance?” “Usually when a woman takes her clothes off in front of me I have some warning.” Alex shrugged, and the shadows moved over her skin. “Next time, I'll light the signal fires.” “That would be best.

Would it help to break something else?' She was breathing hard. 'Maybe.' Darlington rose and opened a cupboard, then another, and another, revealing shelf after shelf of Lenox, Waterford, Limoges-glassware, plates, pitchers, platters, butter dishes, gravy boats, thousands of dollar's worth of crystal and china. He took down a glass, filled it with wine, and handed it to Alex. 'Where would you like to start?

Fuck," he gasped. Alex blinked. "I think that's the first time I've heard you swear." Chills shook him and he tried to control the tremors that quaked through his body. "I c-c-class p-p-profanity with declarations of love. Best used sparingly and only when wholeheartedly m-m-meant.

The Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House smiled, tiny and triumphant. Then she kneeled into Gideon’s arms. Gideon stumbled, sick with terror, kneeling them both down to the ground as Harrow lay like a broken rag doll. She forgot her sword, forgot everything as she cradled her used-up adept. She forgot the wrecked ligaments in her sword arm, her messed-up knee, the cups of blood she’d lost, everything but that tiny, smoldering, victorious smile.

Consider a white ninth-grade student taking American history in a predominantly middle-class town in Vermont. Her father tapes Sheetrock, earning an income that in slow construction seasons leaves the family quite poor. Her mother helps out by driving a school bus part-time, in addition to taking care of her two younger siblings. The girl lives with her family in a small house, a winterized former summer cabin, while most of her classmates live in large suburban homes. How is this girl to understand her poverty? Since history textbooks present the American past as four hundred years of progress and portray our society as a land of opportunity in which folks get what they deserve and deserve what they get, the failures of working-class Americans to transcend their class origin inevitably get laid at their own doorsteps.

Alex stood guiltily in the middle of the kitchen, waiting for someone to chastise her, maybe even the house. But this was not the mansion on Orange with its hopeful creaks and disapproving sighs. Darlington had been the life of this place, and without him the house felt huge and empty, a shipwreck hull.

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.

Put it on record --I am an Arab And the number of my card is fifty thousand I have eight children And the ninth is due after summer. What's there to be angry about? Put it on record. --I am an Arab Working with comrades of toil in a quarry. I have eight childern For them I wrest the loaf of bread, The clothes and exercise books From the rocks And beg for no alms at your doors, --Lower not myself at your doorstep. --What's there to be angry about? Put it on record. --I am an Arab. I am a name without a tide, Patient in a country where everything Lives in a whirlpool of anger. --My roots --Took hold before the birth of time --Before the burgeoning of the ages, --Before cypess and olive trees, --Before the proliferation of weeds. My father is from the family of the plough --Not from highborn nobles. And my grandfather was a peasant --Without line or genealogy. My house is a watchman's hut --Made of sticks and reeds. Does my status satisfy you? --I am a name without a surname. Put it on Record. --I am an Arab. Color of hair: jet black. Color of eyes: brown. My distinguishing features: --On my head the 'iqal cords over a keffiyeh --Scratching him who touches it. My address: --I'm from a village, remote, forgotten, --Its streets without name --And all its men in the fields and quarry. --What's there to be angry about? Put it on record. --I am an Arab. You stole my forefathers' vineyards --And land I used to till, --I and all my childern, --And you left us and all my grandchildren --Nothing but these rocks. --Will your government be taking them too --As is being said? So! --Put it on record at the top of page one: --I don't hate people, --I trespass on no one's property. And yet, if I were to become starved --I shall eat the flesh of my usurper. --Beware, beware of my starvation. --And of my anger!

How may we address you this night?” Darlington inquired. The wearer of the mask represented Lan Caihe, one of the eight immortals of Chinese myth, who could move amongst genders at will. At each gathering of Manuscript, a different Caihe was chosen. “Tonight I am she.

As for your instruction here, this is what the First House asks of you.” The room drew breath together—or at least, all the necromancers did, alongside a goodly proportion of their cavaliers. Harrow’s knuckles whitened. Gideon wished that she could flop into a seat or take a sly nap. Everybody was poised in readiness for the outlined syllabus, and scholarship made her want to die.

Tripp was on the sailing team, a third-generation Bonesman, a gentleman and a scholar, a purebred golden retriever - dopey, glossey, and expensive. He was rumpled and rosy as a healthy infant, his hair sandy, his skin tan from whichever island he'd spent winter break on. He had the ease of someone who had always been and would always be just fine, a boy of a thousand second chances.

I’m not saying you did anything,” said Sandow mildly. “I’m just saying by dint of what you are, you may have brought this on.” Dawes crossed her arms. “That sounds a lot like She was asking for it, Dean Sandow.” Alex couldn’t quite believe what she was hearing. Pamela Dawes disagreeing with Dean Sandow. On her behalf. Sandow set his mug down with a clatter. “That’s certainly not what I meant to imply.” “But that is the implication,” said Dawes in a voice Alex had never heard her use before, clear and incisive. Her eyes were cold. “Alex has indicated her own concerns regarding her assault, and instead of hearing her out, you’ve chosen to question her credibility. You may not have meant to imply anything, but the intent and the effect were to silence her, so it’s hard not to think this stinks of victim blaming. It’s the semantic equivalent of saying her skirt was too short.

All I can say is that it was complicated back in Canaan House and sometimes a cute older girl shows you a lot of attention, because she’s bored or whatever, and you sort of have this maybe-flirting-maybe-not thing going on right, and then it turns out she’s an ancient warrior who’s killed all your friends and she’s coming for you, and then you both die and she turns up ages later in the broiling heat on a sacred space station and like, it’s complicated. Just saying that it happens all the time.

Marcia Wilson was a good example of Omega’s core strategy for creating a New World Order. It involved placing their people, or moles, in positions of power within the CIA, the NSA, the Pentagon, the White House and global organizations like the UN, the IMF and the World Bank. This enabled Omega to pull some of the strings of these organizations and to direct American, and world politics, to an extent.

I’m in danger, she wanted to say. Someone hurt me and I don’t think they’re finished. Help me. But what good had that ever done? Somehow Alex had thought this place was different, with all of its rules and rituals and Dean Sandow watching over them. We are the shepherds. But they were children at play.

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.” “Yes,” said Alex, leaning forward. This was what Alex’s mother had never managed to grasp. Mira loved art and truth and freedom. She didn’t want to be a part of the machine. But the machine didn’t care. The machine went on grinding and catching her up in its gears.

A Lethe alum named Lee De Forest, who had once been suspended as an undergrad for causing a campus-wide blackout, had left Lethe with countless inventions, including the Revolution Clock, which showed an accurate-to-the-minute countdown to armed revolt in countries around the globe. It had twenty-two faces and seventy-six hands and had to be wound regularly or it would simply begin screaming.

It occurs to me that there are many other ideas that I understand perfectly, even though no such things exist in the World. For example I know that a garden is a place where one can refresh oneself with the sight of plants and trees. But a garden is not a thing that exists in the World nor is there any Statue representing that particular idea. (Indeed I cannot quite imagine what a Statue of a garden would look like.) Instead, scattered about the House are Statues in which People or Gods or Beasts are surrounded by Roses or Strands of Ivy, or shelter under the Canopies of Trees. In the Ninth Vestibule there is the Statue of a Gardener digging and in the Nineteenth South-Eastern Hall there is a Statue of a different Gardener pruning a Rose Bush. It is from these things that I deduce the idea of a garden. I do not believe this happens by accident. This is how the House places new ideas gently and naturally in the Minds of Men. This is how the House increases my understanding.

Good. Better. Best. That was the trajectory that got you into this place. What Darlington and probably all the rest of these eager, effortful children couldn't understand was that Alex would have happily settled for less than Yale. Darlington was all about the pursuit of perfection, something spectacular. He didn't know how precious a normal life could be, how easy it was to drift away from average. You started sleeping till 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.

These days, there are so few pure country people left on the concession roads that we may be in need of a new category of membership, much as sons and daughters of veterans are now allowed to join the Legion. A few simple questions could be asked, a small fee paid and (assuming that the answers are correct) you could be granted the status of an "almost local." Here are some of the questions you might be asked: Do you have just one suit for weddings and funerals? Do you save plastic buckets? Do you leave your car doors unlocked at all times? Do you have an inside dog and an outside dog? Has your outside dog never been to town? When you pass a neighbour in the car, do you wave from the elbow or do you merely raise one finger from the steering wheel? Do you have trouble keeping the car or truck going in a straight line because you are looking at crops or livestock? Do you sometimes find yourself sitting in the car in the middle of a dirt road chatting with a neighbour out the window while other cars take the ditch to get around you? Can you tell whose tractor is going by without looking out the window? Can people recognize you from three hundred yards away by the way you walk or the tilt of your hat? If somebody honks their horn at you, do you automatically smile and wave? Do most of your conversations open with some observation about the weather? Is your most important news source the store in the village? Have you had surgery in the local hospital? If you hear about a death or a fire in the community, does the woman in your house immediately start making sandwiches or a cake? Do you sometimes find yourself referring to a farm in the neighbourhood by the name of someone who owned it more than twenty-five years ago? If you answered yes to all of the above questions, consider it official: you are a local.

But you didn’t even get me a six-month birthday present,” she whispered pathetically. “I didn’t get the beach party, or a cake, or any dogs.” “Honey of course I got you a birthday present,” said Pyrrha instantly. “I bought one the day of the broadcast. I went and got you a new T-shirt—the expensive kind, not the ones that dissolve when you wash them. I hid it under the sink.” Nona sucked in a breath. “Tell me about it,” she whispered. “Describe it exactly.” “Uh,” said Pyrrha, and flicked her eyes up at Paul. “Okay, so, I hadn’t cleared this with the powers that be, but it was a picture of a moustache—like the facial hair, but a cartoon?—and then there were words below it. Look, you had to see it, I’m not sure I can describe it in a way that…” “Pyrrha, I want to know what it said.” Now Pyrrha avoided Paul’s gaze. “It advertised cheap moustache rides,” said Pyrrha. “We’re talking low prices.” Nona started to cry softly, overwhelmed. Paul said, “Palamedes wouldn’t have let her wear that outside the house.” Then: “Camilla wouldn’t have let her wear it inside, either.” “Yeah, but what about you?” said Pyrrha. “Her choice,” said Paul. “I think moustache rides should be free.” “It would have been my favourite present except for the handkerchief,” said Nona breathlessly. “I’m going to go back and fetch it. I’ll remember. I’ll make myself remember. And I’ll wear it all the time, inside the house and outside the house, and then you’ll know it’s really me. I’m not going to be gone forever…I’m ready. Im ready. Let’s go.

Moreno, Morelos, Cantine, Gomez, Gutierrez, Villanousul, Ureta, Licon, Navarro, Iturbi; Jorge, Filomena, Nena, Manuel, Jose, Tomas, Ramona. This man walked and this man sang and this man had three wives; and this man died of this, and that of that, and the third from another thing, and the fourth was shot, and the fifth was stabbed and the sixth fell straight down dead; and the seventh drank deep and died dead, and the eighth died in love, and the ninth fell from him horse, and the tenth coughed blood, and the eleventh stopped his heart, and the twelfth used to laugh much, and the thirteenth was a dancing one, and the fourteenth was most beautiful of all, the fifteenth had ten children and the sixteenth is one of those children as is the seventeenth; and the eighteenth was Tomas and did well with his guitar; the next three cut maize in their fields, had three lovers each; the twenty-second was never loved; the twenty-third sold tortillas, patting and shaping them each at the curb before the Opera House with her little charcoal stove; and the twenty-fourth beat his wife and now she walks proudly in the town and is merry with new men and here he stands bewildered by this unfair thing, and the twenty-fifth drank several quarts of river with his lungs and was pulled forth in a net, and the twenty-sixth was a great thinker and his brain now sleeps like a burnt plum in his skull.