Sophie Strand Quotes

You okay?” Keefe asked, flicking a strand of her blonde hair to get her attention. “And before you answer, remember: You’re talking to an Empath. Plus, you’ve already pulled put two eyelashes since we got here, and I can tell you’re dying to go for a third.” She was.

Her hands flew to her mouth. 'Are we even twins?' Josh rested his hand on her shoulder and brought his forehead to rest against hers, strands of their blond hair mingling. 'I will always be your brother, Sophie. I will always look after you.

I thought to myself that a conversation was a strange thing that could take you almost anywhere. Often you were left stranded miles from where you had started, with no idea about how to get back.

Inside, Howl was still sitting on the stool. He sat in an attitude of utter despair. And he was covered all over in thick green slime. There were horrendous, dramatic, violent quantities of green slime – oodles of it. It covered Howl completely. It draped his head and shoulders in sticky dollops, heaping on his knees and hands, trickling in glops down his legs and dripping off the stool in sticky strands. It was in oozing ponds and crawling pools over most of the floor. Long fingers of it had crept into the hearth. It smelled vile. “Save me!” Calcifer cried in a hoarse whisper. He was down to two desperately flickering small flames. “This stuff is going to put me out!” Sophie held up her skirt and marched as near Howl as she could get – which was not very near. “Stop it!” she said. “Stop it at once! You are behaving just like a baby!

I've been avoiding you because I'm just so damn annoyed..." He shakes his head, sloshing water. The strands brush his shoulders rhythmically. "I don't want you risking yourself again. The human world...Will. It's too dangerous." Cassian takes my hand. I feel his heartbeat through the simple touch, the thud of his life meeting with mine. "You dead...it would break me." His voice whips sharply over the drum of the rainfall. "Everything I ever said to you was the truth. My feelings haven't changed for you, Jacinda. Even if you drive me crazy, here, in the pride...you're still that single bright light for me.

It was always a shock for me to suddenly become Elodie. I couldn’t imagine how weird it must feel for the people watching it happen. But Jenna went with it. “Could you open the door using your magic?” “Of course,” Elodie scoffed. Sitting up, she went to toss my hair, but my fingers just got hopelessly ensnarled. “Oh, for the love of God,” she muttered, trying to untwist the strands from a ring I wore. There was a knock at the door, and I could feel Elodie about to swoosh on out, when Archer said, “Mercer? You in there?” Go on, I told Elodie, but she didn’t budge. Thankfully, Jenna opened the door and immediately said, “Sophie’s here, but Elodie’s possessing her right now.” “In that case, I’ll wait out here,” he said.

Everything is connected to something. But not everything is connected to everything. The differences are vital.

Now I know that uncertainty is the greatest miracle of all. When we hold ourselves open to the possibility of error, a blessing can arrive that we never imagined possible. The oceans can part and offer a way forward. A question blooms season after season, yielding new flowers, new ideas. But an answer is solid. It bears only one fruit. And very often, it is the wrong fruit.

Adam's final act of naming is to name his wife, Eve, inaugurating the religious basis for the masculine's ownership over the feminine. What we name, we often feel we own. What we name, we feel we understand well enough to name. And when we believe we have arrived at understanding, we stop asking questions. We close ourselves off from surprise.

Ranging in different shades of pink from pale to vibrant, the peonies seemed to burst open practically overnight, swarms of bees zipping from flower to flower. In the orchard, fluffy white flowers adorned the cherry trees. The lake glimmered in the distance, the strands of the weeping willows blowing in the warm spring breeze. I'd read somewhere that weeping willows represented strength and were able to withstand the greatest of challenges. I wanted to be the tree, perseverant and ready for anything, even a storm.

Is that a trip wire?” Sophie asked as he unhooked a thin strand of silver from the underside of the panel. “Can’t be too careful with Lord Nosypants around,” he confirmed, pulling the panel free and revealing four notebooks—one brown, one gold, one silver, and one green—with a cloudy vial sitting on top of them, attached to the other end of the wire. “That tube is filled with one of my favorite airborne microbes,” Ro explained, flashing all of her pointed teeth when Sophie backed up a step. “Those little guys know how to have a party in your sinuses.

Dude, wait until you see the hot little number on there!” He was grinning like the Cheshire cat. “What are you talking about? Aren’t all flight attendant’s middle-aged, blonde women?” “Not this one. She’s feisty too, kneed me right in the balls.” I smiled, and it was actually genuine. I wondered if he was fucking with me. But, it was enough to peak my curiosity. I slowly walked towards the plane wondering if it was going to be a grandma, or something. It wouldn’t be the first time. I really hoped that it wasn’t some die-hard groupie either. As soon as I reached the top of the stairs I almost tripped and fell on my face when I got my first look at her. She was gorgeous! She looked like she walked straight off of a pin-up girl calendar. She had long, black hair with strands of hot pink. I appraised my way down her body. She had a slim waist and curvy hips. She was built like an hourglass. I noticed a couple of sexy facial piercings. She had an adorable little nose and big brown eyes. Then I saw a tattoo peeking out on her shoulder. I could tell that she had a chest piece. I was instantly hard. Awesome…

You're like some wild bird, aren't you? Batting its wings and flying against the cage door. Even if it hurts you. Even if it kills you. You won't stop. Even if on one is out to hurt you, you wont stop." He tucks a strand of hair behind my ear, and I flinch at the brush of his fingers on my skin. I shrug, slap at his hand "So what? You just described everyone in here. All of us." "No, the rest of us will keep to this cage. It's protection from the dangers outside. In here, we have shelter. Freedom. Each other. We wait for the door to open, and when its safe, only then do we go out. You? You don't care as long as you're gone. Away from the rest of us.

I don’t know when I can come back,” he said. “The second you get tired of living in a smelly old surplus tent, I want you to come across town to my house.” Mollie nodded and stepped closer. How safe she felt standing within the circle of his arms and laying her head against his chest, where she could hear the strong beating of his heart. “I heard it the first time you offered,” she said with a smile in her voice. “And the fifth, and the tenth.” He pinched her cheek. “Such a clever lass. I knew there was a reason I liked you.” Why didn’t she just leave with him? When she glanced over at the church, she saw Sophie reading the daily newssheet to Frank while Dr. Buchanan played a game of dice with the lumber merchant. “I’m not sure I can explain it,” Mollie said, “but I feel bonded to these people. I can’t leave to go live in the lap of luxury while they are all stranded here.” “You can sleep in my root cellar if it would make you feel better.

People with wombs have always known that bodies and consciousness are cyclical, tied to a rhythm that is larger than the individual. The cycle is twenty-eight days, full moon to full moon. Moon sounds like a name or a noun. But let us remember that moon is a gerund. Always moving. Always moon-ing. It is time to give the masculine back its lunar knowledge. Wombs swell, yearn, mulch, and release in twenty-eight days. But a womb is not just an organ. It is an invitation that anyone of any physicality and any gender expression can accept. It is an invitation to dance inside change for twenty-eight days. To practice softness for a cycle. The masculine has a womb, too. A moon. All it need do is look up at the night sky. What is lunar wisdom? Even on a new moon night, the moon is still present: replete and whole, while also void and occluded. This is a completion that holds loss tenderly inside its body. It is neatly summed up by Octavia Butler’s powerful words: “God is change.”1 The moon is every gender, every sexuality, mostly both, always trans: waxing and waning. The moon only ever flirts with fullness or emptiness for a brief, tenuous moment before slipping into change. Here is our blended, androgynous Dionysus. Wine-drunk, love-swollen, wind-swept, in ecstatic union with the holy, the moon encourages us to dissolve our edges rather than affirm them. Lunar knowledge keeps us limber. Keeps us resilient. Awe, whether somatic or spiritual, transforms us. The alternative to patriarchy and sky gods is not equal and opposite. It is not a patriarchy with a woman seated on a throne. The Sacred Masculine isn’t a horned warrior bowing down to his impassive empress. The divine, although it includes us, is mostly inhuman. Mutable. Mostly green. Often microscopic. And it is everything in between. Interstitial and relational. The light and the dark. Moonlight on moving water. The lunar bowl where we all mix and love and change.

What would it look like to become a welcoming home? A place where different stories and beliefs and beings could potluck and laugh and share? What would it look like to come home to ourselves? To buy flowers to place on the table of our own desires? To tend to the body as if it were a room that needed to be cleaned, its windows opened to the linden-scented spring air? The Empress card invites in the masculine. We do not have to rule the home. We can relax and become the home.

But I want to be ready. When I look in your eyes and see how much you want a son, I want so much to give you one. A little boy with blond hair and blue eyes, just like you.” “No, he should have green eyes and brown hair with red highlights—just like his mother.” Sylvan smiled again and swept a strand of her hair behind her ear. “Or, you never can tell—we might have a daughter. It’s extremely rare but it does happen from time to time.” Sophie shook her head. “I’d rather have a little boy. I think I would worry about a boy less than a girl.” “I doubt you’d worry less if you knew some of the things I got up to as a child.” “Yes, well you were killing abominable vrannas by the time you were nine. I hope you wouldn’t expect to let our son do anything like that.” “No.” Sylvan looked thoughtful. “There aren’t any vrannas aboard the ship. I suppose we could devise a different manhood ritual for him, though.” “Over my dead body!” Sophie pushed away from him. “Listen, Mister, if you think for one minute I would let you take any son of mine into that kind of dangerous situation—” She broke off because Sylvan was laughing softly. “What?” she demanded. “Nothing. I’m just thinking what a wonderful, protective mother you’re going to be when you’re ready to have children. When we’re both ready.” He pulled her close again and Sophie buried her face in his broad shoulder and breathed in his familiar, comforting scent. I

In you go, young Kit.” He slowly lowered the baby into the tub, which provoked an immediate and deafening squeal of delight. Kit sat in the middle of the tub, smacking the water vigorously with both hands and crowing with glee. “Told you it wasn’t for the faint of heart.” There was gruff humor in Mr. Charpentier’s voice, the first humor Sophie had detected from him that morning. “Now what do we do?” “We play.” He lowered his hand into the water and used his thumb and middle finger to flick the baby’s chest with water. The gleeful squealing stopped, and Kit stared at the large male hand that had produced such a startling new sensation. “He wants you to do it again.” “You do it.” Mr. Charpentier straightened and grabbed a cloth to dry his hand, the baby’s gaze on him the entire time. Sophie regarded the baby making a happy tempest in the middle of the washtub. A duke’s daughter did not engage in tomfoolery… but she wasn’t a duke’s daughter at that moment. She was a woman with a baby to bathe. “Kit.” She trailed a hand through the water. “You are having entirely too much fun in there. Perhaps it’s time we got down to business.” She dribbled water down the child’s chubby arm, and got heartily splashed as Kit expressed his approval of this new game. By damp fits and starts, Sophie got him bathed, got the entire front of her old dress wet, and only realized Mr. Charpentier was largely dry when the man handed her a clean blanket to wrap the wet, wiggling baby in. “You were no help at all, Vim Charpentier. You left me stranded at sea.” “You managed quite well with just your own oars, Sophie Windham. Kit looks to be considering a career in the Navy.

At the thought of Lilli being in the hands of demons, Sophie rested her forehead on the windowsill.  She wondered what was happening to Lilli right then, and if she was even still alive.  A fresh wave of despair crashed over her.  Akeldama was taking everyone she cared about.  Who would be next? “You’re awake.”  Tristan’s voice was deep and husky from sleep.  It rumbled from his chest, slipping through her despair.  She turned and leaned back against the wall, light-headed from just that small movement. Her heart jumped when she realized that he was no longer on the bench, but was now sitting next to her on the bed. “How are you feeling?”  He reached out and brushed a stray strand of hair off of her forehead.  The tenderness in the gesture had Sophie