You're nobody's rainbow. You're nobody's princess. You're nobody's doorway but your own, and the only one who gets to tell you how your story ends is you.

Hope means you keep holding on to things that won't ever be so again.

If anything attacked us, we could just panic at it until it went away.

I am so tired of this gothic crap,” I muttered. “Just once, I want to meet the villain in a cheerful, brightly lit room. Possibly one with kittens.

In the interests of friendship, I hope you’ll forgive me what I’m about to do.”“Forgive you wha—”My sentence was cut off as he clamped his mouth over mine, kissing me deeply....“Ready to make a scene?”He raised an eyebrow. “Do I have a choice?”“Not really. To quote something someone said to me recently, in the interests of friendship, I hope you’ll forgive what I’m about to do.” I drew back my hand and slapped him across the face. The smack of flesh striking flesh echoed through the hall. Conversations stopped as people whipped around to stare at us. Raising my voice to something just below a shout, I snarled, “You asshole!

If it had been my decision, you would still be sleeping, and I would be hoping every hour of every night you lived was filled with the foulest of dreams.”“My only nightmare in this moment is the quality of the mattress you saw fit to place me on,” said Simon. “Really, brother, have you never heard of lumbar support?

None of this is real, my dear. Not this house, not this conversation, not those shoes you're wearing--which are several years out of style if you're trying to reacclimatize yourself to the ways of your peers, and are not proper mourning shoes if you're trying to hold fast to your recent past--and not either one of us. 'Real' is a four-letter-word, and I'll thank you to use it as little as possible while you live under my roof.

He was still so very young. Faeries—true faeries, not their changeling throwaways—live forever, and when you have an eternity of adulthood ahead of you, you linger over childhood. You tend it and keep it close to your heart, because once it ends, it’s over. Quentin was barely fifteen. He’d never seen the Great Hunt that came down every twenty-one years, or been present for the crowning of a King or Queen of Cats, or announced his maturity before the throne of High King Aethlin. He was a child, and he should have had decades left to play; a century of games and joy and edging cautiously toward adulthood.But he didn’t. I could see his childhood dying in his eyes as he looked at me, silently begging me to answer for him.

My lord was never sane, but he was my love, once. He always will be, somewhere. Wherever it is that the once upon a times go when they die.