FIND ME AT @EXEUNTOMNES

He is lost in Agamemnon and Odysseus’ wily double meanings, their lies and games of power. They have confounded him, tied him to a stake and baited him. I stroke the soft skin of his forehead. I would untie him if I could. If he would let me.

“But wasn’t that what every girl dreamed? That she’d wake and find herself a princess? Or blessed with magical powers and a grand destiny? Maybe there were people who lived those lives. Maybe this girl was one of them. But what about the rest of us? What about the nobodies and the nothings, the invisible girls? We learn to hold our heads as if we wear crowns. We learn to wring magic from the ordinary. That was how you survived when you weren’t chosen, when there was no royal blood in your veins. When the world owed you nothing, you demanded something of it anyway.”

I have become something wonderful, she thought. I have become something terrible. 

Was she now a goddess or a monster? Perhaps neither. Perhaps both. 

(R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War)

she wished she had inej’s gift for spywork or kaz’s gift for scheming, but she only seemed to have jesper’s gift for bad decisions.

“And if beauty is terror,” said Julian, “then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?” “To live,” said Camilla. “To live forever,” said Bunny, chin cupped in palm.”

I’d give it all up, you know. all of it. the money and the jobs and the fame. I’d give it all up just to be with you, just to be n o r m a l with you.

The Lynch brothers had many secrets.

“Are you afraid of dying? Holland had asked him in the alley.  And Kell was. Had always been, ever since he could remember. He feared not living, feared ceasing to exist. Lila’s world may believe in Heaven and Hell, but his believed in dust. He was taught early that magic reclaimed magic, and earth reclaimed earth, the two dividing when the body died, the person they had combined to be simply forfeit, lost.  Nothing lasted. Nothing remained.”

“ The absence of pain led to an absence of fear, and the absence of fear led to a disregard for consequence.”

I stand at that statue and claim the bodies whose names the world wants to forget. I claim those bodies whose names I was taught to forget. And I claim the unsung bloodlines that soak the ground beneath my feet, because I know, I just know, that if they could, they would claim me.

                 “We learn to hold our heads as if we wear crowns. We learn to wring magic from the ordinary. That was how you survived when you weren’t chosen, when there was no royal blood in your veins. When the world owed you nothing, you demanded something of it anyway.”