Цитаты из книги Black Iris

Strength is not in the body, it`s in the mind. It doesn`t lie in flexing your muscles and crushing those who oppose you. It lies in being the last one standing. By any means. At any cost.

Falling for someone is like pulling a loose thread. It happens stitch by stitch. You feel whole most of the time even while the seams pop, the knots loosen, everything that holds you together coming undone. It feels incredible, this opening of yourself to the world. Not like the unraveling it is. Only afterward do you glance down at the tangle of string around your feet that used to be a person that was whole and self-contained and realize that love is not a thing we create. It`s an undoing.

Girls love each other like animals. There is something ferocious and unself-conscious about it. We don't guard ourselves like we do with boys. No one trains us to shield our hearts from each other. With girls, it's total vulnerability from the beginning. Our skin is bare and soft. We love with claws and teeth and the blood is just proof of how much. It's feral. And it's relentless.

When I`d kissed Armin, it was fire. Something visceral happened at the deepest cellular level of me. I`d felt it low in my belly, hard and tight, animal, unreckonable. But when I kissed Blythe it was all air. High in my chest, a rising lightness, an evanescence, all the dark, heavy things in me breaking up and scattering like dandelion seeds.

Today I got off the train early and walked home, tasted the autumn air in my mouth. Watched leaves blowing out of the trees. Felt the skeleton inside my skin, this part of me I can`t see that will remain when I die, outlast me. Everything was bloody poetry.

Boys are so beautiful when they don`t realize how powerful they are. When they hold it with quiet grace, oblivious to how easily they could rip the world apart.

"I`ve missed you so much," I said. Her hands trembled, touching the tiny gold cross at my throat. "I haven`t missed you at all. It`s just that there`s no color in the world anymore, and every sound is the buzzing of flies, and everything tastes like dust."

A novel with an unreliable narrator is really two stories in one. There`s what the narrator tells us, and there`s the truth. Sometimes they overlap. Sometimes one illuminates the other.

The second time I kissed Armin, on the spiral staircase, I held one hand behind my back, my fingers knit with Blythe`s.

That summer, we were gods.

"I`ll never be as good as F. Scott, anyway," I said. "Rubbish. You`re halfway there. You`re a self-loathing alcoholic. Now you just need money and talent."

"I`ve been dying to show you my book. But I`m terrified, too, because then you`ll really know me." I looked at my hands, my fingers ticking nervously. "I hide myself in my words. There`s a cipher, and one half is in my writing and the other half is in me, and if you have them both then you`ll understand everything. Strangers think it`s just a story, but you`ll know what`s real. You`ll know who I really am."

The blood on her mouth looked like smudged lipstick. On me it would`ve been deranged, but on her it was weirdly beautiful. Even sitting still she was a hurricane. Always going two hundred miles an hour, so gorgeous in that haphazard, unwound way, the kind that pulled you in and then shredded you up.

You can`t slut-shame me if I love being a slut.

Blythe stared at him icily. "You`ve got five seconds to get the fuck out of my face." The smile returned. He looked at her, then me, disbelieving. "Four," Blythe said. "Hey." The guy elbowed me aside, towering over us. "Let`s try this again. I`m--" "Tired of counting," Blythe said, and shoved a palm into his thick chest.

"It`s stupid teenage diary bullshit, Blythe." "Keats died at twenty-five. Shelley was twenty-nine. Byron, thirty-six. Their stupid teenage diary bullshit is now considered high art." "I`m not Lord fucking Byron." "You`re a terrible judge of your own work, like every writer who`s worth a shit."

The simplest thing to not get caught doing a bad thing is to do it in front of everyone. Because most people are good - or scared, which is the same thing, functionally - and good people associate badness with guilt. Skulking, hiding. Lurking in the dark. They assume you feel their shame, that you`ll try to hide your sins. They try to catch you in the shadows. No one looks for badness in the light.

"We`re the sun and moon, Blythe." "What does that mean?" "I turn invisible when you`re out."

"Where do I belong?" "On a rocky cliff above a tempestuous sea. With the salt breeze whipping through your hair, and a house burning behind you."