When Donna Tartt said Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not, and M. L. Rio said How tremendous the agony of unmade decisions.

when Charles Bukowski said “and when nobody wakes you up in the morning, and when nobody waits for you at night, and when you can do whatever you want. what do you call it, freedom or loneliness?”

— Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas (2020)

“Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.”

Atom by atom he had managed to become more important than Clem or cinchona or anything else, but he was going to live for hundreds of years and I was nothing but another one in a long line of people he would never know well, who died like leaves.

read in 2018: the bedlam stacks // natasha pulley

ON THE FAVES SHELF | the bedlam stacks by natasha pulley

there weren’t ghosts - i don’t believe in ghosts - but standing there i wished i did, because ghosts would have meant they were less lost.

@projectliterature​ event 01: 2020 releases — the silvered serpents 
— When the devil waged war in the heavens, even angels had to fall.

But what no one tells you is that even when you decide which world you will live in, the world may not always see you as you would wish. Sometimes it demands that you be so outrageous as to transcend your very skin. You can change your name. Your eye colour. Make yourself a myth and live within it, so that you belong to no one but yourself.

the gilded wolves, by roshani chokshi

wolves were everywhere; in politics, on thrones, in beds. they cut their teeth on history and grew fat on war.

YA LIT MEME: 7/10 Books - The Gilded Wolves, Roshani Chokshi

When you are who they expect you to be, they never look too closely. If you’re furious, let it be fuel.

City of Lies Sam Hawke.

Foggy morning, Scotland / October, 2019

The City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty

Nahri has never believed in magic. Certainly, she has power; on the streets of eighteenth-century Cairo, she’s a con woman of unsurpassed talent. But she knows better than anyone that the trades she uses to get by—palm readings, zars, and a mysterious gift for healing—are all tricks, both the means to the delightful end of swindling Ottoman nobles and a reliable way to survive. 

But when Nahri accidentally summons Dara, an equally sly, darkly mysterious djinn warrior, to her side during one of her cons, she’s forced to reconsider her beliefs. For Dara tells Nahri an extraordinary tale: across hot, windswept sands teeming with creatures of fire and rivers where the mythical marid sleep, past ruins of once-magnificent human metropolises and mountains where the circling birds of prey are more than what they seem, lies Daevabad, the legendary city of brass—a city to which Nahri is irrevocably bound.

In Daevabad, within gilded brass walls laced with enchantments and behind the six gates of the six djinn tribes, old resentments run deep. And when Nahri decides to enter this world, her arrival threatens to ignite a war that has been simmering for centuries.

Spurning Dara’s warning of the treachery surrounding her, she embarks on a hesitant friendship with Alizayd, an idealistic prince who dreams of revolutionizing his father’s corrupt regime. All too soon, Nahri learns that true power is fierce and brutal. That magic cannot shield her from the dangerous web of court politics. That even the cleverest of schemes can have deadly consequences. 

After all, there is a reason they say to be careful what you wish for…

wildflower ridge; los angeles, california

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Łukasz Stokłosa (Polish, b. 1986), Untitled, 2014. Oil on canvas, 30 x 40 cm.

The Bedlam Stacks by Natasha Pulley + trailer by Marcella Cheng

In 1859, ex-East India Company smuggler Merrick Tremayne is trapped at home in Cornwall after sustaining an injury that almost cost him his leg. On the sprawling, crumbling grounds of the old house, something is wrong; a statue moves, his grandfather’s pines explode, and his brother accuses him of madness. When the India Office recruits Merrick for an expedition to fetch quinine–essential for the treatment of malaria–from deep within Peru, he knows it’s a terrible idea. Nearly every able-bodied expeditionary who’s made the attempt has died, and he can barely walk. But Merrick is desperate to escape everything at home, so he sets off, against his better judgment, for a tiny mission colony on the edge of the Amazon where a salt line on the ground separates town from forest. Anyone who crosses is killed by something that watches from the trees, but somewhere beyond the salt are the quinine woods, and the way around is blocked. Surrounded by local stories of lost time, cursed woods, and living rock, Merrick must separate truth from fairytale and find out what befell the last expeditions; why the villagers are forbidden to go into the forest; and what is happening to Raphael, the young priest who seems to have known Merrick’s grandfather, who visited Peru many decades before. The Bedlam Stacks is the story of a profound friendship that grows in a place that seems just this side of magical.