en

Victoria Schwab

  • Snowhas quoted10 months ago
    Plenty of humans are monstrous,

    and plenty of monsters know how to play at being human.

    —V. A. VALE
  • Snowhas quoted10 months ago
    Where are you, Kate? she asked herself.

    It was a game she sometimes played, ever since she learned about the theory of infinite parallels, the idea
    that a person’s path through life wasn’t really a line, but a tree, every decision a divergent branch, resulting in a divergent you. She liked the idea that there were a hundred different Kates, living a hundred different lives.

    Maybe in one of them, there were no monsters.

    Maybe her family was still whole.

    Maybe she and her mother had never left home.

    Maybe they’d never come back.

    Maybe, maybe, maybe—and if there were a hundred lives, a hundred Kates, then she was only one of them, and that one was exactly who she was supposed to be. And in the end, it was easier to do what she had to if she could believe that somewhere else, another version of her got to make another choice. Got to live a better—or at least simpler—life. Maybe she was even sparing them. Allowing another Kate to stay sane and safe.

    Where are you? she wondered.
  • Snowhas quoted10 months ago
    There are no monsters in the dark.
  • Snowhas quoted10 months ago
    “I know,” she said, fighting to be the right Kate, the one she wanted to be around him, the one who deserved to be around him. Not the girl lying in the field or the one crying in a car right before it crashed. The one who wasn’t afraid of anything. Anyone. Not even him. She couldn’t manage that smug smile, but she pictured it, held the image in her head.
  • Snowhas quoted10 months ago
    Faces had so many features, infinitely divisible, and yet they all added up to single, identifiable expressions like pride, disgust, frustration, fatigue—he was losing his train of thought again.
  • Snowhas quoted10 months ago
    “You think I’ll get hurt?” And then, before she could answer, August was on his feet. In a single, fluid move he took up the knife and drove it down into his hand. Henry flinched, and Emily sucked in a breath, but the blade glanced off August’s skin as if it were stone, the
    tip burying in the chopping block beneath. The kitchen went very quiet.

    “You act as though I’m made of glass,” he said, letting go of the knife. “But I’m not.” He took her hands, the way he’d seen Henry do so many times. “Em,” he said, softly. “Mom. I’m not fragile. I’m the opposite of fragile.”
  • Snowhas quoted10 months ago
    “And which am I?” asked August, pulling away. “Your weakness, or your strength?”

    Emily’s warm brown eyes went wide and flat as the word spilled out. “Both.”
  • Snowhas quoted10 months ago
    As someone who had come quite suddenly into being, like the end of a magic trick, he feared the tenuous nature of his existence, feared that at any moment he might simply cease to be again.
  • Snowhas quoted10 months ago
    He wasn’t sure when exactly the insulation had started to feel like isolation, just that it had.
  • Snowhas quoted10 months ago
    Good and bad were weak words. Monsters didn’t care about intentions or ideals. The facts were simple.
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