Dust & Shadows

“Anna has a quality.” Matthew raised a thoughtful eyebrow. “The French would call it jolie laide.” Cordelia knew French well enough to frown. “Pretty-ugly? She’s not ugly!” “It doesn’t mean that,” Matthew said. “It means unusually pretty. Oddly beautiful. It denotes having a face with character.”

THE LADIES OF THE NIGHT COURT A Court of Mist and Fury (2016), Sarah J. Maas

What is your name, my child?

South Manitou Island Lighthouse | Michigan (by cedarkayak)

     .  .  .   “I thought about the Three Fates, and the way I’d seen my life flash by. I could avoid all that. No aging, no death, no body in the grave. I could be a teenager forever, in top condition, powerful, and immortal, serving my father. I could have power and eternal life. Who could refuse that? Then I looked at Annabeth again. I thought about my friends from camp: Charles Beckendorf, Michael Yew, Silena Beauregard, so many others who were now dead. I thought about Ethan Nakamura and Luke. And I knew what to do. “No,” I said.”   .  .  .

Above, the stars faded behind the misty sky, and the sun fanned its light upon us. We melted into each other until the dawn slid into dusk, and the sun paled into the moon, and the stars, once lost, became found again.

“which of us could say we were more sinned against than sinning? we were so easily manipulated - confusion made a masterpiece of us.”

Charlie Heaton and Natalia Dyer

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

Well, you’d actually have to try to know.

[ NIKOLAI LANTSOV ]  nikolai had been told that hope was dangerous, had been warned of it many times. but he’d never believed that. hope was the wind that came from nowhere to fill your sails and carry you home.

— Kate Jacobs

Ulyana Sergeenko / Spring 2019

The universe is massive. Some believe it has no end. Or that our universe might be one in a multitude, as bountiful as the stars in the sky or the sand on a beach.