❝↞🏹↠❞

'I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.'

'Now, the value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. Indeed, the probabilities are that the more insincere the man, the more purely intellectual the idea will be, as in that case it will not be coloured by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices.'

'[...] the worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.'

'All influence is immoral [...] Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions [...] He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.'

The life that was to make his soul would mar his body.

'I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given.'

'Behind everything exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.'

'When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.'

'Good artists simply exist in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating [...] He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realise.'

[...] now and then, a complex personality took the place and assumed the office of art [...] Life having its elaborate masterpieces, just as poetry has, or sculpture, or painting.

Can they feel, I wonder, those white silent people we call the dead?

Sometimes [...] a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthrals us.

To become the spectator of one's own life [...] is to escape the suffering of life.

There seemed [...] to be something so tragic in a friendship so coloured by romance.

[…] Life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation.

It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals […]

[...] youth smiles without any reason.

There was romance in every place. But Venice, like Oxford, had kept the background for romance, and, to the true romantic, background was everything [...]

In her dealings with man Destiny never closed her accounts.

Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that.

in 'once upon a broken heart'

... this girl, who believed in hope and fairytales and love at first sight...

... Evangeline... used to joke that if [she] were ever cursed, it would just prove that magic existed.

It wasn't because she was fearless or terribly heroic; it was because Evangeline simply had more hope than most.

Evangeline tried not to leap to any conclusions and failed almost immediately.

... Evangeline couldn't imagine her stepsister even thinking about stealing Luc from her, and even if she had, wasn't Luc the one Evangeline should have really been blaming?

Evangeline unliked her arm from LaLa's and stepped forward to curtsey. But Apollo stopped a few feet away and reached his arm out for another girl...

But Evangeline knew better than to give into another mortifying delusion.

She wasn't ready to be a wife. She just wanted to be a girl.

It was probably too much to hope for, but Evangeline had always had a weakness for hoping in things others thought impossible.

It was tempting to close her eyes and curl into a ball...

Her heart fluttered at the contact, which was the absolute wrong response.

She was starting to think that sometimes she imagined things were signs when they weren't. But that didn't mean there were not actual signs.

Evangeline wasn't scared. She was terrified.

in 'the ballad of never after'

But Evangeline knew that her heart longed to hope for the best. She believed that people could change; she believed that everyone's life was like a story with an ending that was not yet written, and therefore everyone's future held infinite possibilities.

Once, she might have run to him. Once, she might have wept for him. Now, she wanted to throw things at him. Sharp, hurtful things.

Evangeline's cheeks went suddenly hot, but she didn't let that distract her from slamming the back of her skull into Jacks's face.

If Jacks hadn't betrayed her, if he hadn't set her up for murder, she might have been a little bewitched by him.

But maybe she just didn't want to be alone, didn't want to be untethered. She didn't want to be a person who could disappear without anyone knowing she was gone. She wanted to be important to someone. If her heart stopped, she wanted someone else to feel it...

Since arriving in the North, Evangeline had always been the person in the room with the least amount of power, but that was no longer the case. She was the girl from the prophecy. She was the key - a magical key capable of magical things! She didn't need to linger in the doorway like a scared little kitten or sit politely in a chair and wait.

'She put an end to a royal family, and yet she's afraid of a spider.'

Evangeline stiffened. She instantly felt guilty about it. She had no reason to dislike this Petra Youngblood. It was jealous and petty.

Evangeline wanted to give love and be loved and feel love at just the sight of someone. She wanted butterflies and kisses. She wanted it so much that sometimes she thought her heart would burst from it.

She could not believe Jacks did not care for her. She couldn't believe his feelings for her were only because of this stone. She - She was being delusional.

in 'a curse for true love'

Evangeline Fox always believed she'd find herself inside of a fairytale one day.

Hoping and imagining and believing in magic had always been like breathing to Evangeline.

Evangeline felt silly as she realised how trusting she'd been. Although maybe the problem hadn't been that she was trusting, but that she'd trusted the wrong people.

But it seemed Evangeline still didn't have a sense of self-preservation.

He had dimples. Unfair dimples.

It felt as if she'd found a bit of her old self. And it was one of her favourite pieces. It was the part of herself that loved to hope.

Now Evangeline had never thought of herself as a reckless person. Others might disagree with this. But Evangeline would say to them that she was merely hopeful of what could be, whereas others were fearful as to what could go wrong.

He looked furious and feral. There was blood on his hands, and his eyes were shot through it as well. Yet she'd never wanted anyone more. She must have lost her mind sometime during the night...

Evangeline had always had a love affair with anticipation. One of her favourite pastimes was to dream and imagine.

He'd never heard her curse properly before. She wasn't very good at it, but she was trying furiously.

"Tragically, I can't wield a sword."

Evangeline wanted to throw up and pace, or maybe pace and throw up.

Evangeline had changed as well since the first time she had entered this clearing on her first night in the Magnificent North, when she had believed that marrying a prince could make all her dreams come true. Looking back, her dreams had felt impossible and she felt so courageous for believing in them. But now she realised those were never her dreams, not really. They had been dreams borrowed from stories, dreams she had clung to because she had yet to imagine her own dreams.

i did this for my first time read of 'a curse for true love' and actually really enjoyed the process, so welcome to my thoughts rereading 'a good girl's guide to murder' for (i want to say fourth?) time. obviously there will be spoilers ahead, so you have been warned.

'caraval' was my favourite fantasy series until i read 'once upon a broken heart' and i have been WAITING for the waterstones edition paperback of 'a curse for true love' to come out for over a year (its got to match the rest of my set - the reader girlies get it) AND NOW I FINALLY HAVE IT!!! and i always wish i could read my favourite books for the first time again so this might help me relive this experience.

this goes without saying but there will be spoilers for 'a curse for true love' by stephanie garber up ahead (albeit without context) so just a heads-up for that.

Dark was for stars and dreams and the magic that took place in between days.

People called it heartbreak, but Evangeline thought that losing someone you loved broke more than just a heart.

'Happy endings can be caught, but they are difficult to hold on to. They are dreams that want to escape the night. They are treasure with wings. They are wild, feral, reckless things that need to be constantly chased, or they will certainly run away.'

... yet in that moment, Evangeline knew he would carry her through more than just freezing water. He would pull her through fire if he had to, haul her from the clutches of war, from falling cities and breaking worlds. And in one brittle heartbeat, Evangeline understood why so many girls had died from his lips.

The air shifted as Evangeline entered, redolent of old paper pages that called to her like a siren's song. Like all admirers of fairytales, she'd always loved the scent of books. She loved the paper dust in the air, the way it swirled in the light like little sprinkles of magic. And most of all, she loved the way that fairytales always made her think of her mother and endless possibilities.

She used to think love was like a house. Once it was built, a person got to live in it forever. But now she wondered if love was more like a war with new foes constantly appearing and battles cropping up. Winning at love was less about succeeding in a battle and more about continuing to fight, to choose the person you loved as the one you were willing to die for, over and over.

'In the morning... you can go back to pretending you don't like me, and I can pretend that I don't care. But for tonight, let me pretend you're mine.'

She held him as if he were hers and she were his, and there was nothing else between them. No curses. No lies. No past wounds or mistakes. She held him as if there was only now, as if nothing mattered but this moment. Then she let him go.

Magic crackled in the sliver of space between them. Golden and electric and alive. It felt like the ending of a fairytale, when one kiss had more power than a thousand wars or a hundred spells.

He held her so tightly it hurt, but this pain she didn't mind. She'd let him crush her, let him break her, just as long as he never let her go.

If hope were a pair of wings, Evangeline's were stretching out behind her, eager to take flight again.

'I don't know if I can fix your broken heart, but you can take mine because it's already yours.'

Heroes don't get happy endings. They give them to other people.

In the North, fairytales and history were treated as one and the same because their stories and histories were all cursed.

'I believe there are far more possibilities than happily ever after or tragedy. Every story has the possibility for infinite endings'.

It was tremendously difficult to fully fall out of love with someone when you had no one else to love instead.

... not all loves happened at first; some took time to grow like seeds, or they might be like bulbs, dormant until the right season approached.

Evangeline saw symbols from countless Northern tales and ballads: star-shaped keys and broken books, knights in armour, a crowned wolf's head, winged horses, bits of castles, arrows and foxes, and twining vines of harlequin lilies.

But she was like the tide drawn by the tremendous force of the moon. It was no wonder the waves were always crashing; they must have hated the pull as much as she did.

Apollo burned like a fire that consumed instead of warmed. And yet there must have been a part of her that wanted to be scorched, or at the very least singed.

... murmurs were like villains at the end of a story. They just wouldn't die.

But Evangeline's doubt was like salt. There wasn't much of it, yet it seemed to alter the taste of her thoughts.

'I want you Evangline Fox. I want to write ballads for you on the walls of Wolf Hall and carve your name on my heart with swords. I want you to be my wife and my princess and my queen.'

'Did you ever play that game as a child - the one where there's a circle of chairs, and when the music stops playing you have to find a chair to sit in? But there's never enough chairs for everyone, so one person is always left without a seat in the circle. That's how I feel, as if I missed my chance at a chair and now I've been tossed out of the game.'

She sensed that she was living in an illusion and if she looked closely, she'd see that everything she'd thought was stardust was really just the burning embers of a wicked spell.

People called it falling out of love, but falling was easy. Letting go of Luc had been more like climbing the face of a rock. She'd clawed her way out, fighting to shake it off, to let it go, to find something else to hold on to.

LaLa was not a wilting maid pining away for lost love. She was the boldest girl at the party, the girl who was unafraid to dance by herself... She didn't make being alone seem lonely as Evangeline had always feared. She made it seem like an adventure, as if every moment were the start of a story with endless possibilities.