Ava Reid

“Better to die young with a smile on my face than live a long life without laughter.”

“That is the only way to truly believe in something,” Zsigmond says. “When you’ve weighed and measured it yourself.”

“If there is anyone I would damn my soul for,” Gáspár says, “it would be you.”

Only twenty-one. That’s so sad, isn’t it?”
“Why is it sad?”
“Because,” she said, “what do you do when you’re twenty-one and you’ve already achieved everything that most people can only dream of? You have the rest of your life in front of you, but nowhere else to go.”

More likely because my people have prohibitions against inking your skin. But there’s hardly anything in life worth doing that doesn’t make somebody angry.

I would smile blithely if someone tried to saw off my leg. But no one had ever told me that I was allowed to scream

If there was power in keeping a secret, surely there was power in revealing it too

Storytelling is an art deserving of greatest reverence, and storytellers ought to be considered guardians of Llyrian cultural heritage

What is a mermaid but a woman half-drowned,
What a selkie but an unwilling wife,
What a tale but a sea-net, snatching up both
From the gentle tumult of dark waves?
From “Elegy for a Siren,” collected in The Poetical Works of Emrys Myrddin, 196–208 AD

I can hear the mermaids singing
Beneath the rolling, wanton waves,
Their hair as lush as meadowsweet,
Their maidenheads as ripe for plunder
As the gold inside their sunken chests.
From “Great Captain and His Sea-Bride,” collected in The Poetical Works of Emrys Myrddin, 196–208 AD