465 Best The Invisible Life of Addie Larue Quotes (2023)

1. “Because, Addie, the gods are greedy.”

2. “All she knows is that she is tired, and he is the place she wants to rest. And that, somehow, she was happy. But it is not love.”

3. “And the more she talks about him, the thicker the frost in her eyes, the more it spreads, until he can barely make out the color beneath. And Henry wonders how she can see, but of course, she can't. That's the point.”

4. “You are thinking of possession.”

5. “As if you couldn't like one place and want to see another.”

6. “But isn’t it wonderful,” she says, “to be an idea?”

7. “Stories are a way to preserve one’s self. To be remembered. And to forget. ”

8. “El arte tiene que ver con las ideas. Y las ideas son más indómitas que los recuerdos. Son como las malas hierbas, siempre encuentran la forma de desarrollarse.”

9. “There’s no way to un-know the fact that someone is dying. It eats away all the normal, and leaves something wrong and rotten in its place.”

10. “The girl he loved is gone, and he is still here... He's glad to have it [the 6 notebooks filled with Addie's story, her life], because the truth is he is already fogetting. When you are the only one holding on to a memory, a girl, It's hard to keep it from floating away.”

11. “I do not want to belong to someone else. I do not want to belong to anyone but myself. I want to be free. Free to live, and to find my own way, to love, or to be alone, but at least it is my choice, and I am so tired of not having choices, so scared of the years rushing past beneath my feet. I do not want to die as I’ve lived, which is no life at all.”

12. “‘ . . . ideas are so much wilder than memories, so much faster to take root.'” (Luc, 210)

13. “Other people would call him sensitive, but it is more than that. The dial is broken, the volume turned all the way up. Moments of joy registered as brief, but ecstatic. Moments of pain stretched long and unbearably loud.”

14. “A successful theft is an anonymous act. The absence of a mark.”

15. “Take a drink every time you hear you’re not enough. ”

16. “I know your heart, my dear. I feel when it falters.”

17. “I saw an elephant, and thought of you. I was in Paris, and you were not. “And you thought of me,” she says.”

18. “When they were still together, when everything was a plural instead of a singular”

19. “It does,” he admits, before nodding at her attire. “And yet,” he says with an impish grin, “you strike me as someone not easily restrained. Aut viam invenium aut faciam, and so on.”

20. “Why would anyone trade a lifetime of talent for a few years of glory?” Luc’s smile darkens. “Because time is cruel to all, and crueler still to artists. Because vision weakens, and voices wither, and talent fades.” He leans close, twists a lock of her hair around one finger. “Because happiness is brief, and history is lasting, and in the end,” he says, “everyone wants to be remembered.”

21. “When Adeline told the girl about her trip, Isabelle had only shrugged, and said, “I like it here.”

22. “The old gods are everywhere,” she says. “They swim in the river, and grow in the field, and sing in the woods. They are in the sunlight on the wheat, and under the saplings in spring, and in the vines that grow up the side of that stone church. They gather at the edges of the day, at dawn, and at dusk.”

23. “You're looking at that sandwich like it broke your heart.'

24. “You want an ending,” she says. “Then take my life when I am done with it. You can have my soul when I don’t want it anymore.”

25. “She begins to wonder at the importance of a name at all. The very idea will begin to lose its meaning, the way a word does when said too many times, breaking down into useless sounds and syllables.”

26. “Don't you remember, she told him then, when you were nothing but shadow and smoke?

27. “It is just a storm, he tells himself, but he is tired of looking for shelter. It is just a storm, but there is always another waiting in its wake. ”

28. “I'm fine,he says, in that automatic way people always answer when you ask them how they are, even though his heart is hanging open on its hinges.”

29. “Why would anyone trade a lifetime of talent for a few years of glory?”

30. “Adeline begins to wonder if the world outside is as boring as her own.”

31. “A story is an idea, wild as a weed, springing up wherever it is planted.” (The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue Quotes)

32. “He didn’t realize how much connective tissue was made up of guilt. Without the weight of it, he feels dizzy and light.”

33. “Nothing is all good or all bad. Life is so much messier than that.”

34. “and the irony is hardly lost on you that in wanting to live, to learn, to find yourself, you’ve gotten lost.”

35. “it’s amazing what you can learn when you have the time.”

36. “It feels good to be the user instead of the used.

37. “A dreamer,” warns Estele.

38. “You know,” she’d said, “they say people are like snowflakes, each one unique, but I think they’re more like skies. Some are cloudy, some are stormy, some are clear, but no two are ever quite the same. ”

39. “Nothing is all good or all bad,” she says. “Life is so much messier than that. ”

40. “Aut viam invenium aut faciam”

41. “Luc flicks his fingers. “What nonsense,” he says. “It is because I love you that I won’t. Love is hungry. Love is selfish.”

42. “She missed him the way someone might miss the sun in winter, though they still dread its heat. She missed the sound of his voice, the knowing in his touch, the flint-on-stone friction of their conversations, the way they fit together.”

43. “She has listened to the bells, and the organ, and the calls to prayer. And yet, despite it all, she has never understood the appeal. How does a ceiling bring you closer to heaven? If God is so large, why build walls to hold Him in?”

44. “Three words, large enough to tip the world. I remember you. ”

45. “If she must grow roots, she would rather be left to flourish wild instead of pruned, would rather stand alone, allowed to grow beneath the open sky. Better that than firewood, cut down just to burn in someone else’s hearth.”

46. “…and it is sad, of course, to forget. But it is a lonely thing, to be forgotten. To remember when no one else does. ” (pg 77)

47. “It is the kind of day designed for wood fires, and mugs of tea, and well-loved books.”

48. “And when the girl looks at him, she doesn't see perfect. She sees someone who cares too much, who feels too much, who is lost, and hungry, and wasting inside his curse. She sees the truth, and he doesn't know how, or why, only knows that he doesn't want it to end. Because for the first time in months, in years, his whole life, perhaps, Henry doesn't feel cursed at all. For the first time, he feels seen.”

49. “But here is the danger of a place like Villon.

50. “Live long enough, and people open up like books. ” (Pg 213)

51. “Addie was a gift from Estele, shorter, sharper, the switch-quick name for the girl who rode to markets, and strained to see over roofs, for the one who drew and dreamed of bigger stories, grander worlds, of lives filled with adventure.”

52. “You didn’t come.”

53. “Ah,” says the darkness, reading her silence. “You do not know.” Again, the green eyes shift, darken. “You ask for time without limit. You want freedom without rule. You want to be untethered. You want to live exactly as you please.”

54. “It is like a gap between stones, this village, just wide enough for things

55. “He wants to feel lighter, to feel brighter, but the room darkens, and he can feel a storm creeping in.

56. “There’s this family photo,” he says, “not the one in the hall, this other one, from back when I was six or seven. That day was awful. Muriel put gum in David’s book and I had a cold, and my parents were fighting right up until the flash went off. And in the photo, we all look so … happy. I remember seeing that picture and realizing that photographs weren’t real. There’s no context, just the illusion that you’re showing a snapshot of a life, but life isn’t snapshots, it’s fluid. So photos are like fictions. I loved that about them. Everyone thinks photography is truth, but it’s just a very convincing lie.”

57. “He remembers being in love with that smile, back when it felt like a victory every time he earned a glimpse. Now she simply hands it to him, brown eyes shrouded in fog.”

58. “Being forgotten, she thinks, is a bit like going mad. You begin to wonder what is real, if you are real. After all, how can a thing be real if it cannot be remembered? It’s like that Zen koan, the one about the tree falling in the woods. If no one heard it, did it happen? If a person cannot leave a mark, do they exist?”

59. “Blink and you’re twenty-eight, and everyone else is now a mile down the road, and you’re still trying to find it, and the irony is hardly lost on you that in wanting to live, to learn, to find yourself, you’ve gotten lost.”

60. “Being forgotten, she thinks, is a bit like going mad. You begin to wonder what is real if you are real. After all, how can a thing be real if it cannot be remembered?”

61. “Take a drink every time you hear you’re not enough.

62. “Listen to me. Life can feel very long sometimes, but in the end, it goes so fast. You better live a good life.”

63. “If you only walk in other people’s steps, you cannot make your own way. You cannot leave a mark.”

64. “Addie shakes her head. “I don’t understand. Why end their lives as they’re reaching their peak?”

65. “How foolish to think it would stay the same, when everything else has changed. When she has changed, grown from a girl into a woman, and then into this - a phantom, ghost.”

66. “I would have lost my mind.” “Oh, I did,” she says blithely. “But when you live long enough, even madness ends.”

67. “Humans are so ill-equipped for peace.”

68. “Three words, large enough to tip the world. I remember you.”

69. “His heart has a draft. It lets in light. It lets in storms. It lets in everything.”

70. “…[she] had only shrugged and said ‘I like it here’.As if you couldn’t like one place and want to see another.”

71. “Dine with me,” Luc says as winter gives way to spring.

72. “My father made the grave mistake of sending me away to school, and the more I read, the more I thought, and the more I thought, the more I knew I had to be in Paris. This is where the thinkers are. This is where the dreamers live.”

73. “You didn’t call.”

74. “Bea insists that everyone who works in a bookstore wants to be a writer, but Henry's never fancied himself a novelist. Sure, he's tried putting pen to paper, but it never really works. He can't find the words, the story, the voice. Can't figure out what he could possibly add to so many shelves. Henry would rather be a storykeeper than a storyteller.”

75. “The past drawn like a silk sheet over the present.”

76. “It is the only thing Addie refused to leave behind and feed to the flames in New Orleans, though the smell of him clung to it like smoke, his stain forever on everything. She does not care. She loves the jacket. It was new then, but it is broken in now, shows its wear in all the ways she can’t. It reminds her of Dorian Gray, time reflected in cowhide instead of human skin.”

77. “Don’t forget,” she says softly, the words half prayer, half plea.Henry’s arms tighten, a body surfacing from sleep. “Forget what?” he murmurs, already sinking again.

78. “Food is one of the best things about being alive. Not just food. Good food. ” (Pg. 201)

79. “A story is an idea, wild as a weed, springing up wherever it is planted. ” (Pg 440)

80. “Blink, and the years fall away like leaves. ”

81. “All girls are prone to dreaming. She will grow out of it, her parents say—but instead, Adeline feels herself growing in, holding tighter to the stubborn hope of something more. The world should be getting larger. Instead, she feels it shrinking, tightening like chains around her limbs as the flat lines of her own body begin to curve out against it, and suddenly the charcoal beneath her nails is unbecoming, as is the idea that she would choose her own company over Arnaud’s or George’s, or any man who might have her. She is at odds with everything, she does not fit, an insult to her sex, a stubborn child in a woman’s form, her head bowed and arms wrapped tight around her drawing pad as if it were a door.”

82. “Once you know about a thing, you start to see it everywhere. Someone says the words purple elephant, and all of a sudden, you catch sight of them in shop windows and on T-shirts, stuffed animals and billboards, and you wonder how you never noticed.”

83. “attraction can look an awful lot like recognition in the wrong light.”

84. “Her face has waned a little with every child, each birth stealing a little more of her life.”

85. “March is such a fickle month. It is the seam between winter and spring—though seam suggests an even hem, and March is more like a rough line of stitches sewn by an unsteady hand, swinging wildly between January gusts and June greens. You don’t know what you’ll find, until you step outside.”

86. “Choosing a class became choosing a discipline, and choosing a discipline became choosing a career, and choosing a career became choosing a life, and how was anyone supposed to do that, when you only had one?” (Pg 283)

87. “This,” he says, “is a story of gods.”

88. “Blink, and the years fall away like leaves.”

89. “It’s just a storm, he tells himself, but he is tired of looking for shelter. It is just a storm, but there is always another waiting in its wake.”

90. “Addie is so many things, thinks Henry. But she is not forgettable. How could anyone forget this girl, when she takes up so much space? She fills the room with stories, with laughter, with warmth and light.”

91. “Greatness requires sacrifice. Who you sacrifice to matters less than what you sacrifice for.”

92. “It would be years before Henry learned to think of those dark times as storms, to believe that they would pass, if he could

93. “That time always ends a second before you’re ready. That life is the minutes you want minus one. ” (Pg 421)

94. “...ideas are so much wilder than memories, that they long and look for ways of taking root.”

95. “Do you know how many nights I begged—” “I heard you,” he says, and there is an awful pleasure in the way he says it. Addie sneers with rage. “But you never came.” The darkness spreads his arms, as if to say, I am here now. And she wants to strike him, useless as it is, wants to banish him, cast him from this room like a curse, but she must ask. She must know. “Why? Why did you do this to me?” His dark brows knit with false worry, mock concern.”

96. “Addeline ha decidido que prefiere ser un árbol. Si tiene que echar raíces, prefiere florecer en estado salvaje en lugar de ser podada, prefiere quedarse sola y que le permitan crecer bajo el cielo abierto. Mejor eso que acabar convertida en leña y arder en la chimenea de otra persona.”

97. “And when she does look up, her gaze always goes to the edge of town.

98. “Semantics may seem small, Adeline, but the power of a deal is in its wording.” (Page 351)

99. “I see someone who cares," she says slowly. "Perhaps too much. I see someone lost, and hungry. The kind of person who feels like they're wasting away in a world full of food, because they can't decide what they want.”

100. “Being forgotten, she thinks, is a bit like going mad. You begin to wonder what is real, if you are real. After all, how can a thing be real if it cannot be remembered?”

101. “The day passes like a sentence.

102. “And she is laughing, tears streaming down her cheeks, and he wants to wipe them away, but his hands are her hands, and she is drawing.”

103. “She rounds on him. 'I thought you had better things to do than plague me.'

104. “He is all restless energy, and urgent need, and there isn't enough time, and he knows of course that there will never be.

105. “Everyone thinks photography is truth, but it’s just a very convincing lie.”

106. “the irony is hardly lost on you that in wanting to live, to learn, to find yourself, you’ve gotten lost.”

107. “She will learn in time that she can lie, and the words will flow like wine, easily poured, easily swallowed. But the truth will always stop at the end of her tongue. Her story silenced for all but herself.”

108. “Palimpsest.

109. “and it is enough, it is enough, it is enough.”

110. “Freedom is a pair of trousers and a buttoned coat. A man’s tunic and a tricorne hat. If only she had known. The darkness claimed he’d given her freedom, but really, there is no such thing for a woman, not in a world where they are bound up inside their clothes, and sealed inside their homes, a world where only men are given leave to roam.”

111. “He knows it’s not real, not in the strictest sense, but he doesn’t care. It still feels good.”

112. “Time always ends a second before you’re ready. That life is the minutes you want minus one.”

113. “And then she is back out on the steps of the church, the heavy grind of the bolt sliding home, and somewhere in Addie's mind, Estele begins to cackle.

114. “Mischief glints in those green eyes. “I think you’ll find my word won’t fade as fast as yours.” He shrugs. “They will not remember you, of course. But ideas are so much wilder than memories, so much faster to take root.”

115. “It is sad to forget. But it's a lonely thing to be forgotten.”

116. ” The old gods may be great, but they are neither kind nor merciful. They are fickle, unsteady as moonlight on water, or shadows in a storm. If you insist on calling them, take heed: be careful what you ask for, be willing to pay the price.” (Estele, pg 30)

117. “The nicest days are always the ones we don’t plan.”

118. “Dressing up is just like watching cartoons, something you enjoyed as a kid, before it passes through the no man’s land of teen angst, the ironic age of early twenties. And then somehow, miraculously, it crosses back into the realm of the genuine, the nostalgic. A place reserved for wonder.”

119. “I remember you.” Three words, large enough to tip the world.”

120. “And now that he’s up, he cannot bear the stillness. He is all restless energy, and urgent need, and there isn’t enough time, and he knows of course that there will never be.

121. “No matter how many times she walks these blocks, no matter how many hours, or days, or years she spends learning the contours of New York, as soon as she turns her back it seems to shift again, reassemble. Buildings go up and come down, businesses open and close, people arrive and depart and the deck shuffles itself again and again and again.”

122. “Seven freckles. One for every love she’d have, that’s what Estele had said, when the girl was still young. One for every life she’d lead. One for every god watching over her. Now, they mock her, those seven marks. Promises. Lies. She’s had no loves, she’s lived no lives, she’s met no gods, and now she is out of time.”

123. “And by the time they return home…she will already be a different version of herself. A room with the windows all thrown wide, eager to let in the fresh air, the sunlight, the spring.”

124. “It is just a storm, he tells himself, but he is tired of looking for shelter. It is just a storm, but there is always another waiting in its wake.”

125. “A story is an idea, wild as a weed, springing up wherever it is planted.”

126. “Being forgotten, she thinks, is a bit like going mad. You begin to wonder what is real, if you are real. After all, how can a thing be real if it cannot be remembered? It’s like that Zen koan, the one about the tree falling in the woods.

127. “Perhaps an enemy’s company is still better than none. ” (Pg 131)

128. “Three hundred years she's had to learn the color of his moods. She knows them all by now, the meaning of every shade, knows his temper, wants, and thoughts, just by judging those eyes.

129. “[...] and somewhere between a question and an answer, it fell apart.”

130. “Don’t be ridiculous. Eighteen is old enough to vote, twenty-one is old enough to drink, but thirty is old enough to make decisions.”

131. “Life can feel so long sometimes, but in the end, it goes so fast.”

132. “One step at one time.”

133. “I do not want to marry. I do not want to belong to someone else. I do not want to belong to anyone but myself. I want to be free. Free to live, and to find my own way, to love, or to be alone, but at least it is my choice, and I am so tired of not having choices, so scared of the years rushing past beneath my feet. I do not want to die as I’ve lived, which is no life at all.”

134. “I am not some genie, bound to your whim." He pushes off the tree. "Nor am I some petty forest spirit, content with granting favors for mortal trinkets. I am stronger than your god and older than your devil. I am the darkness between stars, and the roots beneath the earth. I am promise, and potential, and when it comes to playing games, I divine the rules, I set the pieces, and I choose when to play. And tonight, I say no.”

135. “Whenever Addie feels herself forgetting, she presses her ear to his bare chest and listens for the drum of life, the drawing of breath, and hears only the woods at night, the quiet hush of summer. A reminder that he is a lie, that his face and his flesh are simply a disguise.

136. “She sees the truth, and he doesn’t know how, or why, only knows that he doesn’t want it to end. Because for the first time in months, in years, in his whole life, perhaps, Henry doesn’t feel cursed at all. For the first time, he feels seen.”

137. “¿Qué es una persona, sino las huellas que deja?”

138. “The world is wide, and he’s seen so little of it with his own eyes. He wants to travel, to take photos, listen to other people’s stories, maybe make some of his own. After all, life seems very long sometimes, but he knows it will go so fast, and he doesn’t want to miss a moment.”

139. “He is all restless energy, and urgent need, and there isn’t enough time, and he knows of course that there will never be. That time always ends a second before you’re ready. That life is the minutes you want minus one.”

140. “Addie fue un regalo de Estele, más corto, más afilado, el nombre de la niña que viajaba hasta el mercado y se esforzaba por ver por encima de los tejados, de la chica que dibujaba y soñaba con las historias más grandes, con los mundos más vastos, con una vida llena de aventuras.”

141. “But that’s the thing, Henry, you haven’t been you. You waste so much time on people who don’t deserve you. People who don’t know you, because you don’t let them know you.”

142. “The first mark she left upon the world, long before she knew the truth, that ideas are so much wilder than memories, that they long and look for ways of taking root.”

143. “The darkness claimed he’d given her freedom, but really, there is no such thing for a woman, not in a world where they are bound up inside their clothes, and sealed inside their homes, a world where only men are given leave to roam.”

144. “She has kissed a lot of people. But none of them will ever kiss like him. The difference doesn’t lie in the technicalities. His mouth is no better shaped to the task. It is just in the way he uses it.”

145. “A dreamer,” scorns her mother.

146. “Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives–or to find strength in a very long one. ”

147. “Olvidar es triste, desde luego. Pero que te olviden resulta solitario. Recordar cuando nadie más lo hace.”

148. “You want an ending," she says. "Then take my life when I am done with it. You can have my soul when I don't want it anymore."

149. “Nothing is all good or all bad,” she says. “Life is so much messier than that.”

150. “The vexing thing about time,” he says, “is that it’s never enough. Perhaps a decade too short, perhaps a moment. But a life always ends too soon.”

151. “He assures you that you’ll find your calling, but that’s the whole problem, you’ve never felt called to any one thing. There is no violent push in one direction, but a softer nudge a hundred different ways, and now all of them feel out of reach.”

152. “Stories are a way to preserve one’s self. To be remembered. And to forget.”

153. “Three hundred years, and some part of her is still afraid of forgetting. There have been times, of course, when she wished her memory more fickle, when she would have given anything to welcome madness, and disappear. It is the kinder road, to lose yourself.”

154. “Spells are for the witches, and witches are too often burned.”

155. “You can’t make people love you. If it’s not a choice, it isn’t real.”

156. “We all have battle scars. People in our past.”

157. “It would be years before Henry learned to think of those times as storms, to believe that they would pass, if he could simply hold on long enough.”

158. “I can’t hold a pen. I can’t tell a story. I can’t wield a weapon, or make someone remember. But art,” she says with a quieter smile, “art is about ideas. And ideas are wilder than memories. They’re like weeds, always finding their way up.” “But no photographs. No film.”

159. “Dance with me,” he says as a new year begins.

160. “How do you walk to the end of the world? she asked once. And when Addie didn't know, the old woman smiled that wrinkled grin, and answered.

161. “knows that when she died, he packed up all her books and brought them down to sell, and it’s like letting her go in pieces. Selling off his grief. Addie”

162. “She draws him out of bed, and into the kitchen, and Henry sits on a stool and listens as she makes an omelet and tells him about the first time she flew a plane, heard a song on the radio, saw a moving picture.

163. “Me.”

164. “And perhaps it is just that happiness is frightening.”

165. “Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.”

166. “But a life without art, without wonder, without beautiful things—she would go mad. She has gone mad. ”

167. “There is a defiance in being a dreamer”

168. “Books feed hungry minds. Tips feed the cat?”

169. “The cat, also named Toby (“So I can talk to myself without it being weird . . .” he explained) looks at her as she blows on her tea.”

170. “The old gods may be great, but they are neither kind nor merciful. They are fickle, unsteady as moonlight on water, or shadows in a storm. If you insist on calling them, take heed: be careful what you ask for, be willing to pay the price. And no matter how desperate or dire, never pray to the gods that answer after dark.”

171. “Palimpsest. She doesn’t know the word just yet, but fifty years from now, in a Paris salon, she will hear it for the first time, the idea of the past blotted out, written over by the present, and think of this moment in Le Mans. A”

172. “She said no, and learned how much the word was worth.”

173. “Ideas are so much wilder than memories, so much faster to take root.”

174. “She leans back against him, as if he is the umbrella, and she the one in need of shelter. And Henry holds his breath, as if that will keep the sky aloft. As if that will keep the days from passing. As if that will keep it all from falling down.”

175. “Husband. A word like a millstone, all weight and no warmth.”

176. “Funny, how some people take an age to warm, and others simply walk into every room as if it’s home.”

177. “There are days when she mourns the prospect of another year, another decade, another century. There are nights when she cannot sleep, moments when she lies awake and dreams of dying.

178. “They say people are like snowflakes, each one unique, but I think they’re more like skies. Some are cloudy, some are stormy, some are clear, but no two are ever quite the same.”

179. “You can’t make people love you, Hen. If it’s not a choice, it isn’t real.”

180. “Pain can be beautiful,” he says, exhaling a cloud of smoke. “It can transform. It can create.” (Page 232)

181. “Greatness requires sacrifice. Who you sacrifice to matters less than what you sacrifice for. And in the end, she became what she wanted to be.”

182. “They are a sea of strangers, unfamiliar faces in unfamiliar clothes, with unfamiliar voices, calling unfamiliar words.”

183. “Estele’s face darkens. “The old gods may be great, but they are neither kind nor merciful. They are fickle, unsteady as moonlight on water, or shadows in a storm. If you insist on calling them, take heed: be careful what you ask for, be willing to pay the price.” She leans over Adeline, casting her in shadow. “And no matter how desperate or dire, never pray to the gods that answer after dark.”

184. “I don't know what they want from me," he says. "I don't know who they want me to be. They tell you to be yourself, but they don't mean it, and I'm just tired..." His voice breaks. "I'm tired of falling short. Tired of being... it's not that I'm alone. I don't mind being alone. But this–" His fingers knot in his shirtfront. "It hurts.”

185. “There was no danger in it, no reproach, not when she was young. All girls are prone to dreaming. She will grow out of it, her parents say—but instead, Adeline feels herself growing in, holding tighter to the stubborn hope of something more.”

186. “No, Adeline has decided she would rather be a tree, like Estele. If she must grow roots, she would rather be left to flourish wild instead of pruned, would rather stand alone, allowed to grow beneath the open sky. Better that than firewood, cut down just to burn in someone else’s hearth.”

187. “Because happiness is brief, and history is lasting, and in the end,” he says, “everyone wants to be remembered.”

188. “Me llamo Adeline LaRue, se dice a sí misma. Mi padre me enseñó a ser una soñadora, mi madre a ser la esposa de alguien, y Estele me enseñó a hablar con los dioses.”

189. “Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives--or to find strength in a very long one.”

190. “The food, the art, the constant offerings of culture—though Addie’s favorite thing is its scale. Towns and villages are easily conquered. A week in Villon was enough to walk every path, to learn every face. But with cities like Paris, London, Chicago, New York, she doesn’t have to pace herself, doesn’t have to take small bites to make the newness last. A city she can consume as hungrily as she likes, devour it every day and never run out of things to eat.”

191. “You have grown teeth, he said, and Addie will show him how sharp they have become.”

192. “The sun is out, fighting for warmth, but

193. “Now, as she stares up at the mottled dusk, she longs for home. Not for Roger, or the future she did not want, but the woody grip of Estele’s hand on hers as the old woman showed her how to wind raspberry bushes, and the soft hum of her father’s voice as he worked in his shed, the scent of sap and wood dust in the air. The pieces of her life she never meant to lose.”

194. “And this, is what a good-bye should be. Not a period, but an ellipsis, a statement trailing off, until someone is there to pick it up. It is a door left open.”

195. “Lying is easy, so long as you choose the right words.”

196. “It reminds her of Dorian Gray, time reflected in cowhide instead of human skin.”

197. “And yet, you are unmarried?”

198. “Bea looks at him, then, eyes swirling with frost, and even through the mist, she looks suddenly, immeasurably sad. 'You can't make people love you, Hen. If it's not a choice, it isn't real.'

199. “And it should feel good to hear her music, it should feel right.

200. “Ha descubierto que los libros son una forma de vivir mil vidas, o de hallar la fuerza en una muy larga.”

201. “With me.”

202. “Back home, a good storm would wash the world clean, leave it smelling crisp and new. But it seems nothing can rinse the grime from the streets of Paris. If anything, that storm has only made things worse, the world wet and dull, puddles brown with mud and filth.”

203. “No one is ever ready to die. Even when they think they want to. ” (Pg 424)

204. “She has gone so long without roots, she doesn't know how to grow them anymore. So used to losing things, she isn't sure how to hold them.”

205. “Addie has always had a fondness for museums.

206. “She fell in love with the darkness many times, fell in love with a human once.”

207. “Do you still have feelings for him?”

208. “Never pray to the gods that answer after dark.”

209. “Addie softens, takes his hand. “Of course it does. Your deal and mine, they nest like Russian dolls together in a shell. I look at you, and I see exactly what I want. It’s just that what I want has nothing to do with looks, or charm, or success. It would sound awful, in another life, but what I want most—what I need—has nothing to do with you at all. What I want, what I’ve always truly wanted, is for someone to remember me. That’s why you can say my name. That’s why you can go away, and come back, and still know who I am. And that’s why I can look at you, and see you as you are. And it is enough. It will always be enough.”

210. “What she needs are stories.

211. “Because time is cruel to all, and crueller still to artists.”

212. “And the truth is, Henry loves the store. Loves the smell of books, and the steady weight of them on shelves, the presence of old titles and the arrival of new ones and the fact that in a city like New York, there will always be readers.”

213. “She searches his face. “Do I know you?” He bows his head over hers. “You are the only one who does.”

214. “But then she wakes, and sees the pink and orange dawn against the clouds, or hears the lament of a lone fiddle, the music and the melody, and remembers there is such beauty in the world.”

215. “Everything changes. It is the nature of the world. Nothing stays the same.”

216. “She never gets closure, never gets to say good-bye—no periods, or exclamations, just a lifetime of ellipses. Everyone else starts over, they get a blank page, but hers are full of text. People talk about carrying torches for old flames, and it’s not a full fire, but Addie’s hands are full of candles. How is she supposed to set them down, or put them out? She has long run out of air.”

217. “Fall,” he says, “when everything is fading.”

218. “You belong to me.” There is a sound like thunder in the back of his throat. “With me.”

219. “All girls are prone to dreaming. She will grow out of it, her parents say–but instead, Adeline feels herself growing in, holding tighter to the stubborn hope of something more.” (33)

220. “He tastes like the air at night, heady with the weight of summer storms. He tastes like the faint traces of far-off woodsmoke, a fire dying in the dark. He tastes like the forest, and somehow, impossibly, like home.”

221. “He is full of roots, while she has only branches.”

222. “Here is a new kind of silence, rarer than the rest. The easy quiet of familiar spaces, of places that fill simply because you are not alone within them.”

223. “When everything slips through your fingers, you learn to savor the feel of nice things against your palm.”

224. “Because time is cruel to all, and crueler still to artists. Because visions weakens, and voices wither, and talent fades…. Because happiness is brief, and history is lasting, and in the end… everyone wants to be remembered”

225. “Blink and you’re twenty-eight, and everyone else is now a mile down the road, and you’re still trying to find it, and the irony is hardly lost on you that in wanting to live, to learn, to find yourself, you’ve gotten lost. ”

226. “Homesick—Henry knows that one is supposed to mean sick for home, not from it, but it still feels right. He loves his family, he does. He just doesn’t always like them. Doesn’t like who he is around them.”

227. “History is something you look back on, not something you really feel at the time. In the moment, you’re just living.”

228. “The first mark she left upon the world, long before she knew the truth, that ideas are so much wilder than memories, that they long and look for ways of taking root”

229. “This is how the fight begins.

230. “Adeline was going to be a tree, and instead, people have come brandishing an ax.”

231. “It’s like living with déjà vu,” she says, “only you know exactly where you’ve seen or heard or felt a thing before.”

232. “Women at least, women of a certain class – never venture forth alone, even during the day. They are kept inside like potted plants, tucked behind the curtains of their homes. And when they do go out, they go in groups, safe within the cages of each other’s company, and always in the light of day. To walk alone in the morning is a scandal, but to walk alone at night, that is something else.”

233. “Stories are a way to preserve one’s self. To be remembered. And to forget. ” (pg 35)

234. “So she longs for the mornings, but she settles for the night, and if it cannot be love, well then at least it is not lonely.”

235. “Everything changes, foolish girl. It is the nature of the world. Nothing stays the same.”

236. “Listen to me." Her voice is urgent now. "Life can feel very long sometimes, but in the end, it goes so fast." Her eyes are glassy with tears, but she is smiling. "You better live a good life, Henry Strauss.”

237. “Being forgotten, she thinks, is a bit like going mad. You begin to wonder what is real, if you are real. After all, how can a thing be real if it cannot be remembered? It’s like that Zen koan, the one about the tree falling in the woods. If no one heard it, did it happen? If a person cannot leave a mark, do they exist?” (pg 103)

238. “It will hurt. And it will pass. All things do.”

239. “You are not capable of love.”

240. “Because time is cruel to all, and crueler still to artists. Because vision weakens, and voices wither, and talent fades. ” He leans close, twists a lock of her hair around one finger. “Because happiness is brief, and history is lasting, and in the end, ” he says, “everyone wants to be remembered.”

241. “Three hundred years, and there are still new things to learn. ” (Pg 316)

242. “She's nervous.

243. “And this, he decides, is what a good-bye should be. Not a period, but an ellipsis, a statement trailing off, until someone is there to pick it up. It is a door left open. It is drifting off to sleep.”

244. “Most fights, after all, are not the work of an instant. They build over days or weeks, each side gathering their kindling, stoking their flames.” (412)

245. “A boy is born with a broken heart.”

246. “Don’t you remember, she told him then, when you were nothing but shadow and smoke? Darling, he’d said in his soft, rich way, I was the night itself. ”

247. “Want is for children. If this were want, I would be rid of you by now. I would have forgotten you centuries ago,” he says, a bitter loathing in his voice. “This is need. And need is painful but patient. Do you hear me, Adeline? I need you. As you need me. I love you, as you love me.”

248. “I remember seeing that picture and realizing that photographs weren’t real. There’s no context, just the illusion that you’re showing a snapshot of a life, but life isn’t snapshots, it’s fluid. So photos are like fictions. I loved that about them. Everyone thinks photography is truth, but it’s just a very convincing lie.”

249. “She considers the cut of their clothes, the absence of bone stays or bustled skirts, and thinks, not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, how much simpler it would be to be a man, how easily they move through the world, and at such little cost.”

250. “Suddenly every word is full of weight, honesty is such a heavy thing.”

251. “art is about ideas. And ideas are wilder than memories. They're like weeds, always finding their way up.”

252. “…it is sad, of course, to forget. But it is a lonely thing, to be forgotten. To remember when no one else does. ”

253. “They are Orpheus, she is Eurydice, and every time they turn back, she is ruined.”

254. “You belong to me.”

255. “She lied, but only because she can’t say her real name—one of the vicious little details tucked like nettles in the grass. Hidden barbs designed to sting. What is a person, if not the marks they leave behind? She has learned to step between the thorny weeds, but there are some cuts that cannot be avoided—a memory, a photograph, a name.”

256. “They will not remember you, of course. But ideas are so much wilder than memories, so much faster to take root."

257. “March is such a fickle month. It is the seam between winter and spring – though seam suggests an even hem, and March is more like a rough line of stitches sewn by an unsteady hand, swinging wildly between January gusts and June greens. You don’t know what you’ll find, until you step outside.”

258. “A boy is sick of his broken heart. Tired of his storm-filled brain. So he drinks until he cannot feel the pieces scraping together in his chest, until he cannot hear the thunder rolling through his head.”

259. “Henry Strauss has never been a morning person.

260. “I am stronger than your god and older than your devil. I am the darkness between stars, and the roots beneath the earth. I am promise, and potential, and when it comes to playing games, I divine the rules, I set the pieces, and I choose when to play. And tonight, I say no.”

261. “They've left his heart too open. Forgotten to close back up the armor of his chest. And now he feels... too much.”

262. “A dreamer,” mourns her father.

263. “Three hundred years, and some part of her is still afraid of forgetting. There have been times, of course, when she wished her memory more fickle, when she would have given anything to welcome madness, and disappear. It is the kinder road, to lose yourself.

264. “A secret kept. A record made. The first mark she left upon the world, long before she knew the truth, that ideas are so much wilder than memories, that they long and look for ways of taking root. ” (pg 77)

265. “Do you know how to live three hundred years?” she says. And when he asks how, she smiles. “The same way you live one. A second at a time.”

266. “I remember seeing that picture and realizing that photographs weren’t real. There’s no context, just the illusion that you’re showing a snapshot of a life, but life isn’t snapshots, it’s fluid. So photos are like fiction. I loved that about them. Everyone thinks photography is truth, but it’s just a very convincing lie.”

267. “Books are wonderful, portable, lasting, but sitting there, in the darkened theater, the wide screen filling her vision, the world falls away, and for a few short hours she is someone else, plunged into romance and intrigue and comedy and adventure.”

268. “Dreamer is too soft a word. It conjures thoughts of silken sleep, of lazy days in fields of tall grass, of charcoal smudges on soft parchment.”

269. “No one is ever ready to die. Even when they think they want to. No one is ready.”

270. “She missed him the way someone might miss the sun in winter, though they still dread its heat.”

271. “Even rocks wear away to nothing.”

272. “Henry loves his sister, he does. But Muriel's always been like strong perfume.

273. “I think there are many ways to matter." He plucks the book from his pocket. "These are the words of a man - Voltaire. But they are also the hands that set the type. The ink that made it readable, the tree that made the paper. All of them matter, though credit goes only to the name on the cover.”

274. “Saying good-bye, perhaps to her father -- her favorite person in this world. this is how she would remember him. Not by the sad unknowing in his eyes, or the grim set of his jaw as he led her to church, but by the things he loved. By the way he showed her how to hold a stick of charcoal, coaxing shapes and shades with the weight of her hand. The songs and stories, the sights from the five summers she went with him to market, when Adeline was old enough to travel, not old enough to cause a stir. By the careful gift of a wooden ring, made for his first and only daughter when she was born -- the one she then offered to the dark.”

275. “He doesn't know it, but he's been working on this song for weeks. Well, they have.

276. “And she wonders what it was that drew her here the first time.

277. “Henry wonders, as they wait in the queue, if some people have natural style, or if they simply have the discipline to curate themselves every day.”

278. “You have ruined the one thing I still had."

279. “Teaching is an extension of learning, a way to be a perpetual student.”

280. “Because visions weaken, and voices wither, and talent fades… because happiness is brief, and history is lasting, and in the end, everyone wants to be remembered.”

281. “I am stronger than your god and older than your devil. I am the darkness between stars, and the roots beneath the earth. I am promise, and potential, and when it comes to playing games, i divine the rules, I set the pieces, and I choose when to play.”

282. “What is a person, if not the marks they leave behind? She has learned to step between the thorny weeds, but there are some cuts that cannot be avoided––a memory, a photograph, a name. ” (pg 15)

283. “Live long enough, and you learn how to read a person. To ease them open like a book, some passages underlined and others hidden between the lines. ” (Pg 140)

284. “I remember you.

285. “Adeline has decided she would rather be a tree, like Estele. If she must grow roots, she would rather be left to flourish wild instead of pruned, would rather stand alone, allowed to grow beneath the open sky.”

286. “Funny, how some people take an age to warm, and others simply walk into every room as if it's home.”

287. “Do not mistake this kindness. I simply want to be the one who breaks you.”

288. “And there in the dark, he asks if it was really worth it. Were the instants of joy worth the stretches of sorrow? Were the moments of beauty worth the year of pain? And she turns her head, and looks at him, and says ‘Always. ”

289. “Stories are a way to preserve one's self. To be remembered. And to forget.”

290. “And by the time they return home to Villon, she will already be a different version of herself. A room with the windows all thrown wide, eager to let in the fresh air, the sunlight, the spring.”

291. “Estelle used to call these the restless days, when the warmer-blooded gods began to stir, and the cold ones began to settle. When dreamers were most prone to bad ideas, and wanderers were likely to get lost.”

292. “What she needs are stories. Stories are a way to preserve one’s self. To be remembered. And to forget.”

293. “Memories are stiff, but thoughts are freer things. They throw out roots, they spread and tangle, and come untethered from their source. They are clever, and stubborn, and perhaps--perhaps--they are in reach.”

294. “Addie," he breathes, and the sound sends sparks across her skin, and when he kisses her, he tastes like salt, and summer. But it feels too much like a punctuation mark, and she isn't ready for the night to end, so she kisses him back, deeper, turns the period into a question, into an answer.”

295. “With time,” she said, “you can get used to anything.”

296. “Remy Laurent is laughter bottled into skin. It spills out of him at every turn.”

297. “Memories are stiff, but thoughts are freer things. They throw out roots, they spread and tangle, and come untethered from their source. They are clever and stubborn, and perhaps–perhaps–they are in reach.”

298. “Adeline had wanted to be a tree. To grow wild and deep, belong to no one but the ground beneath her feet, and the sky above, just like Estele. It would be an unconventional life, and perhaps a little lonely, but at least it would be hers. She would belong to no one but herself.”

299. “It is a crime,” he says, “that women are not taught the same as men. Why, a world without reading, I cannot fathom it.”

300. “But if you only walk in other people's steps, you cannot make your own way. You cannot leave a mark.”

301. “You know,” she’d said, “they say people are like snowflakes, each one unique, but I think they’re more like skies. Some are cloudy, some are stormy, some are clear, but no two are ever quite the same.”

302. “A story is an idea, wild as a weed, springing up wherever it is planted.” (440)

303. “Estelle used to call these the restless days when the warmer-blooded gods began to stir, and the cold ones began to settle. When dreamers were most prone to bad ideas, and wanderers were likely to get lost.”

304. “I love you,' he says, and Addie wonders if this is love, this gentle thing.

305. “It is easier to be alone among so many people.”

306. “Do you know how you live three hundred years?” she says.

307. “It was just so...permanent.

308. “She has gone so long without roots, she doesn't know how to grow them anymore.

309. “There will be other nights, of course, other wretched dawns, and her resolve will always weaken a little as the days grow long, and the anniversary draws near, and treacherous hope slips in like a draft. But the sorrow has faded, replaced by stubborn rage, and she resolves to kindle it, to shield and nurture the flame until it takes far more than a single breath to blow it out.”

310. “For months, she will keep reaching for the bird, hand drifting to her pocket the way it might to a stubborn curl, a motion born of so much habit. She cannot seem to remind her fingers it is gone, cannot seem to remind her heart, which stutters a little every time she finds the pocket empty. But, there, blooming amid the sorrow, is a terrible relief. Every moment since she left Villon, she has feared the loss of this last token.

311. “Her shadow stretches out ahead - too long, its edges already blurring - and small white flowers tumble from her hair, littering the ground like stars. A constellation left in her wake, almost like the one across her cheeks.

312. “But this is how you walk to the end of the world.

313. “In this moment, she is holding to the sound of her name, her real name, on someone else’s tongue, and it is enough, it is enough, it is enough”

314. “Adeline had wanted to be a tree.

315. “Because time is cruel to all, and crueler still to artists. Because visions weakens, and voices wither, and talent fades.... Because happiness is brief, and history is lasting, and in the end... everyone wants to be remembered”

316. “… but life isn't snapshots, it’s fluid. So photos are like fictions. I Loved that about them. Everyone thinks photography is truth, but it’s just a very convincing lie.”

317. “That time always ends a second before you’re ready. That life is the minutes you want minus one. ”

318. “But this is how you walk to the end of the world. This is how you live forever. Here is one day, and here is the next, and the next, and you take what you can, savor every stolen second, cling to every moment, until it’s gone. ”

319. “Small places make for small lives. And some people are fine with that. They like knowing where to put their feet. But if you only walk in other people’s steps, you cannot make your own way. You cannot leave a mark.”

320. “He always liked learning. Loved it, really. If he could have spent his whole life sitting in a lecture hall, taking notes, could have drifted from department to department, haunting different studies, soaking up language and history and art, maybe he would have felt full, happy.”

321. “Her future will rush by the same as her past, only worse, because there will be no freedom, only a marriage bed and a death bed and perhaps a child bed between them, and when she dies it will be as though she never lived.”

322. “History is a thing designed in retrospect.”

323. “Time moves so fucking fast.

324. “I remember you.”

325. “Déjà vu. Déjà su. Déjà vécu. Already seen. Already known. Already lived.”

326. “Spells are for witches, and witches are too often burned.”

327. “By the end of the day, the wooden wares are gone, and Adeline’s father gives her a copper sol and says she may buy anything she likes. She goes from stall to stall, eying the pastries and the cakes, the hats and the dresses and the dolls, but in the end, she settles on a journal, parchment bound with waxy thread. It is the blankness of the paper that excites her, the idea that she might fill the space with anything she likes.”

328. “March is such a fickle month. It is the seam between winter and spring–though seam suggests an even hem, and March is more like a rough line of stitches sewn by an unsteady hand, swinging wildly between January gusts and June greens. You don’t know what you’ll find, until you step outside.” (20)

329. “But Muriel’s always been like strong perfume. Better in small doses. And at a distance.”

330. “You can’t make people love you, Hen. If it’s not a choice, it isn’t real.” (Page 290)

331. “Be with me,” he says, at last, as one decade slips into the next”

332. “Two hundred years,” Luc says, kneeling beside her, “and still behaving like a child.”

333. “But it is a lonely thing, to be forgotten, to remember when no one else does.”

334. “No,” she says, “I confess, I do not want a master, and I’ve yet to find an equal.”

335. “But it is a lonely thing, to be forgotten, To remember when know one else does.”

336. “And there in the dark, he asks if it was really worth it.

337. “To find a way, or make your own.”

338. “Live long enough, and you learn how to read a person. To ease them open like a book, some passages underlined and others hidden between the lines.”

339. “But you have to let them see you as you are. You have to find people who see you.”

340. “And this, he decides, is what a good-bye should be. Not a period, but an ellipsis, a statement trailing off, until someone is there to pick it up.”

341. “I don’t know how to be with someone,” she whispers. “I don’t know how to be a normal person.”

342. “Do you know how to live three hundred years?” she says. And when he asks how, she smiles. “The same way you live one. A second at a time. ”

343. “Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives–or to find strength in a very long one.”

344. “She would belong to no one but herself.”

345. “‘ . . . happiness is brief, and history is lasting, and in the end,’ he says, ‘everyone wants to be remembered.'” (351)

346. “I will simply go where it is dark again.” Addie rises, goes to the window, and draws the curtains closed, plunging the room back into lightless black. “There,” she says, feeling her way back to him. “Now it is dark again.” Luc laughs, a soft, beautiful sound, and pulls her down into the bed.”

347. “It feels as if the doors of her world have been

348. “But a life without art, without wonder, without beautiful things—she would go mad. She has gone mad.”

349. “There are nights when she cannot sleep, moments when she lies awake and dreams of dying. But then she wakes, and sees the pink and orange dawn against the clouds, or hears the lament of a lone fiddle, the music and the melody, and remembers there is such beauty in the world. And she does not want to miss it—any of it. ” (Pg 342)

350. “I’m sorry,” he says, and it is the first time she has ever heard those words in that silken voice, the only time they will ever sound honest.”

351. “And then he whispers three words into her hair. “I love you,” he says, and Addie wonders if this is love, this gentle thing. If it is meant to be this soft, this kind. The difference between heat, and warmth. Passion, and contentment. “I love you too,” she says. She wants it to be true.”

352. “She stares out at the expanse, the coastline giving way to water, and water giving way to sky. She has seen maps of course, but ink and paper hold nothing to this. To the salt smell, the murmur of waves, the hypnotic draw of the tide. To the scope and scale of the sea, and the knowledge that somewhere, beyond the horizon, there is more.”

353. “A secret kept. A record made. The first mark she left upon the world, long before she knew the truth, that ideas are so much wilder than memories, that they long and look for ways of taking root.”

354. “the greatest danger in change is letting the new replace the old.”

355. “They will stay the night in a local inn, and for the first time in her life, Adeline will sleep in a foreign bed, and wake to foreign sounds and smells, and there will be a moment, as brief as a yawn, when she won’t know where she is, and her heart will quicken—first with fear, and then with something else. Something she does not have the words for yet.

356. “Eighteen is old enough to vote, twenty-one is old enough to drink, but thirty is old enough to make decisions.”

357. “...it is sad, of course, to forget.

358. “I saw an Elephant, in Paris.”

359. “The rise isn't worth the fall.”

360. “His heart has a draft. It lets in light. lets in storms. It lets in everything.”

361. “but she’s always considered time a flexible concept,”

362. “Do you think a life has any value if one doesn’t leave some mark upon the world?”

363. “What is real to you, Adeline? Since my love counts for nothing?”

364. “His heart has a draft. It lets in light. It lets in storms. It lets in everything. ”

365. “It is easy to be honest when there are no wrong words, because the words don't stick. When whatever you say belongs to only you.”

366. “It’s like living with déjà vu,” she says, “only you know exactly where you’ve seen or heard or felt a thing before. You know every time, and place, and they sit stacked on top of each other like pages in a very long and complicated book.”

367. “I am stronger than your god and older than your devil. I am the darkness between stars, and the roots beneath the earth. I am promise, and potential, and when it comes to playing games, i divine the rules, I set the pieces, and I choose when to play. ”

368. “She has seen maps of course, but ink and paper hold nothing to this. To the salt smell, the murmur of waves, the hypnotic draw of the tide. To the scope and scale of the sea, and the knowledge that somewhere, beyond the horizon, there is more.”

369. “he sits down here because he’s afraid of dying in his apartment, of not being found—not being missed.”

370. “Blink, and you’re twenty-six, and you’re called into the dean’s office because he can tell that your heart’s not in it anymore, and he advises you to find another path, and he assures you that you’ll find your calling, but that’s the whole problem, you’ve never felt called to any one thing. There is no violent push in one direction, but a softer nudge a hundred different ways, and now all of them feel out of reach.

371. “How do you walk to the end of the world?”

372. “Easy to stay on the path when the road is straight and the steps are numbered.”

373. “If you could live somewhere with only one season,” asks Henry, “what would it be?”

374. “Perhaps it will take twenty years. Perhaps it will take a hundred. But he is not capable of love, and she will prove it. She will ruin him. Ruin his idea of them. She will break his heart, and he will come to hate her once again. She will drive him mad, drive him away. And then, he will cast her off. And she will finally be free.”

375. “If you loved me, you would have let me go by now.” Luc flicks his fingers. “What nonsense,” he says. “It is because I love you that I won’t. Love is hungry. Love is selfish.” “You are thinking of possession.” He shrugs. “Are they so different? I have seen what humans do to things they love.”

376. “… but life isnt snapshots, it’s fluid. So photos are like fictions. I loved that about them. Everyone thinks photography is truth, but it’s just a very convincing lie.”

377. “It has been a hard and lonely life, she says, and a wonderful one, too. She has lived through wars, and fought in them, witnessed revolutions and rebirth. She has left her mark on a thousand works of art, like a thumbprint in the bottom of a drying bowl. She has seen marvels, and gone mad, has danced in snowbanks and frozen to death along the Seine. She fell in love with the darkness many times, fell in love with a human once.

378. “Sorry, Book," she mutters, lifting the cat gingerly onto the back of the old chair, where he does his best impression of an inconvenienced bread loaf.”

379. “Small places make for small lives. And some people are fine with that. They like knowing where to put their feet. But if you only walk in other people’s steps, you cannot make your own way. You cannot leave a mark. ” (Pg 179)

380. “These days, everyone’s looking down,” muses Sam. “It’s nice to see someone looking up.”

381. “Te dolerá, pero el dolor desaparecerá con el tiempo. Como todo.”

382. “So much of life becomes routine, but food is like music, like art, replete with the promise of something new. ” (Pg 201)

383. “Déjà vu. Déjà su. Déjà vécu. ”

384. “Espero que disfrutes conociéndola. Y cuando hayas acabado de leer, espero que alguna parte de su historia permanezca contigo. Espero que la recuerdes.”

385. “-he’d blinked and somehow years had gone by, and everyone else had carved their trenches, paved their paths, and he was still standing in a field, uncertain where to dig.”

386. “La vida puede parecer muy larga a veces, pero al final, pasa volando.”

387. “It is the kinder road, to lose yourself. Like Peter, in J .M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. There, at the end, when Peter sits on the rock, the memory of Wendy Darling sliding from his mind, and it is sad, of course, to forget. But it is a lonely thing, to be forgotten.”

388. “As a matter of habit, more automatic than faith.”

389. “They teach you growing up that you are only one thing at a time—angry, lonely, content—but he’s never found that to be true. He is a dozen things at once. He is lost and scared and grateful, he is sorry and happy and afraid.”

390. “He has the kind of face, she thinks, that can't keep secrets well.”

391. “But if you only walk in other people’s steps, you cannot make your own way. You cannot leave a mark.”

392. “Choosing a class became choosing a discipline, and choosing a discipline became choosing a career, and choosing a career became choosing a life, and how was anyone supposed to do that, when you only had one?”

393. “The day passes like a sentence. The sun falls like a scythe.”

394. “And even though he's safe, both feet firmly on the ground, Henry feels himself begin to fall.”

395. “Books are wonderful, portable, lasting, but sitting there, in the darkened theater, the wide screen filling her vision, the world falls away, and for a few short hours she is someone else, plunged into romance and intrigue and comedy and adventure. ” (pg 54)

396. “Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives or to find strength in a very long one.”

397. “Don't you remember", she told him then, "when you were nothing but shadow and smoke?"

398. “There are a hundred kinds of silence. There’s the thick silence of places long sealed shut, and the muffled silence of ears stoppered up. The empty silence of the dead, and the heavy silence of the dying. There is the hollow silence of a man who has stopped praying, and the airy silence of an empty synagogue, and the held-breath silence of someone hiding from themselves. There is the awkward silence that fills the space between people who don’t know what to say. And the taut silence that falls over those who do, but don’t know where or how to start.”

399. “When the truth is not an option, fiction takes on a mind of it’s own.”

400. “She will come back to this moment a thousand times. In frustration, and regret, in sorrow, and self-pity, and unbridled rage. She will come to face the fact that she cursed herself before he ever did.”

401. “She missed him the way someone might miss the sun in the winter, though they still dread its heat.”

402. “The shadow's other hand still rests against her cheek. "You assume I want anything," he says, lifting her chin. "But I take only one coin." He leans closer still, green eyes impossibly bright, his voice soft as silk. "The deals I make, I make for souls.”

403. “A boy is sick of his broken heart.

404. “Do not mistake this—any of it—for kindness, Adeline.” His eyes go bright with mischief. “I simply want to be the one who breaks you.”

405. “Now that it is gone, there is a guilty gladness tucked among the grief. The last, brittle thread to her old life has broken, and [she] has been set well, and truly, and forcibly free.”

406. “You move among them like a ghost,” he says, his forehead bowing against hers, “because you are not one of them. You cannot live like them. You cannot love like them. You cannot belong with them.”

407. “No,” she says, drawing back her hand. “You are not capable of love because you cannot understand what it is to care for someone else more than yourself. If you loved me, you would have let me go by now.”

408. “There is a point when the night breaks.

409. “Florence is all odd shapes and sharp edges, domes and spires, white stone walls and copper-slated roofs. It is a place painted in a different palette, music played in a different chord.”

410. “Stories come in so many forms: in charcoal, and in song, in paintings, poems, films.”

411. “Blink and you’re twenty-eight, and everyone else is now a mile down the road, and you’re still trying to find it, and the irony is hardly lost on you that in wanting to live, to learn, to find yourself, you’ve gotten lost. ” (Pg 226)

412. “...Addie straightens, lifts her chin, smiles with an almost defiant kind of joy.

413. “There is a rhythm to moving through the world alone.

414. “This is better than the attention of a hundred strangers. This is the difference between a hotel bed and a home.”

415. “Pain can be beautiful. It can transform. It can create.”

416. “Don’t you remember, she told him then, when you were nothing but shadow and smoke? Darling, he’d said in his soft, rich way, I was the night itself.”

417. “Because time is cruel to all, and crueler still to artists. Because visions weakens, and voices wither, and talent fades. Because happiness is brief, and history is lasting, and in the end. everyone wants to be remembered”

418. “What is a person, if not the marks they leave behind?”

419. “Addie has said so many hellos, but that was the first and only time she got to say good-bye. That kiss, like a piece of long-awaited punctuation. Not the em dash of an interrupted line, or the ellipsis of a quiet escape, but a period, a closed parenthesis, an end.” (440)

420. “If she must grow roots, she would rather be left to flourish wild instead of pruned, would rather stand alone, allowed to grow beneath the open sky.”

421. “Belief is a bit like gravity. Enough people believe a thing, and it becomes as solid and real as the ground beneath your feet. But when you’re the only one holding on to an idea, a memory, a girl, it’s hard to keep it from floating away.”

422. “Because time doesn’t work like photos. Click, and it stays still. Blink, and it leaps forward.”

423. “A dreamer,” scorns her mother. “A dreamer,” mourns her father. “A dreamer,” warns Estele. Still, it does not seem such a bad word. ”

424. “Small places make for small lives. And some people are fine with that. They like knowing where to put there feet. But if you only walk in other people’s steps, you cannot make your own way. You cannot leave a mark.”

425. “This is what she loves about a city like New York. It is so full of hidden chambers, infinite doors leading into infinite rooms, and if you have the time, you can find so many of them. Some she’s found by accident, others in the course of this or that adventure. She keeps them tucked away, like slips of paper between the pages of her book.”

426. “The sky outside is a static gray, a thin mist of rain blurring the buildings. It is the kind of day designed for wood fires, and mugs of tea, and well-loved books.”

427. “A woman must take responsibility for her own education, for no man truly will.”

428. “So much of life becomes routine, but food is like music, like art, replete with the promise of something new.”

429. “Estele used to call these the restless days, when the warmer-blooded gods began to stir, and the cold ones began to settle. When dreamers were most prone to bad ideas, and wanderers were likely to get lost. Addie has always been predisposed to both.”

430. “Spring,” she says, “when everything is new.”

431. “It can't just be about the other person. You have to be someone, too. You have to know who you are.”

432. “But this is how you walk to the end of the world. This is how you live forever. Here is one day, and here is the next, and the next, and you take what you can, savor every stolen second, cling to every moment, until it’s gone. ” (Pg 202)

433. “And despite the doors and walls between them, she can feel the weight of what she left behind, and she wishes she could have stayed, wishes that when Henry had said Wait, she had said, Come with me, but she knows it is not fair to make him choose. He is full of roots, while she has only branches.”

434. “if this is love, this gentle thing. If it is meant to be this soft, this kind. The difference between heat, and warmth. Passion, and contentment.”

435. “Stories come in so many forms: in charcoal, and in song, in paintings, poems, films. And books.”

436. “There is a defiance in being a dreamer.”

437. “A dreamer,” scorns her mother. “A dreamer,” mourns her father. “A dreamer,” warns Estele. Still, it does not seem such a bad word.”

438. “If a person cannot leave a mark, do they exist?”

439. “Of all the inventions Addie has seen ushered into the world movies might just be her favorite one. Books are wonderful, portable, lasting, but sitting there, in the darkened theater, the wide screen filling her vision, the world falls away, and for a few short hours she is someone else, plunged into romance and intrigue and comedy and adventure. All of it complete with 4K picture and stereo sound.”

440. “Humans are capable of such wondrous things. Of cruelty, and war, but also art and invention.”

441. “After all, life seems very long sometimes, but he knows it will go so fast, and he doesn’t want to miss a moment.” (438)

442. “She will grow out of it, her parents say - but instead, Adeline feels herself growing in, holding tighter to the stubborn hope of something more.

443. “history is something you look back on, not something you really feel at the time. In the moment, you're just... living.”

444. “Take a drink every time you hear a lie.

445. “Take your echoes and pretend they are a voice.”

446. “Belief is a bit like gravity. Enough people believe a thing, and it becomes as solid and real as the ground beneath your feet.”

447. “You see only flaws and faults, weaknesses to be exploited. But humans are messy, Luc. That is the wonder of them. They live and love and make mistakes, and they feel so much.”

448. “How strange, the winding way a dream comes true.”

449. “What she needs are stories. Stories are a way to preserve one’s self. To be remembered. And to forget. Stories come in so many forms: in charcoal, and in song, in paintings, poems, films. And books. Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one. ”

450. “These days, everyone’s looking down. It’s nice to see someone looking up.”

451. “Sabe que el tiempo siempre se acaba un segundo antes de que estés preparado.

452. “My name is Addie LaRue. I was born in Villon in the year 1691, my parents were Jean and Marthe, and we lived in a stone house just beyond an old yew tree…”

453. “‘I remember you.’ Three words, large enough to tip the world.” (135)

454. “Food is one of the best things about being alive.

455. “And this is what she's settled on: she can go without food (she will not wither). She can go without heat (the cold will not kill her). But a life without art, without wonder, without beautiful things--she would go mad. She has gone mad.

456. “Oh, I did,” she says blithely. “But when you live long enough, even madness ends.”

457. “She will learn in time that she can lie, and the words will flow like wine, easily poured, easily swallowed.”

458. “The old gods may be great, but they are neither kind nor merciful. They are fickle, unsteady as moonlight on water, or shadows in a storm. If you insist on calling them, take heed: be careful what you ask for, be willing to pay the price. And no matter how desperate or dire, never pray to the gods that answer after dark. ”

459. “Addie has said so many hellos, but that was the first and only time she got to say good-bye. That kiss, like a piece of long-awaited punctuation. Not the em dash of an interrupted line, or the ellipsis of a quiet escape, but a period, a closed parenthesis, an end.

460. “...a woman must take responsibility for her own education, for no man truly will.”

461. “She swears sometimes her memory runs forward as well as back, unspooling to show the roads she’ll never get to travel. But that way lies madness, and she has learned not to follow.”

462. “But this is how you walk to the end of the world. This is how you live forever. Here is one day, and here is the next, and the next, and you take what you can, savor every stolen second, cling to every moment, until it’s gone.”

463. “Henry Strauss wakes her with kisses.”

464. “Art is about ideas. And ideas are wilder than memories.”

465. “That time always ends a second before you’re ready.

466. “Nothing is all good or all bad," she says. "Life is so much messier than that."