beautifulbookishdisaster

[beautifulbookishdisaster]

Her last thought before even thought went away was that a border was very much like a threshold, and a threshold implied the presence of a door.

Seanan McGuire, Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear

[beautifulbookishdisaster]

They had discussed it, in the halting, awkward way teens talked about the future when they didn't want to face it directly, out of fear that it would come swooping down and gobble them up.

Seanan McGuire, Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear

[beautifulbookishdisaster]

No one can warn the eager and excited away from their own future. A future is a monster of its own breed, different for everyone, and ever inescapable.

Seanan McGuire, Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear

[beautifulbookishdisaster]

Sometimes, he missed the resiliency of childhood more than words could say. But time was passing, and she wouldn't be that resilient forever.

Seanan McGuire, Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear (Ivan)

[beautifulbookishdisaster]

"I said I would take a gift from a river, when I first got here. I said it where the river could hear me. So, this is something I asked for, not something being forced on me. It doesn't change who I am. I'm allowed to want things to make the world a little easier. So thank you, river. It's beautiful."

Seanan McGuire, Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear (Nadya)

[beautifulbookishdisaster]

... time is a river, and like all rivers, it runs where it wishes, and cannot be stopped. Our time together is never as long as we would like, and so we must now move downstream perhaps more quickly than we would like. It is a pleasant thing, to linger in currents clean and clear, where we know nothing will hurt us. Sometimes, though, the fishing is better where the water moves more quickly. Sometimes, we must move on.

Seanan McGuire, Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear

[beautifulbookishdisaster]

Time is a river, or so they say in almost every world where time runs in a linear fashion and not in awkward, disconnected pools of causality that may or may not remain the same from day to day: time is a river, and like all rivers, it runs where it wishes, and cannot be stopped. Our time together is never as long as we would like, and so we must now move downstream perhaps more quickly than we would like. It is a pleasant thing, to linger in currents clean and clear, where we know nothing will hurt us. Sometimes, though, the fishing is better where the water moves more quickly. Sometimes, we must move on.

Seanan McGuire, Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear

[beautifulbookishdisaster]

"You saved yourself. I would think that is the most important adventure of all."

Seanan McGuire, Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear (Vasyl)

[beautifulbookishdisaster]

But things weren't love. They didn't look to her the way some of the smaller children at the orphanage had, eyes soft and faces full of light. They looked at each other that way, if rarely, and the other parents at her school looked at their children that way, but Carl and Pansy didn't, because they didn't love her. Things weren't love, and she was a thing to them, a thing that required many other things to be content, but not entirely a person.

Seanan McGuire, Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear

[beautifulbookishdisaster]

"Sometimes people, like tales, begin where they do not belong."

Seanan McGuire, Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear (Borya)

[beautifulbookishdisaster]

"Only the very young are capable of uncomplicated surety, you see, and so the doors seek them when they are lost and need to come home. Sometime people, like tales, begin where they do not belong."

Seanan McGuire, Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear (Borya)

[beautifulbookishdisaster]

"Trust is an important gift, difficult to give and easy to break. But if you trust me, I shall do my best to trust you, and believe you when you speak to me."

Seanan McGuire, Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear (Artyom)

[beautifulbookishdisaster]

"No, you were right to run away from a frog large enough to take a human's arm. I would have run as well. We can't all be heroes, after all. World's not looking for one at the moment, so far as I'm aware."

Seanan McGuire, Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear (Artyom)

[beautifulbookishdisaster]

Ah. So this was another scripted conversation, then, and as usual, Nadya was on the wrong foot because she hadn't learned her lines. She never did.

Seanan McGuire, Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear

[beautifulbookishdisaster]

Oh, how she hated. She hated being forced to conform to other people's idea of normal, whether they be cultural or physical. She hated how easy it was for adults in her world to pass her around like a doll, moving her from Russia to America, from house to doctor's office, from her bedroom to wherever they wanted her to be. She hated that her agency had been taken away from her in ways she couldn't fully articulate, and she sat at her desk, and she seethed.

Seanan McGuire, Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear

[beautifulbookishdisaster]

She was young and sweet and innocent and hard, in the way children raised in job lots rather than individually; she was doing her best to be a good person, and to figure out what that meant in the context of the world she knew and had and understood.

Seanan McGuire, Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear

[beautifulbookishdisaster]

For the most part, it worked. Yes, the place was a horror, but it was like any other horror long anticipated - the reality is never a match for the imagined version, and thus comes almost as a relief.

Heather Fawcett, Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales