Book Of Night Quotes
"There’d always been something wrong with Charlie Hall. Crooked, from the day she was born. Never met a bad decision she wasn’t willing to double down on."
"But that didn’t mean she couldn’t try to be different. And she was trying."
"There are countless differences between the lives of people with money and people without."
"In the world of shadow magic, Charlie was a successful thief, but to the locals, she would always be a useful amateur."
"The first time Charlie had ever seen an altered shadow, it had made her think of a fairy tale she’d read as a child in the school library: The Witch and the Unlucky Brother."
"Manipulated shadows were the specialty of alterationists, the most public-facing of the four disciplines."
"If only it could be that easy for Charlie to fix things for Posey. But there was no con or heist, no scam she could think of that would help."
"Charlie had spent so many years in it. Robbing libraries, museums, antiquarian book fairs. Lied and charmed and conned, picked pockets and locks, and even once trapped a Blight in an onyx binding box."
"It ended when she stole a volume for Vicereine, the head of a local gang of alterationists who called themselves the Artists."
"No more stealing magic, she told herself as she recovered. No more gloamists. No more cons. No more living her life with the volume turned up to eleven."
"At home with Vince, she tried to be both fabulist and fabulist’s creation, a woman whose past as a con artist was long over and who wasn’t fighting down the urge to go off the rails again."
"Sometimes her mom looked at her strangely, but Charlie tried not to notice. And Posey, jealous of the attention Charlie had gotten, started reading tarot cards and cultivating a thousand-yard stare."
"Even though she was able to fake up evidence, she wasn’t sure it would be enough to convince her mother."
There was something wrong with him," Posey said. "He’s too quiet. And I think he’s been lying about speaking French.
"Charlie tried to swallow the impulse. She turned to sit with the door open, letting her legs dangle out of the van as Vince opened up the hood of her Corolla."
"She didn’t get jealous. Not like that. It didn’t make sense to long for someone who was already yours."
"Charlie needed to stop looking for trouble where there was none. She needed to stop looking for trouble, period."
"But he didn’t seem alarmed, and after a moment the sharp spike of panic faded. She was just drunk. Drunk people said stupid things."
"You wouldn’t know the truth if it stuck its tongue up your ass."
"The past is the only thing that matters."
"The brain can’t process the feeling of being touched in two places at once, so it only alerts the mind to the harder hit."
"Never hurts to have a bag on you, or an old woman with you."
"You got your sister in on it, didn’t you?"
"But why ask you? You take something from him? Not yet."
"People think the tap is misdirection, but that’s not it."
"When I saw you tonight—what he’d done, what he was doing, I wanted to kill him."
"I looked at you and had a feeling so intense that it made me dizzy and a little sick."
"If you can, pretend tonight never happened, Charlie."
"Whatever you want, pretend I didn’t say any of that."
"You’re like me. This is what people like us were made for. Born deceivers."
"They didn’t understand how her bra straps cut into her shoulders and underwires cut into her ribs, and that the bras that fit looked like ones a matronly nurse would wear in an old war movie."
"You and me, we’re the same," he’d remind her again and again, in case she forgot. "We pretend, so that other people will like us. But they wouldn’t like us if they knew us, would they? That’s why we’ve got to stick together."
"Just wave the vermouth bottle over the gin," Benny would say. "That’s how to make a martini right."
"You gotta be like a shark in this business," Benny told her, with his soft voice and his slicked-back hair. "Sniff around for the blood in the water. Greet life teeth first. And no matter what, never stop swimming."
"It was the throat cancer that got her in the end," he said mournfully. "The cops never even came close."
"Our client’s name is Knight, but that’s all I’m going to tell you," Rand said. "And so long as we bring him his book, he says we’re free to bilk Moneybags for anything else we can get."
"Posey got up even later than usual, around four. She looked ragged as she staggered into the kitchen and filled a cereal bowl with all the remaining coffee, then stuck it in the microwave."
"I didn’t understand the danger we were in," His gaze slid away from her. "I didn’t."
"Charlie, do you mind standing?" he asked, after he’d gotten his equipment where he wanted it to be.
"But there she was, more bent than ever."
"You’re not going to tell me why you trashed your bedroom?"
"Have a seat," he said, indicating a café table that looked like one corner of it had been set on fire at some point in the past.
"And then he was out the door, and out of the museum, with what he hoped was a believable excuse for hightailing it out of there."
"The ashes blew around, black shapes circling in the wind like shadows."
"It’s supposed to contain rituals specifically to do with them. Some gloamists think that’s the key to immortality, to be able to live on as your Blight."
"She’d known he was going to break her heart. That was the Hall family legacy. It had always been a matter of when."
"The last time she cut open a butternut squash, she’d really had to saw her way through. That would be a terrible way to go."
"That old chestnut about killers occurred to her—a quiet guy, kept to himself. That did describe Vincent."
"Vincent Damiano isn’t a real person. She’d been so busy trying to make sure Vince didn’t see behind her masks that she didn’t notice that he was all mask."
"Hole in the head, hole in the heart, or hole in the pocket. The Hall family curse."
"It wasn’t until the red light of dawn bled onto the horizon that she finally slept."
"I wish I could say I was sorry, that I wanted to be honest the whole time, but I didn’t. I never wanted to be honest. I just wanted what I told you to be the truth."
"If she couldn’t be responsible or careful or good or loved, if she was doomed to be a lit match, then Charlie might as well go back to finding stuff to burn."
"Revenge on everybody. That would fill her time. That would keep her busy. Keep her from feeling her feelings."
"You’ve got to go," Kyle told her, then leaned forward and lowered his voice. "You probably shouldn’t come back for a while, either."
"You look as though you could use some coffee," Salt said, turning to look back at her. "And fresh clothes."
"You’re a smart girl. You’ll make the smart choice."
"I promise I’ll come back," Red whispered. "Cross my heart and hope to die. Stick a needle in my eye."
"Once they get their claws into you, they never let go."
"No one can fight their own shadow," he shouted after her.
"I am the one who is going to marry her, and they will listen to me instead of you."
"You always told Mom you wanted to go with him."
"I am going to make such a scene that everyone in this room is going to believe that when you treated my dying father, I smelled alcohol on your breath."
"I think you’re the one that made him be awful to me."
"And if sometimes Remy felt as though he’d given so much of himself away that there wasn’t much left, he was unwilling to contemplate any of the alternatives."
"There's obviously something you think you know, so go ahead and say it."
"If you never deal with what happened, you'll never heal from it."
"I wanted you and your sister to have the freedom to express yourselves."
"I'm fine. Sound as a bell, right as rain."
"The problem with monsters is that you need to keep them leashed, or they turn on you."
"I'll think about what I said," her mother told her as she stood.
"Who we were and what we did and what was done to us—we don't get to shrug that stuff off and become some new shiny person."
"You're going to burn in bartender hell."
"I was made of his anger. What do you think?"
"I'm giving you a ride." He was a short guy with broad shoulders and dark, curly hair.
"I'm made of his anger. What do you think?"
"Walk away. Wasn’t that what she’d tried to do for years?"
"She was terrified of what she could do if she tried."
"Somebody needed to keep her in check, and so that person became Charlie herself."
"Charlie had been walking away from herself her whole life."
"You told me what would happen if I didn’t."
"The shadowless can’t be controlled. There’s a door shut inside of them."
"Maybe there really was such a thing as fate."
"You’re nothing more than a piece of gristle between my teeth."
"You have made a very bad mistake crossing me, Charlatan."
"I’m sorry, Char. It was always going to happen like this."
"I thought that I couldn’t get into your safe?"
"If you can make a stupid decision, then I can make one too."