22 Quotes by Anna-Marie McLemore

No boy was ever so interesting to them as when he was interesting to someone else.

My father doesn't ask why I'm in the back after the first morning rush, making green and purple sugar paste for pan dulce. He's working on a batch of unicorn conchas, his latest stroke of genius, pan dulce covered with shells of pink, purple, and blue sugar that sell out every weekend.

No," he said. He said it without sadness, because however he had died to the gray world and the soft, olive-leafed world before that, he was in this world now. Estrella's.This was the place he was coming back to life.

Estrella wished she could pry the ground open like the shell of a pomegranate, spilling out its secrets like shining red seeds.

Do not stare at me unless you are willing to see me.' ...'Look at me,” he says. “Look at this body. My body. Or stop looking. Deny it, and deny me.

That I was a boy, but it was not as simple as me wanting to be called he. That I liked being called he and him. But that I would've liked being called she and her sometimes, too, if it didn't let everyone settle into the assumption that I was a girl. I had never been a girl, would never be a girl...

Of course he would think the whole glittering universe existed to spin anything he wanted out of stardust. He was a man, and a rich one, and these together made him believe the planets and moons orbited around the single point of his desires.

Then comes another hand. And another one. They come out of the dark like the night is growing them.

I wonder, just for a second, how it will taste on Gael's tongue, the cinnamon and chile en polvo laced into our vanilla cake, the spice a little like what he adds to his family's tamales.