38 Quotes by Melissa Bashardoust

All this time, she had thought of him as her persecutor and herself as the maligned victim of his pride, intimidated into submission because she refused to hurt him. But Ramin had been living in a different story, with himself as the hero, protecting his family from a demon in their midst that only he could recognize.

She was herself and not herself--she didn't know what she was, except that she was free.

If they love you for anything, it will be for your beauty.

Every time you shudder from the cold or wrap yourself more tightly in your furs, it reminds me that somewhere, the sun shines more brightly than it does here. You carry it in your skin.

She had read a story like this once, about a girl who was carried away by a monstrous bird to Mount Arzur. But the bird was enchanted, and when the girl kissed him, he turned into a handsome young man. It was fitting, Soraya supposed, that she would kiss a handsome young man and turn him into a monster.

Do you see now why I recognized you? You’re my favorite story. I feel like I’ve known you for a long time.

His nearness was no longer just a shield now, but a kind of luxury, a sip of heady wine that she would probably never taste again. Was it so wrong to linger?

No, it wasn’t that he had killed them that bothered her—it was that he had done it so well.

To anyone who has ever felt poisonous or monstrous or bristling with thorns.