I worry hope will crush me, the way love has so many times before. Are they so different, hope and love? O & E in the same place, half of the other in each word. Both swimming in unknowns. Iโve been through the big changes. These ones should seem easier in comparison, I should be more prepared, but they donโt and Iโm not. Sometimes I feel like a broken-wing butterfly, clinging to a window screen. Afraid to let go. Afraid to stay. Wondering how much wing is enough to fly.
Erin MorgensternEverything I have done, every change I have made to that circus, every impossible feat and astounding sight, I have done for her.
Erin MorgensternDo you remember all of your audiences?" Marco asks. "Not all of them," Celia says. "But I remember the people who look at me the way you do." "What way might that be?" "As though they cannot decide if they are afraid of me or they want to kiss me." " I am not afraid of you," Marco says.
Erin MorgensternThe funeral is a quiet one, despite the number of mourners present. There are no sobs or flailing handkerchiefs. There is a smattering of color amongst the sea of traditional black. Even the light rain cannot push it down into the realms of despair. It rests instead in a space of thoughtful melancholy.
Erin MorgensternThere is so much that glows in the circus, from flames to lanterns to stars. I have heard the expression โtrick of the lightโ applied to sights within Le Cirque des Reves so frequently that I sometimes suspect the entirety of the circus is itself a complex illusion of illuminationโ .
Erin Morgenstern