“Still, I would have rather spent another night with a hungry belly than found myself satisfying the appetite of a wolf. Or a faerie.”

At the beginning of the novel, Feyre’s survival instinct is matched only by her innate hatred of faeries. Later, this early line is revealed to be both foreshadowing and innuendo as Feyre will find herself willingly aiding the faeries in their plight and satisfying Tamlin’s sexual appetite.

“Once it had been second nature to savor the contrast of new grass against dark, tilled soil, or an amethyst brooch nestled in folds of emerald silk; once I’d dreamed and breathed and thought in color and light and shape. Sometimes I would even indulge in envisioning a day when my sisters were married and it was only me and Father, with enough food to go around, enough money to buy some paint, and enough time to put those colors and shapes down on paper or canvas or the cottage walls.”

Feyre laments the loss of her artistic dreams, replaced by dreams of security and safety, yet she retains the ability to think in terms of color and light. Throughout the novel, Feyre uses descriptive, colorful language like the diction of this early quote to express the moving beauty of the faerie realm of Prythian, where she reconnects to her identity as an artist. As she recovers, her dreams grow larger, too.

“But I’d sworn it to her, and then she’d died, and in our miserable human world—shielded only by the promise made by the High Fae five centuries ago—in our world where we’d forgotten the names of our gods, a promise was law; a promise was currency; a promise was your bond.”

Feyre struggles to accept her freedom from responsibility for her family, as honoring promises is fundamental to her personal and cultural ethics. Feyre internalizes this cultural value as a strong sense of obligation to others. There is both strength and tenuousness for a world built on promises; the mortal realm is soon revealed to be more threatened than Feyre realizes.