Brooke Bolander > Quotes

“Why do you not fight when there is still breath and blood within you? Why do you not trumpet and flail?”
― Brooke Bolander, The Only Harmless Great Thing

“No matter what you did, forty or fifty or a hundred years passed and everything became a narrative to be toyed with, masters of media alchemy splitting the truth's nucleus into a ricocheting cascade reaction of diverging alternate realities.”
― Brooke Bolander, The Only Harmless Great Thing

“Everybody knows how to die. You just quit living and then you're slap-taught.”
― Brooke Bolander, The Only Harmless Great Thing

“The world’s so big and mean, and we’re so small in it with our hands and feet fettered. Little tiny helpless things, who can’t do a damn thing but cry and rage most days at the way the game’s rigged against us.”
― Brooke Bolander, The Only Harmless Great Thing

“But chains can be snapped, O best beloved mooncalf. Sticks can be knocked out of a Man's clever hands”
― Brooke Bolander, The Only Harmless Great Thing

“Smile if men throw the ladder down, do as they ask, but keep your horns sharp.”
― Brooke Bolander, The Last of the Minotaur Wives

“Death decayed into history decayed into poolside anecdote.”
― Brooke Bolander, The Only Harmless Great Thing

“Death decayed into history decayed into poolside anecdote. Francium wishes it had a half-life as short as tragedy’s.”
― Brooke Bolander, The Only Harmless Great Thing

“Without stories there is no past, no future, no We. There is Death. There is Nothing, a night without moon or stars.”
― Brooke Bolander, The Only Harmless Great Thing

“The past will always drag around your ankle, a snapped shackle time cannot pry loose.”
― Brooke Bolander, The Only Harmless Great Thing

“Hatching is not the end of what lies inside the egg, only the end of the shell around it. There’s no flight without the shatter, and no flock without the flight. What we’re made of will go on. A fledgling in some other place and time will look up for guidance and maybe see the path we leave behind, even when all of this as it is”—she flutters her free hand at the darkened desert —“dries and blows away. Change is comforting, in that way.”
― Brooke Bolander, No Flight Without the Shatter

“All the world’s a graveyard.”
― Brooke Bolander, No Flight Without the Shatter

“masters of media alchemy splitting the truth’s nucleus into a ricocheting cascade reaction of diverging alternate realities.”
― Brooke Bolander, The Only Harmless Great Thing

“Once you’ve been in the light for awhile, Blue finds, it’s hard as hell to willingly walk back into darkness.”
― Brooke Bolander, The Last of the Minotaur Wives

“We're scientists," Kat says. She stands. "All we do is teach people how sausage is made.”
― Brooke Bolander, The Only Harmless Great Thing

“If the man can be ignored, the ending-fear cannot. It lies deeper than hurt and deeper than the need to sing her own undoing song, a root buried so far within no tusk can pry it free.”
― Brooke Bolander, The Only Harmless Great Thing

“No matter what you did, forty or fifty or a hundred years passed and everything became a narrative to be toyed with,”
― Brooke Bolander, The Only Harmless Great Thing

“The answer, as with so many things those piteous little creatures dredged from the mud, was poison.”
― Brooke Bolander, The Only Harmless Great Thing

“Are his parents taking him to Coney Island because of the cartoon? she muses. Did the innocent little sugar-sucker beg and plead to go because that’s where the finale dumps its sad, angry but good-at-heart heroine when things are at their darkest? Deeply fucked up, but also deeply probable. No matter what you did, forty or fifty or a hundred years passed and everything became a narrative to be toyed with, masters of media alchemy splitting the truth’s nucleus into a ricocheting cascade reaction of diverging alternate realities.”
― Brooke Bolander, The Only Harmless Great Thing

“Going to college apparently taught you sixteen different ways of saying “we’re damned sorry” and “we’re real damned sorry,” and not a blessed one of them left any air in the room or breath in the speaker’s lungs or meant any more than a trained hen plucking at a toy piano.”
― Brooke Bolander, The Only Harmless Great Thing