Soline > Soline's Quotes

“Yuyeh sesh. Despise your heart. Ni weh sesh. I have no heart.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Ruin and Rising

“I’m not some sort of pallid romantic who insists on being loved for my shining inner being. My inner being is exceptionally cranky and I often don’t want her company myself.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“Mum always told me that you couldn’t know what people would do in a crisis, but I’d thought she just meant you should forgive people for behaving like weasels under bad circumstances, not that a stale biscuit like Khamis might suddenly come over all heroic in a tight corner.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“It is not a complex problem to appear nice to people! You identify the most popular targets in each of your classes, learn what they value about themselves, and give them a minimum of three relevant compliments each week. So long as they think you are agreeable, others will follow their lead.” It hadn’t occurred to me that there was an answer to my question, complete presumably with regularly tended checklists.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“We're going home tomorrow. I'm going home. And my mother is going to be so happy, and for a long time, she won't care about anything, except that I'm back. But then she's going to want me to want the right things again. The things that the family think are the right things." She stopped, and took a deep breath and let it out. "But I'm not going to. I'm going to want the things I want, and help them the way I can help them. And those are going to be the right things, too.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“I couldn't stop myself going by the gym to watch him, just to poke the sore place. It didn't make me feel any better to watch him thrashing scores of fake mals and gym constructs. I knew he was good at killing mals, I knew he was brilliant at it, but if this plan even worked, there wouldn't be scores, there would be hundreds, maybe thousands, all piling on him at once. But I watched from the doors anyway, every day after I finished practicing, and when he finished his last run we went up to dinner together without talking, my teeth clenched round the words I wanted to say: You don't have to do this alone; you can ask for people to help you, at least to shield you; we'll hold a lottery, we'll draw straws. I'd said them already and he'd just waved them away with a shrug and "They'll just get in the way," and he might very well be right, because no one would stick beside him with that horde coming. No one except me, and I was meant to be saving everyone else, everyone else but him.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“When I say us, what I mean is them. I felt fine. No; I felt like I’d woken up after a long sleep and had a good workout in the fresh air and a really nice stretch and was now contemplating with interest the idea of a hearty lunch. Sitting on edge in a classroom for hours surrounded by fluffy peeping freshmen waiting for one mal to pop out at me: nightmarish. Summoning a river of magma to instantly vaporize twenty-seven carefully designed attacks at once: nothing to it.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling stupid in the way I’m sorry always feels stupid when you mean it.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“I’d been trying really hard not to learn their names, but it wasn’t going very well”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“I could never afford to look past survival, especially not for anything as insanely expensive as happiness, and I don’t believe in it anyway.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“It turns out that magical mice high on incense are really good at not being caught.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“And I want to help my family, I want to take care of them…but I can’t be that girl. I can’t be the smart girl. I can only be me.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“There’s no such thing as normal people, I said, a desperate flailing. “There’s just people, and some of them are miserable, and some of them are happy, and you’ve the same right to be happy as any of them—no more and no less.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“To be or not to be. That is the question. A question, yes, but not a choice.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“What he knew, he knew from books, and books lied, they made things prettier.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“None of them really wanted to listen to someone else’s story anyway; they only wanted to tell their own.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Fairness is for happy people, for people who have been lucky enough to have lived a life defined more by certainties than by ambiguities.
Right and wrong, however, are for—well, not unhappy people, maybe, but scarred people; scared people.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“It was much easier to be brave for your friends than for yourself.”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“Our bodies were used to stop bullets, thought Ellwood. He could think of nothing else.”
― Alice Winn, In Memoriam

“I’m going to learn to sail.”

Kaz’s brow furrowed, and he cast her a surprised glance. “Really? Why?”

“I want to use my money to hire a crew and outfit a ship.” Saying the words wrapped her breath up in an anxious spool. Her dream still felt fragile. She didn’t want to care what Kaz thought, but she did. “I’m going to hunt slavers.”

“Purpose,” he said thoughtfully. “You know you can’t stop them all.”

“If I don’t try, I won’t stop any.”

“Then I almost pity the slavers,” Kaz said. “They have no idea what’s coming for them.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows

“Nikolai had been told that hope was dangerous, had been warned of it many times. But he’d never believed that. Hope was the wind that came from nowhere to fill your sails and carry you home.”
― Leigh Bardugo, King of Scars

“You've spent your life only choosing the paths at which you knew you could excel. It's made you lazy.”
― Leigh Bardugo, King of Scars

“Progress is a river. It cannot be called back once it leaps its banks.”
― Leigh Bardugo, King of Scars

“If you listened to a man's words, you might learn his wants. The trick was to look into his heart and discover his needs.”
― Leigh Bardugo, King of Scars

“Don't ask me to sacrifice the hope of the living for the comfort of the dead.”
― Leigh Bardugo, King of Scars

“My only comfort is that you never could have been mine. But know that I would have gladly been yours.”
― Leigh Bardugo, King of Scars

“Nikolai could see that he wanted to believe. Don't we all? Who didn't want to think fate had a plan for him, that his hurts and failures had just been the prologue to a grander tale?”
― Leigh Bardugo, King of Scars

“I'm not keen on riot. Unless they involve dancing, but I believe those are usually referred to as parties.”
― Leigh Bardugo, King of Scars

“Some people see a magic trick and say, ‘Impossible!’ They clap their hands, turn over their money, and forget about it ten minutes later. Other people ask how it worked. They go home, get into bed, toss and turn, wondering how it was done. It takes them a good night’s sleep to forget all about it. And then there are the ones who stay awake, running through the trick again and again, looking for that skip in perception, the crack in the illusion that will explain how their eyes got duped; they’re the kind who won’t rest until they’ve mastered that little bit of mystery for themselves. I’m that kind.”

“You love trickery.”

“I love puzzles. Trickery is just my native tongue.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows