Ligia Maderios > Ligia's Quotes

“At seventeen the young woman had worked out how to improve her future prospects; she would seduce the Prince.”
― Robert Reid, The Emperor

“For each of these women, the fear of the unknown — of leaving a marriage and casting off alone — may have bound them to a marriage where there is insensitivity, neglect, or even outright abuse. People learn intimacy at home, and when those early standards are set too low, a wife may second-guess her judgment about when and whether she should leave.”
― Anne Michaud, Why They Stay: Sex Scandals, Deals, and Hidden Agendas of Eight Political Wives

“Have you been having the dreams?” asked Dani.”
― Steven Decker, The Balance of Time

“Gentlemen,’ the professor said gravely. ‘You must stop this madman. If you do not, you are looking at a doomsday scenario of apocalyptic proportions.”
― Michael Parker, The Devil's Trinity

“In a sense, trust is simply a stronger, more grounded version of faith.”
― Milan Kordestani, I'm Just Saying: A Guide to Maintaining Civil Discourse in an Increasingly Divided World

“Suddenly in the line of solders, she saw him. The boy who had killed Morris. She knew he was Morris’ killer. There was no mistake.”
― Beverly Magid, Sown in Tears: A Historical Novel of Love and Struggle

“All my life, longings lived inside me, rising up like nocturnes to wail and sing through the night. That my husband bent his heart to mine on our thin straw mat and listened was the kindness I most loved in him. What he heard was my life begging to be born.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

“He was feeling a new heresy coming over him, possibly as a result of the spirits, and it had something to do about the celibacy of the clergy. He had one already about the shape of his tonsure and the usual one about the date of Easter, as well as his of Pelagian business-but the latest was beginning to make him feel as if the presence of children was unnecessary.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“Maybe it wasn't a good idea to rank the people in your life. That's not how the heart worked. The heart didn't make lists.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, The Inexplicable Logic of My Life

“Unless you have been very, very lucky, you have undoubtedly experienced events in your life that have made you cry. So unless you have been very, very lucky, you know that a good, long session of weeping can often make you feel better, even if your circumstances have not changed one bit.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“The fights are always the same”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“Mary dashed the rain from her eyes with a frozen hand. Was that a knife buried in the man’s chest with the blood seeping up around it? Doesn’t that mean he’s alive? Although with the blade at that angle, it can’t be for long. Colors swam in the water coating Mary’s vision. She rubbed her face, and with every shuttering breath, even before she could see his features, she knew her son, George, the son she had never met, was dead.”
― Susan Rowland, Murder on Family Grounds

“Snake Street is an area I should avoid. Yet that night I was drawn there as surely as if I had an appointment. 
The Snake House is shabby on the outside to hide the wealth within. Everyone knows of the wealth, but facades, like the park’s wall, must be maintained. A lantern hung from the porch eaves. A sign, written in Utte, read ‘Kinship of the Serpent’. I stared at that sign, at that porch, at the door with its twisted handle, and wondered what the people inside would do if I entered. Would they remember me? Greet me as Kin? Or drive me out and curse me for faking my death?  Worse, would they expect me to redon the life I’ve shed? Staring at that sign, I pissed in the street like the Mearan savage I’ve become.
As I started to leave, I saw a woman sitting in the gutter. Her lamp attracted me. A memsa’s lamp, three tiny flames to signify the Holy Trinity of Faith, Purity, and Knowledge.  The woman wasn’t a memsa. Her young face was bruised and a gash on her throat had bloodied her clothing. Had she not been calmly assessing me, I would have believed the wound to be mortal. I offered her a copper. 
She refused, “I take naught for naught,” and began to remove trinkets from a cloth bag, displaying them for sale.
Her Utte accent had been enough to earn my coin. But to assuage her pride I commented on each of her worthless treasures, fighting the urge to speak Utte. (I spoke Universal with the accent of an upper class Mearan though I wondered if she had seen me wetting the cobblestones like a shameless commoner.) After she had arranged her wares, she looked up at me. “What do you desire, O Noble Born?”
I laughed, certain now that she had seen my act in front of the Snake House and, letting my accent match the coarseness of my dress, I again offered the copper.
 “Nay, Noble One. You must choose.” She lifted a strand of red beads. “These to adorn your lady’s bosom?”
            I shook my head. I wanted her lamp. But to steal the light from this woman ... I couldn’t ask for it. She reached into her bag once more and withdrew a book, leather-bound, the pages gilded on the edges. “Be this worthy of desire, Noble Born?”
 I stood stunned a moment, then touched the crescent stamped into the leather and asked if she’d stolen the book. She denied it. I’ve had the Training; she spoke truth. Yet how could she have come by a book bearing the Royal Seal of the Haesyl Line? I opened it. The pages were blank.
“Take it,” she urged. “Record your deeds for study. Lo, the steps of your life mark the journey of your soul.”
  I told her I couldn’t afford the book, but she smiled as if poverty were a blessing and said, “The price be one copper. Tis a wee price for salvation, Noble One.”
  So I bought this journal. I hide it under my mattress. When I lie awake at night, I feel the journal beneath my back and think of the woman who sold it to me. Damn her. She plagues my soul. I promised to return the next night, but I didn’t. I promised to record my deeds. But I can’t. The price is too high.”
― K. Ritz, Sheever's Journal, Diary of a Poison Master

“Our society assigns us a tiny number of roles: We're producers of one thing at work, consumers of a great many things all the rest of the time, and then, once a year or so, we take on the temporary role of citizen and cast a vote. Virtually all our needs and desires we delegate to specialists of one kind or another - our meals to the food industry, our health to the medical profession, entertainment to Hollywood and the media, mental health to the therapist or the drug company, caring for nature to the environmentalist, political action to the politician, and on and on it goes. Before long it becomes hard to imagine doing much of anything for ourselves - anything, that is, except the work we do "to make a living." For everything else, we feel like we've lost the skills, or that there's someone who can do it better... it seems as though we can no longer imagine anyone but a professional or an institution or a product supplying our daily needs or solving our problems.”
― Michael Pollan, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation

“Longing is the agony of the nearness of the distant.”
― Martin Heidegger

“She smelled like herself, like the wind through a tree.”
― Junot Díaz, Drown

“The Noise is a man unfiltered, and without a filter, a man is just chaos walking.”
― Patrick Ness, The Knife of Never Letting Go

“That old unionism was, however, very different from the kind we live with now. We do not live with an ideal, sometimes on the defensive, of union. We live with the overriding, overwhelming fact, a fact so technologically, economically, and politically validated that we usually forget to ask how fully this fact represents a true community, the spiritually significant communion which the old romantic unionism had envisaged.”
― Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War

“Every general prohibition creates its bootleggers.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love