Shani Mainello > Shani's Quotes

“I hope to be bowing in front of you for a long time.” He takes my hand, drops to one knee, and kisses my fingers.”
― Tricia Copeland, To Be a Fae Queen

“Jack? It’s Margeaux.”
“My sister? Why would my sister be calling me? How did she get my number? Crazy questions blipped through my head. I knew she had married and was living in New Orleans, but we rarely spoke and have never been close by any means”
“Margeaux?”
“I’m calling from the police station. Dad was just brought in and I thought I should let you know.”
“What! Why was he brought in?”
“Jack, he’s been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. He drove himself into New Orleans to Quest Diagnostic for some blood tests and he was waiting to be called. Apparently, they took other people back that had come in after him. He got upset and made a scene. The staff tried to explain that those people all had appointments and he didn’t. He became so abusive, they called security, but before they even got there, Dad knocked down one of the technicians. That’s when they called the police. They came and took him.”
― Behcet Kaya, Treacherous Estate

“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

“It felt like stepping into a lie told very, very well.
          ”
― D.L. Maddox, The Dog Walker: The Prequel

“The captain saluted and left, and Alix heard him shouting orders to men to form a firing squad and then orders for the prisoners to be brought out and lined up. There seemed to be some kind of altercation going on. Someone was protesting vocally.
‘I am a British airman and I demand to be treated as a prisoner of war!’
The sound of the voice struck her somewhere in the middle of her chest and she jumped to her feet and ran out of the house. A ragged line of prisoners was drawn up on the far side of the clearing with a dozen Partisans carrying rifles facing them. Her eyes went along the line. Every face was heavily bearded, unrecognisable at a distance, but then a difference in the way the men were dressed struck her. All wore tunics that had some suggestion of a uniform but on one man the trousers that protruded below it, though ragged and faded, were unmistakably Air Force blue.
‘Ready!’ shouted the captain. ‘Take aim.’
‘No!’ Alix tore across the clearing and flung herself between the firing line and the prisoners. ‘No! I know this man! He is an American, but with the British RAF. He is not an enemy.’
‘Not an enemy?’ the captain queried. ‘Then what is he doing fighting alongside the Chetniks?’
‘I don’t know,’ Alix said breathlessly. ‘But you can’t shoot him without finding out. If you shoot a British serviceman you could jeopardise any help we might get.’
The captain looked uneasy. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘We’ll let Comrade Tito decide about this.’ He called to one of the men guarding the prisoners. ‘Bring that man over here. The one who’s been causing all the trouble.’
The man in the blue trousers was shoved roughly forward.
‘Alix!’ he gasped hoarsely. ‘Thank god!’
She caught hold of his arm. ‘Steve? It is you, isn’t it?’
‘What’s left of him,’ he responded, with an effort at a smile.
 ”
― Holly Green, A Call to Home

“Ivan, the Russian sharpshooter, was sitting, gun in hand, behind one of Borg’s men on a motorbike further down South Eaton Place. The wooden barriers, the parked lorry and the elderly gentleman with the stick were all part of Isaac Walsh’s plan, aimed at hampering the policemen and giving Abbott a chance to escape.”
― Mark Ellis, Death of an Officer

“I've come to the conclusion that what superheroes might be — in their current incarnation, at least — is a symbol of American reluctance to involve themselves in any kind of conflict without massive tactical superiority.”
― Alan Moore

“People who keep stiff upper lips find that it's damn hard to smile.”
― Judith Guest, Ordinary People

“If, to expose the fraud and imposition of monarchy ... to promote universal peace, civilization, and commerce, and to break the chains of political superstition, and raise degraded man to his proper rank; if these things be libellous ... let the name of libeller be engraved on my tomb."

[Letter Addressed To The Addressers On The Late Proclamation, 1792 (Paine's response to the charge of "seditious libel" brought against him after the publication of The Rights of Man)]”
― Thomas Paine, The Thomas Paine Reader

“Such silly things, children -- and so embarrassing -- because they keep changing themselves out of shame, out of a need to be loved or something. While animals are born who they are, accept it, and that is that. They live with greater peace than people do.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Sticks and stones may break our bones, but words will break our hearts. . . .”
― Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

“  Mary fought a savage impulse to slam the door on the couple. But they were too interesting to ignore in the circumstances of the murder. She caught sight of Richard spitting out a mouthful of hair.”
― Susan Rowland, Murder on Family Grounds

“Scott could feel the contents of his stomach flip over and over on themselves. He turned to the side and retched, frothy yellow bile spilled out onto the newspaper covered floor, filling the room with the putrid stench of previously ingested alcohol.

'Look's like someone can't hold their drink,' McBlane said, and Dominic and Shugg laughed.

Scott was still staring at the steam rising from his evacuated stomach contents as he heard the hammer fall. The dull crack of bone splintering under its weight.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Elephant Tree

“She’s a cop’s wife. She understands what her husband does for a living,” the priest said.”
― A.G. Russo, The Cases Nobody Wanted

“Hours passed—or maybe days. It didn’t matter. The body adapted. But the mind—
The mind needed purpose.
      ”
― D.L. Maddox, The Dog Walker: The Prequel

“My Lady, turn away; do not look into the wagon, it is too frightening for a lady to view.”
― Dorlies von Kaphengst Meissner Rasmussen, Escaping the Russian Onslaught: A Family’s Story of Fleeing the Russian Army after Hitler’s Nazi Regime

“… the primitive comprehension that the state property represents a social one, their identification, and their equalization  could not resist the criticism of the time. The state property is not socialism. The state-monopoly property, as it was on the both sides of the Berlin Wall and which continues to be such one even after it dropped down, is not social property. There was never and nowhere any socialism! In the twentieth century, we passed through a system of utopian socialism as proof that this was not socialism that was not possible, but the utopia of the writers before Marx and after Marx. We were visited by a utopian socialism, which at the contemporary stage is simply capitalism—state, monopolistic.”
― Todor Bombov, Socialism Is Dead! Long Live Socialism!: The Marx Code-Socialism with a Human Face

“The bank gods paid a visit after sunset, towering and stiff, ponderously regal and quasiparental in the gray twilight.”
― Gary Clemenceau, Banker's Holiday: A Novel of Fiscal Irregularity

“The world is full of magic. You’ve just got to learn how to access it.”
― Max Nowaz, Get Rich or Get Lucky

“Knowing he had done wrong, prepared to make amends, settle his business. Determined to return to Brokeland, open the doors wide to the angel of retail death, and run the place into the ground all by himself, if that was what it took-but to fail calmly, to fail with style, to fail above all with that true dignity, unknown to his wife or his partner, which lay in never tripping out, never showing offense or hurt to those who had offended or hurt you.”
― Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue

“It's like there's this wave coming toward me, but there's nothing I can do about it. And then it reaches me, crashes over me and...and I'm done for another day. I just give up. Give in to it. Because how do you stop a wave?

You don't. And you're wise to recognize your powerlessness to do so. But what you can do is learn how to negotiate this wave. Work within the context of its inevitability.”
― Wally Lamb, The Hour I First Believed

“What I do know is that wondering why you survived don’t help you survive.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Silver Star

“A porpoise sounded twenty yards away from us in an explosion of breath, startling us. . . . Then another porpoise broke the water and rolled toward us. A third and a fourth porpoise neared the board and we could feel great secret shapes eyeing us from below. I reached out to touch the back of one, its skin the color of jade, but as I reached the porpoise dove and my hand touched moonlight where the dorsal fin had been cutting through the silken waters. The dolphins had obviously smelled the flood tide of boyhood in the sea and heard the hormones singing in the boy0scented water. None of us spoke as the porpoises circled us. The visitation was something so rare and perfect that we knew by instinct not to speak – and then, as quickly as they had come, the porpoises moved away from us, moved south where there were fish to be hunted.
“Each of us would remember that night floating on the waves all during our lives. It was the year before we went to high school when we were poised on the slippery brink between childhood and adulthood, admiring our own daring as we floated free from the vigilance and approval of adult eyes, ruled only by the indifference of stars and fate. It was the purest moment of freedom and headlong exhilaration that I had ever felt. A wordless covenant was set among us the night of the porpoises.”
― Pat Conroy, Beach Music

“Time spent looking back in anger is time wasted.”
― Mary Stewart, The Last Enchantment