Albert > Albert's Quotes

“Over the years, The Cult of the Clan’s finest hunters had tried and failed to capture a changeling and Bonnyman was determined he would not make the same mistakes as his peers. Their stories littered the pages of the Cult’s history like garbage discarded in the street.”
― Frank Lambert, Xyz

“But things had changed, and now she sat in her car outside her childhood residence staring at an open gate with a fifteen-inch Bowie knife in her lap, thinking. ”
― Chad Boudreaux, Homecoming Queen

“You realize assuming can often lead to getting into trouble.”
― March Lions, The Last Sunset

“Convincing all nations in the civilized world to agree that any investments into these corporations should be tax-free was not an easy task. Tea with the Queen didn’t quite cut it. Saki with the Japanese Prime Minister was pleasant, but not quite enough. We had to offer major trade concessions to our partner nations to bring them to the negotiating table. In retrospect, it was a small price to pay. The talks earned me the title of “The Great Negotiator.” I didn't mind.”
― Nancy Omeara, The Most Popular President Who Ever Lived [So Far]

“I walked past Malison, up Lower Main to Main and across the road. I didn’t need to look to know he was behind me. I entered Royal Wood, went a short way along a path and waited. It was cool and dim beneath the trees. When Malison entered the Wood, I continued eastward. 
I wanted to place his body in hallowed ground. He was born a Mearan. The least I could do was send him to Loric. The distance between us closed until he was on my heels. He chose to come, I told myself, as if that lessened the crime I planned. He chose what I have to offer.
We were almost to the cemetery before he asked where we were going. I answered with another question. “Do you like living in the High Lord’s kitchens?”
He, of course, replied, “No.”
“Well, we’re going to a better place.”
When we reached the edge of the Wood, I pushed aside a branch to see the Temple of Loric and Calec’s cottage. No smoke was coming from the chimney, and I assumed the old man was yet abed. His pony was grazing in the field of graves. The sun hid behind a bank of clouds.
Malison moved beside me. “It’s a graveyard.”
“Are you afraid of ghosts?” I asked.
“My father’s a ghost,” he whispered.
I asked if he wanted to learn how to throw a knife. He said, “Yes,” as I knew he would.  He untucked his shirt, withdrew the knife he had stolen and gave it to me. It was a thick-bladed, single-edged knife, better suited for dicing celery than slitting a young throat. But it would serve my purpose. That I also knew. I’d spent all night projecting how the morning would unfold and, except for indulging in the tea, it had happened as I had imagined. 
Damut kissed her son farewell. Malison followed me of his own free will. Without fear, he placed the instrument of his death into my hand. We were at the appointed place, at the appointed time. The stolen knife was warm from the heat of his body. I had only to use it. Yet I hesitated, and again prayed for Sythene to show me a different path.
“Aren’t you going to show me?” Malison prompted, as if to echo my prayer.”
― K. Ritz, Sheever's Journal, Diary of a Poison Master

“Inseparable as sibs—strained as a couple.”
― Andri E. Elia, Borealis: A Worldmaker of Yand Novel

“Metamorphoses" he said, "are our way of showing, in riddles, that we know we are part of the animal world”
― A.S. Byatt, Possession

“I kept returning to this new and bizarre question: is there anything that actually is as it seems? Is anything perceptually straightforward? Maybe that’s inherently impossible, because impressions are, by their very nature, cumulative – the sum of all your interactions with and perceptions of things.”
― Zack Love, The Syrian Virgin

“I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“If your world is out there and you are in here then the only things that will gather within these walls are time and bitterness. Eventually, that bitterness will eat away at you and leave nothing behind but resentment and hate.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Zombie Room

“I wished I could share my own optimism.”
― Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair

“We may with confidence approach the throne. We may walk in the garden with Him once again.”
― Ami Loper, Constant Companion: Your Practical Path to Real Interaction with God

“The craggy lines that made up the character in his face now seemed like scars of defeat, inflicted on him over time.”
― R.D. Ronald, The Elephant Tree

“Somethings wrong,’ he told her.
‘Be specific Jack,’ she said pressuring him.
Jack turned again to the desert. ‘We should already be dead,’ he said. ‘That’s what’s wrong.”
― A.R. Merrydew, The Girl with the Porcelain Lips

“4. Tufle harbour was a hubbub of noise. Carracks and caravels jostled for moorings at the harbour wall. Merchants squabbled over transport to carry their goods to Tamin, either overland, or on the ferries on the Amin River. Sailors bawled at each other to catch a rope or steady a rogue barrel of wine. At one side of the harbour the fishing busses were unloading their catches, drawing excitement from the circling sea birds. In the background to the cacophony in the harbour came the regular thud of hammering, like some strange heartbeat accompanying the harbour’s living noise. The shipyards at Tufle were only a stone’s throw away to the south.”
― Robert Reid, The Empress

“Maybe we can politely ignore each other forever? I think that's the mature thing to do.”
― Sara Pascoe, Faber Faber Weirdo Intense, also BRILLIANT, funny and forensically astute. Marian Keyes.

“Past regrets may not be correctable, but sometimes for a writer the pain of his or her failure can be softened by the work of his hand.”
― Paul A. Barra

“Why do you have such faith in me, Aurelia?" 
"I've told you a million times that I love you, you make me feel safe and cherished, and you care deeply for our people. Why wouldn't I have faith in you?”
― Therisa Peimer, Taming Flame

“Man is an everlack, an infinite withoutness, afloat on an apparently endless ocean of apparently endless indifference to individual things. Obscurely he sees catastrophes happening to other rafts, rafts that are too distant for him to determine whether they have other humans aboard, but too numerous and too identical for him to presume that they have not.”
― John Fowles, Áristos

“This horse has got a good master, and he deserves it.”
― Anna Sewell, Black Beauty

“The universe just does not give a shit.”
― Dan Simmons, Endymion

“We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“None of that used to be in Brian and now it was a part of him, a changed part of him, a grown part of him, and the two things, his mind and his body, had come together as well, had made a connection with each other that he didn’t quite understand”
― Gary Paulsen, Hatchet

“And I’d prefer you function the very best you can at that appointment. My interests are extremely selfish, no remissions permitted.”
― Robert Ludlum, The Bourne Identity