Edda Flaa > Edda's Quotes

“Audun, there is something I must now explain to you. You are the illegitimate son of Alberon, who now calls himself Emperor of the North.”
― Robert Reid, The Emperor

“See you later, tailgater.”
― Merlin Franco, Saint Richard Parker

“I sat there in the lobby with a 7Up and a hog-tied Japanese nymphomaniac locked in my room”
― Edward Williams, Framed & Hunted: A True Story of Occult Persecution

“After that, nothing was the same. The very notion of my having a family turned vague, hard to credit, even weirdly jokey.”
― Michael Wyndham Thomas, The Erkeley Shadows

“My heart aches, a drowsy numbness pains as if of hemlock I had drunk."

Ode To A NIghtengale, John Keats”
― Barbara Sontheimer

“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

“George didn't do quiet or subtle. His big paws kicked up rocks as he stretched into his own version of a freight train.”
― Lisa Kaniut Cobb, Down in the Valley

“I can imagine,’ laughed Bab’s. ‘It’s not every day of the week you meet a female lizard with nail varnish, lipstick and the scent of Channel Number Five.”
― A.R. Merrydew, Inara

“Young fantasies of magic and of mystery
Are over. But they really can't compete
With all we've built together: A long history.
Connections that help render us complete.
Ties that hold and heal us. And the sweet,
Sweet pleasures of an ordinary life.”
― Judith Viorst, Forever Fifty and Other Negotiations

“Centrum permanebit.”
― Richelle Mead, The Fiery Heart

“You cannot hide the soul.”
― Herman Melville

“I felt knowledge and the unity of the world circulate in me like my own blood.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“Some, perhaps, would fall by the way. Some, old or sick, would drop out of the caravan and creep away into a solitary place to die; others would be picked off by gunners, defying the law for the fancied pleasure of stopping in full flight a brave and fiercely burning life; still others, perhaps, would fall in exhaustion into the sea. But no awareness of possible failure or disaster dwelt in the moving host, flying with sweet pipings through the northern sky. In them burned once more the fever of migration, consuming with its fire all other desires and passions.”
― Rachel Carson, Under the Sea-Wind

“I'm playing 'chicken' with a kid called 'Robin.' I don't know why he's showing off. I don't know why I'm going along with it. I don't even know where we're going. It could be a robbery. Or prison break. A gang war. Or free donuts at Lenny's. He sees that Bat-signal in the sky and takes off. Like a bird out of Hell. And he just expects me to follow him. And I do.”
― Chuck Dixon, Batgirl: Year One

“Ah! You speak Levitan,” the man smiled. “But you’re not from Levita I think.” Like
most Levitians he was a good looking man, if perhaps a bit effete for Brown’s tastes. 
“No, I lived there for a while.” 
“Did you enjoy your stay?”
“Up to a point. The Levitian women are very beautiful.”
“Yes of course. So are the men in Levita,” the man smiled. “We used to have a
cleansing programme to ensure a healthy population.”
“You mean a culling policy, where you killed all the weakest members of the
population.”
― Max Nowaz, The Arbitrator

“Many believers are missing freedom and abundant life because they’re standing beside God’s will but not in God’s will.”
― Kathryn Krick, Unlock Your Deliverance: Keys to Freedom From Demonic Oppression

“… 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

“If one does not react to gossip, the informer hushes more quickly.”
― K. Ritz, Sheever's Journal, Diary of a Poison Master

“The sunset bled into the edges of the village. Smoke curled out of the cottage chimney like a crooked finger.”
― Sara Pascoe, Being a Witch, and Other Things I Didn't Ask For

“You can be a natural athlete with terrible work habits, and that ends up wasting your gifts.”
― Vernon Davis, Playing Ball: Life Lessons from My Journey to the Super Bowl and Beyond

“It is life, more than death, that has no limits.”
― Gabriel García Márquez

“It is only when taught deceit by the commerce of the world, that we learn to shroud our character from observation, and to disguise our real sentiments from those with whom we are placed in communion.”
― Walter Scott, The Monastery

“I am a cutter, you see. Also a snipper, a slicer, a carver, a jabber. I am a very special case. I have a purpose. My skin, you see, screams. It's covered with words - cook, cupcake, kitty, curls - as if a knife-wielding first-grader learned to write on my flesh. I sometimes, but only sometimes, laugh. Getting out of the bath and seeing, out of the corner of my eye, down the side of a leg: babydoll. Pull on a sweater and, in a flash of my wrist: harmful. Why these words? Thousands of hours of therapy have yielded a few ideas from the good doctors. They are often feminine, in a Dick and Jane, pink vs. puppy dog tails sort of way. Or they're flat-out negative. Number of synonyms for anxious carved in my skin: eleven. The one thing I know for sure is that at the time, it was crucial to see these letters on me, and not just see them, but feel them. Burning on my left hip: petticoat.

And near it, my first word, slashed on an anxious summer day at age thirteen: wicked. I woke up that morning, hot and bored, worried about the hours ahead. How do you keep safe when your whole day is as wide and empty as the sky? Anything could happen. I remember feeling that word, heavy and slightly sticky across my pubic bone. My mother's steak knife. Cutting like a child along red imaginary lines. Cleaning myself. Digging in deeper. Cleaning myself. Pouring bleach over the knife and sneaking through the kitchen to return it. Wicked. Relief. The rest of the day, I spent ministering to my wound. Dig into the curves of W with an alcohol-soaked Q-tip. Pet my cheek until the sting went away. Lotion. Bandage. Repeat.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“He learned to read the ocean by a cupful. He also learned to regard each port of call as part of the journey and not as the destination. Every voyage begins when you do.”
― E.L. Konigsburg, The View from Saturday

“Shakespeare drew a map of the human mind as clearly as Newton mapped the heavens. Wht is one considered science and the other fir only to be mocked with jokes about pretty girls and drury lane?”
― Sebastian Faulks

“When I consider that the nobler animal have been exterminated here - the cougar, the panther, lynx, wolverine, wolf, bear, moose, dear, the beaver, the turkey and so forth and so forth, I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed and, as it were, emasculated country... Is it not a maimed and imperfect nature I am conversing with? As if I were to study a tribe of Indians that had lost all it's warriors...I take infinite pains to know all the phenomena of the spring, for instance, thinking that I have here the entire poem, and then, to my chagrin, I hear that it is but an imperfect copy that I possess and have read, that my ancestors have torn out many of the first leaves and grandest passages, and mutilated it in many places. I should not like to think that some demigod had come before me and picked out some of the best of the stars. I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth.”
― Henry David Thoreau, The Journal, 1837-1861