Dylan Mckeon > Dylan's Quotes

“Equality is not a concept. It's not something we should be striving for. It's a necessity. Equality is like gravity. We need it to stand on this earth as men and women, and the misogyny that is in every culture is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of balance, and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and woman who's confronted with it. We need equality. Kinda now.”
― Joss Whedon

“Where is your sense of patriotism?"

I keep it hid away safe, along with my sense of trust, Mr. Clent. I don't use 'em much in case they get scratched.”
― Frances Hardinge, Fly by Night

“If you want someone to tell you what to think..."

"You will never be short of people willing to do so.”
― Frances Hardinge, Fly by Night

“But in the name of all that is holy, Mosca, of all the people you could have taken up with, why Eponymous Clent?" murmured Kohlrabi.

Because I'd been hording words for years, buying them from peddlers and carving them secretly on bits of bark so I wouldn't forget them, and then he turned up using words like "epiphany" and "amaranth." Because I heard him talking in the marketplace, laying out sentences like a merchant rolling out rich silks. Because he made words and ideas dance like flames and something that was damp and dying came alive in my mind, the way it hadn't since they burned my father's books. Because he walked into Chough with stories from exciting places tangled around him like maypole streamers..."

Mosca shrugged.
"He's got a way with words.”
― Frances Hardinge, Fly by Night

“The world is full of liars of different humours.”
― Frances Hardinge, Fly by Night

“Sometimes fear made you angry. Perhaps after years anger cooled, like a sword taken from a forge. Perhaps in the end you were left with something very cold and very sharp.”
― Frances Hardinge, Fly by Night

“I generally find,' Clent murmured after a pause, 'that it is best to treat borrowed time the same way as borrowed money. Spend it with panache, and try to be somewhere else when it runs out.'

'And when we get found, Mr. Clent, when the creditors and bailiffs come after us and it's payment time...'

'...then we borrow more, madam, at a higher interest. We embark on a wilder gamble, make a bigger promise, tell a braver story, devise a more intricate lie, sell the hides of imaginary dragons to desperate men, climb to even higher and more precarious ground...and later, of course, our fall and catastrophe will be all the worse, but later will be our watchword, Mosca. We have nothing else - but we can at least make later later.”
― Frances Hardinge, Fly Trap

“I mean, I knew I wasn't a nice person, but what did I do in my past life to deserve this? I must have hit a bus full of nuns while driving a stolen car on my way to selling drugs to schoolchildren!”
― Joss Whedon

“If you can't run, you crawl. If you can't crawl-- you find someone to carry you.”
― Joss Whedon

“In Mosca’s experience, a ‘long story’ was always a short story someone did not want to tell.”
― Frances Hardinge, Fly by Night

“Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!”
― Hoban "Wash" Washburne

“At one o’clock, the ever-logical Right-Eye Grand Steward woke up to discover that during his sleep his left-eyed counterpart had executed three of his advisors for treason, ordered the creation of a new carp pool and banned limericks. Worse still, no progress had been made in tracking down the Kleptomancer, and of the two people believed to be his accomplices, both had been released from prison and one had been appointed food taster. Right-Eye was not amused. He had known for centuries that he could trust nobody but himself. Now he was seriously starting to wonder about himself.”
― Frances Hardinge, A Face Like Glass

“...the wincing sunlight, the ragged gorse and the slow-blinking wings of the moths were witness to an epic Trade in Exotic Terms.

Mosca’s opening offer was a number of cant words she had heard pedlars use, words for the drool hanging from a dog’s jaw, words for the greenish sheen on a mouldering strip of bacon.

Eponymous Clent responded with some choice descriptions of ungrateful and treacherous women, culled from ballad and classic myth.

Mosca countered with some from her secret hoard of hidden words, the terms used by smugglers for tell-alls, and soldiers’ words for the worst kind of keyholestooping spy.

Clent answered with crushing and high-sounding examples from the best essays on the natural depravity of unguided youth.

Mosca lowered the bucket deep, and spat out long-winded aspersions which long ago she had discovered in her father’s books, before her uncle had over-zealously burned them all.

Clent stared at her.

‘This is absurd. I refuse to believe that you have even the faintest idea what an “ethically pusillanimous compromise” is, let alone how one would...’ Clent’s voice trailed away...”
― Frances Hardinge, Fly by Night

“Since that time Saracen had been making a name for himself. That name was not ‘Saracen’. Indeed the name was more along the lines of ‘that hell-fowl’, ‘did-you-see-what-it-did-to-my-leg’, ‘kill-it-kill-it-there-it-goes’ or ‘what’s-that-chirfugging-goose-done-now’.”
― Frances Hardinge, Fly Trap

“Eponymous Clent- Wanted for thirty-nine cases of fraud, counterfeiting, selling, and circulating lewd and unlicensed literature, claiming to be the impecunious son of a duke, impersonating a magistrate, impersonating a horse doctor, breach of promise, forty-seven moonlit flits without payment of debts, robbing shrines, fleeing from justice before trial, stealing pies from windows and small furniture from inns, fabricating the Great Palthrop Horse Plague for purposes of profit, operating a hurdy-gurdy without a license. The public is advised against lending him money, buying anything from him, letting him rooms, or believing a word he says. Contrary to his professions, he will not pay you the day after tomorrow.”
― Frances Hardinge, Fly Trap

“Ordinary life did not stop just because kings rose and fell, Mosca realized. People adapted. If the world turned upside down, everyone ran and hid in their houses, but a very short while later, if all seemed quiet, they came out again and started selling each other potatoes.”
― Frances Hardinge, Fly by Night

“All these years I've been...I'm...' He still seemed to be choking. 'I'm...an orphan. I'm...I'm alone. I'm...I'm...I'm...free.' He pushed himself up on one elbow, staring at his hands as if for the first time they had become his own. 'I can...I can do anything. I can leave Jealousy! I can break my spectacles and run off barefoot to become a...a...cobbler! I can...I can marry my housekeeper! Do I have a housekeeper? I never had time to notice! But now I can get a housekeeper! And marry her!”
― Frances Hardinge, The Lost Conspiracy

“My good lady,’ interrupted Clent, ‘are you telling me that he is not the Luck? That you have in some way obfuscated the chronology of his nativity?’

Seconds passed. A beetle flew into Mistress Leap’s hair while she stared at Clent, then it struggled free and flew off again.

‘Did you lie about when he was born?’ translated Mosca.”
― Frances Hardinge, Fly Trap

“It was hopeless. She was flawless. She was a sunbeam. Mosca gave up and got on with hating her.”
― Frances Hardinge, Fly Trap

“That," he whispered, "is unthinkable." In Mosca’s experience, such statements generally meant that a thing was perfectly thinkable, but that the speaker did not want to think it.”
― Frances Hardinge, Fly Trap

“Mosca said nothing. The word ‘damsel’ rankled with her. She suddenly thought of the clawed girl from the night before, jumping the filch on an icy street. Much the same age and build as Beamabeth, and far more beleaguered. What made a girl a ‘damsel in distress’? Were they not allowed claws? Mosca had a hunch that if all damsels had claws they would spend a lot less time ‘in distress’.”
― Frances Hardinge, Fly Trap

“Gravelip, a young, slight footman with a pocked nose and large ears, obediently gave a smile like toothache. He seemed less than delighted to have outpaced his friends in the ugliness race.”
― Frances Hardinge, Fly Trap

“You’re a peach full of poison, you know that?" Mosca snapped back, but could not quite keep a hint of admiration from her tone.”
― Frances Hardinge, Fly Trap

“Lost: one bonnet, two clogs. Kept in spite of the odds: two thumbs, one life.”
― Frances Hardinge, Fly Trap

“By the time Brand Appleton reached the castle grounds, he had acquired a significant crowd. Never in the history of Toll had one man needed so many people to arrest him.”
― Frances Hardinge, Fly Trap

“It is terribly bad form to admit to being terrified for one’s life, but nobody in their right mind would go to a Court banquet without making preparations. One must have the right costume, the right Faces, and at least eighty-two ways of avoiding assassination.”
― Frances Hardinge, A Face Like Glass

“Well, they set spiders and snakes on me for a bit and blew me up and there was this really scary cake, but it’s mostly all right now, I think. Except I don’t ever want any more cake. Look!”
― Frances Hardinge, A Face Like Glass

“Do you know why a vandal is worse than a thief?" asked the man on the right, in a soft growl. "A thief steals a treasure from its owner. A vandal steals it from the world.”
― Frances Hardinge, A Face Like Glass

“Don’t sneeze, don’t point at anybody with your little finger, don’t scratch your left eyebrow, don’t angle your knife so that it reflects light in somebody’s eyes unless you’re challenging them to a duel...”
― Frances Hardinge, A Face Like Glass

“Brand a man as a thief and no one will ever hire him for honest labor - he will be a hardened robber within weeks. The brand does not reveal a person's nature, it shapes it.”
― Frances Hardinge, Fly by Night