Oli > Oli's Quotes

“I am rooted, but I flow. All gold, flowing …”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“She remembered when Will had died, her agony, the long nights alone, reaching across the bed every morning when she woke up, for eighty years expecting to find him there, and only slowly growing accustomed to the fact that that side of the bed would always be empty. The moments when she had found something funny and turned to share the joke with him, only to be shocked anew that he was not there. The worst moments, when, sitting alone at breakfast, she had realized that she had forgotten the precise blue of his eyes or the depth of his laugh; that like the sound of Jem's violin, they had faded into the distance where memories are silent.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Princess

“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“He is half of my soul, as the poets say.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out of the sun.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“You are all the colors in one, at full brightness.”
― Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places

“The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

“If I cannot be better than them, I will become so much worse.”
― Holly Black, The Cruel Prince

“Come home and shout at me. Come home and fight with me. Come home and break my heart, if you must.”
― Holly Black, The Queen of Nothing

“It’s you I love,” he says. “I spent much of my life guarding my heart. I guarded it so well that I could behave as though I didn’t have one at all. Even now, it is a shabby, worm-eaten, and scabrous thing. But it is yours.” He walks to the door to the royal chambers, as though to end the conversation. “You probably guessed as much,” he says. “But just in case you didn’t.”
― Holly Black, The Queen of Nothing

“The three of you have one solution to every problem. Murder. No key fits every lock.” Cardan gives us all a stern look, holding up a long-fingered hand with my stolen ruby ring still on one finger. “Someone tries to betray the High King, murder. Someone gives you a harsh look, murder. Someone disrespects you, murder. Someone ruins your laundry, murder.”
― Holly Black, The Wicked King

“Fire is catching! And if we burn, you burn with us!”
― Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay

“It has become such an automatic reaction to pain, for him to mask it with a grin. Oak, laughing all the time. Pretending nothing hurts. A false face hiding a false heart.”
― Holly Black, The Prisoner’s Throne

“I have always believed that places with long history, especially those in which terrible events have taken place, retain something of those times, some trace in the air, just as I have been in many a cathedral all over the world and sensed the impress of centuries of prayers and devotions. Places are often filled with their own pasts and exude a sense of then, an atmosphere of great good or great evil, which can be picked up by anyone sensitive to their surroundings.”
― Susan Hill

“I am rooted, but I flow. All gold, flowing that way.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“I thought: I cannot bear this world a moment longer. Then, child, make another.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“I would say, some people are like constellations that only touch the earth for a season.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“A golden cage is still a cage.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“Yet some say lovers are mad.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“As it turned out, I did kill pigs that night after all.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“It is a common saying that women are delicate creatures, flowers, eggs, anything that may be crushed in a moment's carelessness. If I had ever believed it, I no longer did.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“So many years I had spent as a child sifting his bright features for his thoughts, trying to glimpse among them one that bore my name. But he was a harp with only one string, and the note it played was himself.

“You have always been the worst of my children,” he said. “Be sure to not dishonor me.”

“I have a better idea. I will do as I please, and when you count your children, leave me out.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“I am forty years old now, and you know forty years is a whole lifetime; you know it is extreme old age. To live longer than forty years is bad manners, is vulgar, immoral. Who does live beyond forty? Answer that, sincerely and honestly. I will tell you who do: fools and worthless fellows. I tell all old men that to their face, all these venerable old men, all these silver-haired and reverend seniors! I tell the whole world that to its face! I have a right to say so, for I shall go on living to sixty myself. To seventy! To eighty!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead