Taylor > Taylor's Quotes

“I have tried to dismantle you, Gideon Nav! The Ninth House poisoned you, we trod you underfoot—I took you to this killing field as my slave—you refuse to die, and you pity me! Strike me down. You’ve won. I’ve lived my whole wretched life at your mercy, yours alone, and God knows I deserve to die at your hand. You are my only friend. I am undone without you.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth

“Believe," said the rumbling voice. "If you are to survive, you must believe."

"Believe what?" asked Shadow. "What should I believe?"

He stared at Shadow, the buffalo man, and he drew himself up huge, and his eyes filled with fire. He opened his spit-flecked buffalo mouth and it was red inside with the flames that burned inside him, under the earth.

"Everything," roared the buffalo man.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“It doesn't matter that you didn't believe in us," said Mr. Ibis. "We believed in you.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“Why was I born so attractive?” “Because everyone would have throttled you within the first five minutes otherwise,”
― Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth

“Hey," said Shadow. "Huginn or Muninn, or whoever you are."
The bird turned, head tipped, suspiciously, on one side, and it stared at him with bright eyes.
"Say 'Nevermore,'" said Shadow.
"Fuck you," said the raven.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“My hands are yours,” she said. “Please don’t ask me for them again.”
― E.K. Johnston, Queen's Hope

“They think we grant wishes. If I could grant wishes do you think I would be driving a cab?”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“And she is laughing, tears streaming down her cheeks, and he wants to wipe them away, but his hands are her hands, and she is drawing.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“Harrow laughed. It was the first time she had ever heard Harrow really laugh. It was a rather weak and tired sound.

"Gideon the Ninth, first flower of my House," she said hoarsely, "you are the greatest cavalier we have ever produced. You are our triumph, The best of all of us. It has been my privilege to be your necromancer.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth

“He urged again, “Thoughts?” Gideon said, “Did you know that if you put the first three letters of your last name with the first three letters of your first name, you get ‘Sex Pal’?”
― Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth

“This calls for rigor, Nav.’

‘Maybe rigor…mortis,’ said Gideon, who assumed that puns were funny automatically.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth

“For ten years, Padmé had been the center of her galaxy, the lodestar by which she made all of her decisions. She’d never imagined outgrowing that. But life had other ideas.”
― E.K. Johnston, Queen's Hope

“They say that a person’s personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn’t true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we’d never be able to put up with ourselves. We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“That's the power of literature, you know, it can act like little love letters between two people who can only explain their feelings by pointing at other people's.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“He was my echo. Everything I do is quieter now," she said to the other women in the closet.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“Because perhaps it's true what they say, that up to a certain age a child loves you unconditionally and uncontrollably for one simple reason, you're theirs. Your parents and siblings can love you for the rest of your life, too, for precisely the same reason.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“...The following morning they were angry at the sun for rising, and couldn't forgive the world for living on without her.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“... seeing as dads like teaching their sons things, because the moment we can no longer do that is when they stop being our responsibility and we become theirs.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“Older men rarely know what to say to younger men to let them know that they care. It's so hard to find the words when all you really want to say is: 'I can see you're hurting.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“Bridges exist to bring people closer together, he said.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“She remembered when she used to read bedtime stories to the children, and Peter Pan declaring: "To die will be an awfully big adventure." Maybe for the person doing it, Estelle thought, but not for the one who was left behind. All that awaited her were a thousand sunrises where life is a beautiful prison.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“We don't have a plan, we just do our best to get through the day, because there'll be another one coming along tomorrow.”
― Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

“Gethenians could make their vehicles go faster, but they do not. If asked why not, they answer “Why?” Like asking Terrans why all our vehicles must go so fast; we answer “Why not?” No disputing tastes. Terrans tend to feel they’ve got to get ahead, make progress. The people of Winter, who always live in the Year One, feel that progress is less important than presence.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“No, that’s true … You hate Orgoreyn, don’t you?’ ‘Very few Orgota know how to cook. Hate Orgoreyn? No, how should I? How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain ploughland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one’s country; is it hate of one’s uncountry? Then it’s not a good thing. It is simply self-love? That’s a good thing, but one mustn’t make a virtue of it, or a profession … Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“Hearth-brothers, or friends,” he said, and saying it was remote, out of reach, two feet from me in a tent eight feet across. No answer to that. What is more arrogant than honesty? Cooled, I climbed into my fur bag. “Good night, Ai,” said the alien, and the other alien said, “Good night, Harth.” A friend. What is a friend, in a world where any friend may be a lover at a new phase of the moon? Not I, locked in my virility: no friend to Therem Harth, or any other of his race. Neither man nor woman, neither and both, cyclic, lunar, metamorphosing under the hand’s touch, changelings in the human cradle, they were no flesh of mine, no friends; no love between us.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“He had not meant to patronize. He had thought me sick, and sick men take orders. He was frank, and expected a reciprocal frankness that I might not be able to supply. He, after all, had no standards of manliness of virility, to complicate his pride.

On the other hand, if he could lower all his standards of shifgrethor, as I realized he had done with me, perhaps I could dispense with the more competitive elements of my masculine self-respect, which he certainly understood as little as I understoof shifgrethor...”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“Cinders patter, falling with the snow. We creep infinitesimally northward through the dirty chaos of a world in the process of making itself.

Praise then Creation unfinished!”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“And I saw then again, and for good, what I had always been afraid to see, and had pretended not to see in him: that he was a woman as well as a man. Any need to explain the sources of that fear vanished with the fear; what I was left with was, at last, acceptance of him as he was. Until then I had rejected him, refused him his own reality. He had been quite right to say that he, the only person on Gethen who trusted me, was the own Gethenian I distrusted. For he was the only one who had entirely accepted me as a human being: who had liked me personally and given me entire personal loyalty, and who therefore had demanded of me an equal degree of recognition, of acceptance. I had not been willing to give it. I had been afraid to give it. I had not wanted to give my trust, my friendship to a man who was a woman, a woman who was a man.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“For it seemed to me, and I think to him, that it was from that sexual tension between us, admitted now and understood but not assuaged, that the great and sudden assurance of friendship between us rose: a friendship so much needed by us both in our exile, and already so well proved in the days and nights of our better journey, that it might as well be called, now as later, love. But it was from the difference between us, not from the affinities and likenesses, but from the difference, that that love came: and it was itself the bridge, the only bridge, across what divided us. For us to meet sexually would be for us to meet once more as aliens. We had touched, in the only way we could touch. We left it at that. I do not know if we were right.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness