Sole > Sole's Quotes

“We are all stardust and stories.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“For those who feel homesick for a place they’ve never been to. Those who seek even if they do not know what (or where) it is that they are seeking. Those who seek will find. Their doors have been waiting for them.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“Once, very long ago, Time fell in love with Fate. This, as you might imagine, proved problematic. Their romance disrupted the flow of time. It tangled the strings of fortune into knots.  The stars watched from the heavens nervously, worrying what might occur. What might happen to the days and nights were time to suffer a broken heart? What catastrophes might result if the same fate awaited Fate itself? The stars conspired and separated the two. For a while they breathed easier in the heavens. Time continued to flow as it always had, or perhaps imperceptibly slower. Fate weaved together the paths that were meant to intertwine, though perhaps a string was missed here and there. But eventually, Fate and Time found each other again.  In the heavens, the stars sighed, twinkling and fretting. They asked the Moon her advice. The Moon in turn called upon the parliament of owls to decide how best to proceed. The parliament of owls convened to discuss the matter amongst themselves night after night. They argued and debated while the world slept around them, and the world continued to turn, unaware that such important matters were under discussion while it slumbered.  The parliament of owls came to the logical conclusion that if the problem was in the combination, one of the elements should be removed. They chose to keep the one they felt more important. The parliament of owls told their decision to the stars and the stars agreed. The Moon did not, but on this night she was dark and could not offer her opinion.  So it was decided, and Fate was pulled apart. Ripped into pieces by beaks and claws. Fate’s screams echoed through the deepest corners and the highest heavens but no one dared to intervene save for a small brave mouse who snuck into the fray, creeping unnoticed through the blood and bone and feathers, and took Fate’s heart and kept it safe. When the furor died down there was nothing else left of Fate.  The owl who consumed Fate’s eyes gained great site, greater site then any that had been granted to a mortal creature before. The Parliament crowned him the Owl King. In the heavens the stars sparkled with relief but the moon was full of sorrow. And so time goes as it should and events that were once fated to happen are left instead to chance, and Chance never falls in love with anything for long. But the world is strange and endings are not truly endings no matter how the stars might wish it so.  Occasionally Fate can pull itself together again.  And Time is always waiting.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“Memory is often our only connection to who we used to be. Memories are fossils, the bones left by dead versions of ourselves. More potently, our minds are a hungry audience, craving only the peaks and valleys of experience. The bland erodes, leaving behind the distinctive bits to be remembered again and again. Painful or passionate, surreal or sublime, we cherish those little rocks of peak experience, polishing them with the ever-smoothing touch of recycled proxy living. In so doing—like pagans praying to a sculpted mud figure—we make of our memories the gods which judge our current lives.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Tress of the Emerald Sea

“Everyone is a part of a story, what they want is to be part of something worth recording”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“For a while I was looking for a person but I didn't find them and after that I was looking for myself. Now that I've found me I'm back to exploring, which is what I was doing in the first place before I was doing anything else and I think I was supposed to be exploring all along.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“a paper star that has been unfolded and refolded
into a tiny unicorn but the unicorn remembers a time
when it was a star and an earlier time when it was part of
a book and sometimes the unicorn dreams of the time before
it was a book when it was a tree and the time even longer
before that when it was a different sort of star”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“I’ve gotten accustomed to that tiny piece of hope that sits in the middle of the not knowing.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“We’re here to wander through other people’s stories, searching for our own.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“There once was a girl,” he murmured, “clever and good, who tarried in shadow in the depths of the wood. There also was a King—a shepherd by his crook, who reigned over magic and wrote the old book. The two were together, so the two were the same: “The girl, the King… and the monster they became.”
― Rachel Gillig, One Dark Window

“Nervousness means there’s a fear to be faced ahead, Diago. The man who is never nervous, never does anything hard. The man who is never nervous, never grows.”
― James Islington, The Will of the Many

“I will love you to ruination.”
― Ava Reid, A Study in Drowning

“If a story repeated itself so many times over, building itself up brick by brick, did it eventually become the truth? A house with no doors and no windows, offering no escape.”
― Ava Reid, A Study in Drowning

“You’re what happens when an encyclopedia wishes on a star to be a real boy, if that encyclopedia was also an absolute prick.”
― Margaret Owen, Little Thieves

“To the gremlin girls,
I would like to tell you something inspiring,
but the truth is,
when life closes a door for us,
it doesn’t always open a window.
The good news is:
That’s what bricks are for.”
― Margaret Owen, Little Thieves

“I've read fairy tales, of course, and listened to plaintive love songs, but I never understood why anyone would wake up after a hundred years and marry the prince who broke into their bedroom for a kiss. Or dance with a stranger once and decide to spend the rest of their lives together. I always felt a baffled kind of melancholy when others raptured over love at first sight, like maybe something was wrong with me, maybe I didn't know how to love someone at all.
I didn't know it wasn't just me.”
― Margaret Owen, Little Thieves

“I think we all get to decide what good and bad and right and wrong mean to us, not what we’re told to accept.”
― Holly Jackson, Good Girl, Bad Blood

“Fuck likeable. You know who's likeable? People like Max Hastings who walk into a courtroom with fake glasses and charm their way out. I don't want to be like that.”
― Holly Jackson, Good Girl, Bad Blood

“How tremendous the agony of unmade decisions.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“All human wisdom is contained in these two words - Wait and Hope”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

“I would rather love a coward than mourn a legend.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Six Deaths of the Saint

“Lately, I feel like my life is a book written in a language I don't know how to read.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Hero of Ages

“Faith means that it doesn't matter what happens. You can trust that somebody is watching. Trust that somebody will make it all right.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Hero of Ages

“I am, unfortunately, the Hero of Ages.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Hero of Ages

“The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

“Expectations were like fine pottery. The harder you held them, the more likely they were to crack.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

“Life before Death.
Strength before Weakness.
Journey before Destination.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

“I want you to go back into the barrack and tell the men to come out after the storm. Tell them to look up at me tied here. Tell them I’ll open my eyes and look back at them, and they’ll know that I survived.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

“Words aren’t meant to be kept inside, you see. They are free creatures, and if locked away will unsettle the stomach.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

“There was rarely an obvious branching point in a person's life. People changed slowly, over time. You didn't take on step, then find yourself in a completely new location. You first took a little step off a path to avoid some rocks. For a while, you walked alongside the path, but then you wandered out a little way to step on softer soil. Then you stopped paying attention as you drifted farther and farther away. Finally, you found yourself in the wrong city, wondering why the signs on the roadway hadn't led you better.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Emperor's Soul