Jenna > Jenna's Quotes

“Can you imagine what that’s like – to be seen only for the life you could make, not the life you already possess?”
― Samantha Shannon, A Day of Fallen Night

“Some people need to call others evil, so they can seem pure and righteous in comparison, or to purge contempt they hold in secret for themselves.”
― Samantha Shannon, A Day of Fallen Night

“My mother told me we are all like roses. I always thought it means that we opened our petals, took our true form, and gradually withered. But perhaps we never stop growing. If women are flowers, we are not roses, but day's eyes - blooming not once, but over and over, each time the light touches us.”
― Samantha Shannon, A Day of Fallen Night

“History may record the end of my line as a tragedy,” the Grand Empress said, “but a house that crushes its own daughters beneath its foundations— that is no house at all. Better it burns with the rest. A different world must be drawn from the ashes.”
― Samantha Shannon, A Day of Fallen Night

“No woman should be made to fear that she was not enough.”
― Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree

“I do not sleep because I am not only afraid of the monsters at my door, but also of the monsters my own mind can conjure. The ones that live within.”
― Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree

“To be kin to a dragon, you must not only have a soul of water. You must have the blood of the sea, and the sea is not always pure. It is not any one thing. There is darkness in it, and danger, and cruelty. It can raze great cities with its rage. Its depths are unknowable; they do not see the touch of the sun. To be a Miduchi is not to be pure, Tané. It is to be the living sea. That is why I chose you. You have a dragon’s heart.”
― Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree

“You wear so much armour by daylight that, by night, you can carry it no longer. By night, you are only flesh. And even the flesh of a queen is prone to fear.
In darkness, we are naked. Our truest selves. Night is when fear comes to us at its fullest, when we have no way to fight it. It will do everything it can to seep inside you. Sometimes it may succeed - but never think that you are the night.”
― Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree

“My heart knows your song, as yours knows mine. And I will always come back to you.”
― Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree

“That one day, you will forgive yourself. You are in the spring of your life, child, and have much to learn about this world. Do not deny yourself the privilege of living.”
― Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree

“Black doves and white crows flew to her, for she was mother to the outcasts.”
― Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree

“The wisest are seldom appreciated in their time.”
― Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree

“I will endure, my midnight sun. I will teach my heart to beat again.”
― Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree

“A woman is more than a womb to be seeded.”
― Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree

“Just because something has always been done does not mean that is ought to be done.”
― Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree

“My heart knows your song, as yours knows mine.”
― Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree

“All you see, in the end, is what I want you to see. Such is politics.”
― Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree

“To be kin to a dragon you must not only have a soul of water. You must have the blood of the sea, and the sea is not always pure. It is not any one thing. There is darkness in it, and danger, and cruelty.”
― Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree

“To die in the service of a better world would be the highest honor.”
― Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree

“Fill your mind with knowledge—it’s the only kind of power no one can take away from you.”
― Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

“Night is when fear comes to us at its fullest, when we have no way to fight it. It will do everything it can to seep inside you. Sometimes it may succeed - but never think that you are the night.”
― Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“There is no curse in Elvish, Entish, or the tongues of Men for this treachery.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“What do you despise? By this are you truly known.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movements become headlong - faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thoughts of obstacles and forget the precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it's too late.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Without change something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Survival is the ability to swim in strange water.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“The willow submits to the wind and prospers until one day it is many willows - a wall against the wind.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune