Tal > Tal's Quotes

“I don't want to die, but I wish waking up every morning didn't feel like such a fuck-you every single time.”
― Hannah Moskowitz, Gone, Gone, Gone

“You aren't a hero and I'm not beautiful and we probably won't live happily ever after " she said. "But we're alive and together and we're going to be all right.”
― Philip Reeve, Mortal Engines

“Boo-Boo Pennyroyal did not like her male and female slaves to mingle. In the operas that she adored, young people brought together in tragic circumstances were forever falling in love with each other and then throwing themselves off things (cliffs, mostly, but sometimes battlements, or rooftops, or the brinks of volcanoes). Boo-Boo was fond of her slaves, and it pained her to think of them plummeting in pairs off the edges of Cloud 9, so she nipped all tragic love affairs firmly in the bud by forbidding the girls and boys to speak to one another. Of course, young people being what they were, girls sometimes fell in love with other girls, or boys with boys, but that never happened in the operas, so Boo-Boo didn't notice.”
― Philip Reeve, Infernal Devices

“Barking spiders!”
― Scott Westerfeld, Leviathan

“Perhaps it's impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game

“My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.”
― Robert Heinlein

“It was not the feeling of completeness I so needed, but the feeling of not being empty.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“Somewhere there is a book that says you ought to cry buckets of tears over yourself and love yourself with a passion and wrap your arms around yourself; only then will you be happy and free. That's a good book.”
― Joanna Russ, On Strike Against God

“Scholars don't usually sit gasping and sobbing in corners of the library stacks.
But they should. They should.”
― Joanna Russ, On Strike Against God

“There is no good word for the opposite of lonesome.
One might be tempted to suggest togetherness or contentment , but the fact that these two other words bear definitions unrelated to each other perfectly displays why lonesome cannot be properly mirrored. It does not mean solitude, nor alone, nor lonely, although lonesome can contain all of those words in itself.
Lonesome means a state of being apart. Of being other. Alone-some.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Blue Lily, Lily Blue

“Want and need were words that got eaten smaller and smaller: Freedom, autonomy, a perennial bank balance, a stainless-steel condo in a dustless city, a silky black car, to make out with Blue, eight hours of sleep, a cell phone, a bed, to kiss Blue just once, a blister-less heel, bacon for breakfast, to hold Blue's hand, one hour of sleep, toilet paper, deodorant, a soda, a minute to close his eyes.

What do you want, Adam?

To feel awake when my eyes are open.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Dream Thieves

“You can be just friends with people, you know," Orla said. "I think it's crazy how you're in love with all those raven boys."

Orla wasn't wrong, of course. But what she didn't realize about Blue and her boys was that they were all in love with one another. She was no less obsessed with them than they were with her, or one another, analyzing every conversation and gesture, drawing out every joke into a longer and longer running gag, spending each moment either with one another or thinking about when next they would be with one another. Blue was perfectly aware that it was possible to have a friendship that wasn't all-encompassing, that wasn't blinding, deafening, maddening, quickening. It was just that now that she'd had this kind, she didn't want the other.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Blue Lily, Lily Blue

“So what the hell's wrong with me?" Nyx eased off the marble slab.
"Besides your deviant moral flexibility and severe phobia of emotional commitment?" Yahfia asked.
"I consider those virtues," Nyx said.”
― Kameron Hurley, Infidel

“The world could burn around her, the cities turn to dust, the cries of a hundred thousand fill the air, and she would get up after the fire died and walk barefoot and burned over the charred soil in search of clean water, a weapon, a purpose. She would rebuild.”
― Kameron Hurley, God's War

“There are some stories that don’t want telling,” Gian said. “Some stories you tell, they make things worse. Not better.”
― Kameron Hurley, The Mirror Empire

“How many men had made her? Her brothers, by dying? Yah Tayyib, by rebuilding her? All those dead boys whose heads she brought back to the clerks? Raine, by teaching her how to drive and how to die? Tej and Rhys and Khos and all Raine's half-breed muscle? They were just men. They were just people. They had made her as surely as Queen Ayyad and Queen Zaynab, Bashir, Jaks, Radeyah, and her sisters had. Her hoards of sistesr, Kine and the bel dames and the women who kicked her out of school for getting her letters fucked. No, she could have gone either way; followed all or none of them. It wasn't what was done to you. Life was what you did with what was done to you.

"You didn't make me," Nyx gasped. "I made myself.”
― Kameron Hurley, God's War

“Ahmed turned, and leaned into him. Kissed him on the mouth again.
“I’m pretty fucked up,” Eshe said.
“It’s a good thing I’m perfect, then.”
― Kameron Hurley, Rapture

“Because until you know what you want to be, other people are just going to keep trying to make you into something useful for them.”
― Kameron Hurley, Rapture

“It was the secret to winning any contest, he said, in life or in the boxing ring – you just had to get up more than you fell down.”
― Kameron Hurley, Rapture

“The message is clear: By all means become an abomination -- but only while unhinged by grief or wrath.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“When you're a kid it's people's cruelty that makes you cry, then when you're an adult it's their kindness.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“She understood the genre constraints, the decencies we were supposed to be observing. The morally cosy vision allows the embrace of monstrosity only as a reaction to suffering or as an act of rage against the Almighty. Vampire interviewee Louis is in despair at his brother’s death when he accepts Lestat’s offer. Frankenstein’s creature is driven to violence by the violence done to him. Even Lucifer’s rebellion emerges from the agony of injured pride. The message is clear: By all means become an abomination—but only while unhinged by grief or wrath. By rights, Talulla knew, she should have been orphaned or raped or paedophilically abused or terminally ill or suicidally depressed or furious at God for her mother’s death or at any rate in some way deranged if she was to be excused for not having killed herself, once it became apparent that she’d have to murder and devour people in order to stay alive. The mere desire to stay alive, in whatever form you’re lumbered with—werewolf, vampire, Father of Lies—really couldn’t be considered a morally sufficient rationale. And yet here she was, staying alive. You love life because life’s all there is.”
― Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf

“I will not let her speak because I love her, and when you love someone, you do not make them tell war stories. A war story is a black space. On the one side is before and on the other side is after, and what is inside belongs only to the dead.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“I'm glad," I said, with an effort, refusing to let my mouth close up with jealousy. It wasn't that I wanted a husband and a baby; I didn't, or rather, I only wanted them the way I wanted to live to a hundred someday, far off, never thinking about the particulars. But they meant life: she was living, and I wasn't.”
― Naomi Novik, Uprooted

“I don't want more sense!" I said loudly, beating against the silence of the room. "Not if sense means I'll stop loving anyone. What is there besides people that's worth holding on to?”
― Naomi Novik, Uprooted

“A boy may be as disagreeable as he pleases, but when a girl refuses to crap sunshine on command, the world mutters darkly about her moods.”
― Scott Lynch, The Republic of Thieves

“Luxury always comes at someone else’s expense. One of the many advantages of civilization is that one doesn’t generally have to see that, if one doesn’t wish. You’re free to enjoy its benefits without troubling your conscience.”
― Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice