Spencer > Spencer's Quotes

“I think if I gave you my heart, you would treat it tenderly.”
― C.S. Pacat, Kings Rising

“That’s right. He is Charls. I am Charls. We are cousins,’ said Charls, gamely, ‘named after our grandfather. Charls.”
― C.S. Pacat, Kings Rising

“A golden prince was easy to love if you did not have to watch him picking wings off flies.”
― S.U. Pacat, Captive Prince

“the only thing
required
to be
a woman
is to
identify
as one.

- period, end of story.”
― Amanda Lovelace, The Princess Saves Herself in This One

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

“But the world is strange and endings are not truly endings no matter how the stars might wish it so.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“Be brave,’ she says. ‘Be bold. Be loud. Never change for anyone but yourself. Any soul worth their star-stuff will take the whole package as is and however it grows. Don’t waste your time on anyone who doesn’t believe you when you tell them how you feel.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“I accepted because mysterious ladies offering bourbon under the stars is very much my aesthetic.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“Spiritual but not religious,” Zachary clarifies. He doesn’t say what he is thinking, which is that his church is held-breath story listening and late-night-concert ear-ringing rapture and perfect-boss fight-button pressing. That his religion is buried in the silence of freshly fallen snow, in a carefully crafted cocktail, in between the pages of a book somewhere after the beginning but before the ending.”
― 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

“He tells her how he worries that none of it means anything. That none of it is important. That who he is, or who he thinks he is, is just a collection of references to other people’s art and he is so focused on story and meaning and structure that he wants his world to have all of it neatly laid out and it never, ever does and he fears it never will. He tells her things he has never told anyone.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“If an egg breaks it becomes more than it was," Mirabelle says, after considering the matter. "And what is an egg, if not something waiting to be broken?"
"I think the egg was a metaphor."
"Can't make an omelet without breaking a few metaphors," Mirabelle says.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“(The wind does not like to be confused. confusion ruins its sense of direction and direction is everything to the wind.)”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“I'm more of a cocktail guy," he says, though he is also of the opinion that sparkling wine is an anytime beverage and appreciates Mirabel's style.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“Sorry it's so poetry today.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“He tells her things he’s never told anyone. About the man who broke his heart in such a long, drawn out process that he couldn’t discern hurt from love and how whenever he tries to sort out how it feels now, long after the end of it the feeling is just a void.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“We were nostalgic for a time that wasn't yet over.”
― Nina LaCour, We Are Okay

“I thought that it was more likely the opposite. I must have shut grief out. Found it in books. Cried over fiction instead of the truth. The truth was unconfined, unadorned. There was no poetic language to it, no yellow butterflies, no epic floods. There wasn't a town trapped underwater or generations of men with the same name destined to make the same mistakes. The truth was vast enough to drown in.”
― Nina LaCour, We Are Okay

“I learn that I am a tiny piece of a miraculous world.”
― Nina LaCour, We Are Okay

“I listened to the same heartbroken song the entire bus ride home, because it was still a summer when sadness was beautiful.”
― Nina LaCour, We Are Okay

“I implore you to be more open minded, hermano. If we close ourselves off to the possibilities that lie outside of what tradition has dictated, we are destined for extinction.”
― Aiden Thomas, Cemetery Boys

“Growth isn’t a deviation from what we’ve done before, but a natural progression to honor all those who make this community strong.”
― Aiden Thomas, Cemetery Boys

“That's just what translation is, I think. That's all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they're trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“English did not just borrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular. And Robin found it incredible, how this country, whose citizens prided themselves so much on being better than the rest of the world, could not make it through an afternoon tea without borrowed goods.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“But what is the opposite of fidelity?' asked Professor Playfair. He was approaching the end of his dialitic; now he needed only to draw it to a close with a punch. 'Betrayal. Translation means doing violence upon the original, it means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So, where does that leave us? How can we conclude except by acknowledging that an act of translation is always an act of betrayal?”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Nice comes from the Latin word for “stupid”,’ said Griffin. ‘We do not want to be nice.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Trying, he thought, to express some unutterable truth about themselves. Which was that translation was impossible. That the realm of pure meaning they captured and manifested would and could not ever be known. That the enterprise of this tower had been impossible from inception. For how could there ever be an Adamic language? The thought now made him laugh. There was no innate, perfectly comprehensible language. There was no candidate - not English, not French - that could bully and absorb enough to become one. Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No, a thousand worlds within one. And translation, a necessary endeavor however futile, to move between them.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“So, you see, translators do not so much deliver a message as the rewrite the original. And herein lies the difficulty - rewriting is still writing, and writing always reflects the authors ideology and biases.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Still, something did not seem right, and Robin could tell from Victoire’s and Ramy’s faces that they thought so too. It took him a moment to realize what it was that grated on him, and when he did, it would bother him constantly, now and thereafter; it would seem a great paradox, the fact that after everything they had told Letty, all the pain they had shared, she was the one who needed comfort.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“That's the beauty of learning a new language. It should feel like an enormous undertaking. It ought to intimidate you. It makes you appreciate the complexity of the ones you know already.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel