Wintermute > Wintermute's Quotes

“There are three butterflies that dance around a flame. The first butterfly comes close to the flame and says, 'I know all about love. It is beautiful, unforgettable.' The second butterfly wants to get even closer than the first, so it does. But it singes its wings. So it withdraws. Terrified, the butterfly says, 'I know that love only burns.' But the third butterfly simply throws itself into the flames and is consumed.”
― Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora

“My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

“...if you bare your arse to a vengeful unicorn, the number of possible outcomes dwindles to one.”
― David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks

“A word after a word after a word is power.”
― Margaret Atwood

“If I love you, is that a fact or a weapon?”
― Margaret Atwood, Power Politics: Poems

“I was born walking, born in the nowhere between galaxies.”
― Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora

“In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn't creak.”
― Tom Robbins

“And yet it disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“I inherited this longing. I was addicted to it. And so I was at home with those who wanted and never had enough. I was at home in the places that could never be. The places found only in dreams.”
― Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora

“We are product of the immense torque that propels this universe. We are not individuals but a great accumulation of all that lived before.”
― Tanya Tagaq, Split Tooth

“I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity. I want this adventure that is the context of my life to go on without end.”
― Simone de Beauvoir , La vieillesse

“Travel far enough, you meet yourself.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“People whispered comfort about Marian being called back to heaven, but my mother would not be distracted from her grief. To this day it remains a hobby.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“They always call depression the blues, but I would have been happy to waken to a periwinkle outlook. Depression to me is urine yellow. Washed out, exhausted miles of weak piss.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“I’ve always believed clear-eyed sobriety was for the harder hearted.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“The foxes run. The foxes die. I mourn them, but I understand that there is danger in mourning for those who would not mourn for you in return. Empathy is for those who can afford it. Empathy is for the privileged. Empathy is not for Nature.”
― Tanya Tagaq, Split Tooth

“We always live along side the dead. It's scary but the quiet is our true home. This is why we must make the most of our gristle and meat.”
― Tanya Tagaq, Split Tooth

“Murder can heal if applied sparingly. Murder can feed us. Life murders us every day.”
― Tanya Tagaq, Split Tooth

“This is not the last time he will get himself in trouble with bravado that cannot be backed up. He ends up dying that way.”
― Tanya Tagaq, Split Tooth

“The beginning of the end can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it.”
― Karen Russell, Swamplandia!

“When you're a kid, it's hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“Being unconscious with somebody, that's a big deal.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“On the fifth night of our search, I see a plesiosaur. It is a megawatt behemoth, bronze and blue-white, streaking across the sea floor like a torpid comet. Watching it, I get this primordial deja vu, like I'm watching a dream return to my body. It wings towards me with a slow, avian grace. Its long neck is arced in an S-shaped curve; its lizard body is the size of Granana's carport. Each of its ghost flippers pinwheels colored light. I try to swim out of its path, but the thing's too big to avoid. That Leviathan fin, it shivers right through me. It's a light in my belly, cold and familiar. And I flash back to a snippet from school, a line from a poem or a science book, I can't remember which: 'There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction'.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“Wear your skeleton on the inside out, and keep your insect heart secret.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“We keep giggling, happy and nervous, tickled by an incomplete innocence. We both sense that some dark joke is being played on us, even if we can't quite grasp the punch line.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“What bird are you calling?' I ask, finally, when I can't stand it any longer. The bird man stops whistling. He grins, so that I can see all his pebbly teeth. He holds out a hand to me over the broth-thin water. 'You.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“Granana lives on the other side of the island. She's eighty-four, I'm twelve, and Wallow's fourteen, so it's a little ambiguous as to who's babysitting whom.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“He looks me to pieces … I realize now that I have been glimpsed and corner-of-the-eyed before, by the Chief and my sister and the yawning tourists. But I have never actually been looked at. Not like this.”
― Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

“Half of these aren't even Machiavelli.
Some are Plato, Thucydides etc....doesnt anyone check these?”
― Niccolò Machiavelli