Allison > Allison's Quotes

“People who claim that they're evil are usually no worse than the rest of us... It's people who claim that they're good, or any way better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.”
― Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“Mooreland is a long way to go to not to be anywhere when you get there.”
― Haven Kimmel

“That cat doesn't have a lick of sense,' I said, sighing.

Well, honey, he's not right in the head,' Dad said, flipping his cigarette into the front yard.

I glared at him. 'And just what do you mean by that?'

Dad counted on his fingers. 'He's cross-eyed; he jumps out of trees after birds and then doesn't land on his feet; he sleeps with his head smashed up against the wall, and the tip of his tail is crooked.'

Oh yeah? Well, how about this: he once got locked in a basement by evil Petey Scroggs in the middle of January and survived on snow and little frozen mice. When I'm cold at night he sleeps right on my face. Of that whole litter of kittens he came out of he's the only one left. One of his brothers didn't even have a butthole.'

I stand corrected. PeeDink is a survivor.”
― Haven Kimmel, A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small In Mooreland, Indiana

“But I think that what you'll discover more and more as you get older is that most people aren't thinking about you at all.”
― Haven Kimmel, A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small In Mooreland, Indiana

“A DEFINITION NOT FOUND
IN THE DICTIONARY
Not leaving: an act of trust and love,
often deciphered by children”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“You cannot be afraid, Read the book. Smile at it. It's a great book-the greatest book you've ever read.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“It was a Monday and they walked on a tightrope to the sun.”
― Marcus Zusak, The Book Thief

“People observe the colors of a day only at its beginnings and ends, but to me it's quite clear that a day merges through a multitude of shades and intonations with each passing moment. A single hour can consist of thousands of different colors. Waxy yellows, cloud-spot blues. Murky darkness. In my line of work, I make it a point to notice them.”
― Marcus Zusak, The Book Thief

“Do you ever miss him?
Every day. Every minute.
Every minute, she says.
Yes, it's that way, isn't it?”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“We carry on. We have ourselves and we carry on- in spite of our losses and mistakes and women, I think, have more than most. We are good secret-keepers. We can tie weights to out guilt and passions, and hatred and deceitfulness, and let them sink down, so that you'd never know they existed at all. But we know. I can count all mine.”
― Susan Fletcher

“Imagine it. Use all your strength and imagine it exactly. And it will happen that way.”
― Susan Fletcher

“Tell me about Stackpole then...
Like I am now, but smaller.”
― Susan Fletcher

“There is not one wide happiness that reaches us all at the same time.”
― Susan Fletcher

“There are moments.
You will know them.”
― Susan Fletcher

“I believe the world is as we choose to view it. Simple as that. Our happiness is, in the end, up to us, and to no one else.”
― Susan Fletcher

“I just look at her and she creeps me out. She looks like she would eat a baby. Not that she's fat. She just looks hungry in some dangerous way that can't be explained. She's always so nice and friendly. Exactly the disposition of a baby killer.”
― Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors

“I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and more essential than that. When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“Every so often I take out a volume and read a page or two. After all, reading is looking after in a manner of speaking. Though they're not old enough to be valuable for their age alone, nor important enough to be sought after by collectors, my charges are dear to me, even if, as often as not, they are as dull on the inside as on the outside. No matter how banal the contents, there is always something that touches me. For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in the ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“For it must be very lonely being dead.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“One gets so used to one's own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“As for you, you are alive. But it's not the same as living.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“Sometimes you can know things. Things about yourself. Things from before you can remember.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“Emmeline didn't call me anything. She didn't need, for I was always there. You only need names for the absent.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delinaments, weight and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all.
I know, he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“That the good that we do might live on after us, while the evil lies interred with their bones.”
― Jennifer Lee Carrell, Interred with Their Bones

“It is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection.”
― Anonymous, The Bhagavad Gita

“the number 108 is held to be the most auspicious, a perfect three-digit multiple of three, its components adding up to 9, which is three threes. And 3, of course, is the number representing supreme balance.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“Traditionally, I have responded to the transcendent mystics of all religions. I have always responded with breathless excitement to anyone who has ever said that God does not live in a dogmatic scripture or in a distant throne in the sky, but instead abides very close to us indeed- much closer than we can imagine, breathing right through our own hearts.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“God is an experience of supreme love.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love