Mirjam > Mirjam's Quotes

“We don’t need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don’ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.”
― Philip Pullman

“And Olvos said to them: “Why have you done this, my children? Why is the sky wreathed with smoke? Why have you made war in far places, and shed blood in strange lands?

And they said to Her: “You blessed us as Your people, and we rejoiced, and were happy. But we found those who were not Your people, and they would not become Your people, and they were willful and ignorant of You. They would not open their ears to Your songs, or lay Your words upon their tongues. So we dashed them upon the rocks and threw down their houses and shed their blood and scattered them to the winds, and we were right to do so. For we are Your people. We carry Your blessings. We are Yours, and so we are right. Is this not what You said?”

And Olvos was silent.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“Forgetting... is a beautiful thing. When you forget, you remake yourself... For a caterpillar to become a butterfly, it must forget it was a caterpillar at all. Then it will be as if the caterpillar never was & there was only ever a butterfly.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“Life is full of beautiful dangers, dangerous beauties... They wound us in ways we cannot see: an injury ripples out, like a stone dropped in water, touching moments years into the future.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“Deserve.' How preoccupied we are with that. With what we should have, with what we are owed. I wonder if any word has ever caused more heartache.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Blades

“Is it ignorance if you don’t care to know it?” “Yes. That is almost the definition of ignorance, actually.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“...history, as you may know, is much like a spiral staircase that gives the illusion of going up, but never quite goes anywhere.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“I have never met a person who possessed a privilege who did not exercise that privilege to the fullest extent that they possibly could.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“I never saw a country before," says the robed man. "All I saw was the earth under my feet.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“She did not think it was love. She did not think it was love when she felt a curious ache and anxiety when he was not there; she did not think it was love as she felt relief wash over her when she received a note from him; she did not think it was love when she sometimes wondered what their lives would be like after five, ten, fifteen years together. The idea of love never crossed her mind.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“In retrospect they might have started sleeping together solely out of conversational exhaustion.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“...what books meant, the possibility they presented: you could protect them forever, store them up like engineers store water, endless resources of time and knowledge snared in ink, tied down to paper, layered on shelves...Moments made physical, untouchable, perfect, like preserving a dead hornet in crystal, one drop of venom forever hanging from its stinger.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“One day Nola came into school wearing a set of incredibly thick glasses, and though they did no favors to her appearance, Nola was ecstatic: she could see all kinds of things now, things she’d never known were even there. She’d had no idea trees were so pretty, she said. She could see every single leaf waving in the wind now. For some reason, this terrified young Mona. It wasn’t that Nola’s vision had changed: it was that her vision had changed without her even knowing it. There were all kinds of things happening around her that she’d never known about, that she was blind to. Though her experience of the world had seemed whole and certain to her, in truth it had been marred, filled with blind spots, and she’d had no idea.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, American Elsewhere

“Is this how governments are made? Forcing decisions on wounded people in the middle of the night?”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“I wished to be an artist,” Ivanya confides to Shara. “But it simply didn’t turn out that way. I didn’t have the … I’m not sure. The imagination, I suppose, or the ambition, or both. You have to be a bit outside things to make something new, but I was always very much inside things.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.”
― John Milton

“Solitude sometimes is best society.”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“Me miserable! Which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep,
Still threat'ning to devour me, opens wide,
To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“This horror will grow mild, this darkness light.”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost

“Everybody, professors and students and Proctors the same, knew that if the sign said 'do not walk on the grass', one hopped. Anybody who didn't had failed to understand what Oxford was.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“Your science can save a man’s life, but imagination makes it worth living.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“. . . More octo . . .pi?' Thaniel said, knowing that it sounded wrong, though so did puses and podes. He tried to think where he had heard it last , but he did not often have business with more than one octopus at a time.”
― Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“Growing older does not seem to make you more certain, Nella thinks. It simply presents you with more reasons for doubt.”
― Jessie Burton, The Miniaturist

“A lifetime isn't enough to know how a person will behave.”
― Jessie Burton, The Miniaturist

“Marin believes love is better in the chase than caught,’ she says. He raises his eyebrows. ‘That does not surprise me. It is not better. But it is easier. One’s imagination is always more generous. And yet, the chase always tires you out in the end.”
― Jessie Burton, The Miniaturist

“Here she is a puppet, a vessel for others to pour their speech. And it is not a man she has married, but a world.”
― Jessie Burton, The Miniaturist

“For what am I, she wonders, but a product of my own imagination?”
― Jessie Burton, The Miniaturist

“You are a stone, thrown upon a lake. But the ripples you create will never make you still.”
― Jessie Burton, The Miniaturist

“Have you never picked up a book you've read before, and found it speaks to you in a new way?”
― Django Wexler, The Forbidden Library

“Besides it's not as though the prisoner can truly die, any more than a character in a novel can. You can always flip back to the first page, can't you?”
― Django Wexler, The Forbidden Library