Petra > Petra's Quotes

“When you walk to the edge of all the light you have and take that first step into the darkness of the unknown, you must believe that one of two things will happen:

There will be something solid for you to stand upon, or, you will be taught to fly.”
― Patrick Overton, The Leaning Tree

“This is why I came walking, to tell you this so that you may heal. You must listen. Conor swallowed again. “I’m listening.” You do not write your life with words, the monster said. You write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do. There”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

“I know at that moment what he's given me and it isn't a chair. It's an invitation, a welcome, the knowledge that I am accepted here. He hasn't given me a place to sit. He's given me a place to belong.”
― Katja Millay, The Sea of Tranquility

“Who am I? the monster repeated, still roaring. I am the spine that the mountains hang upon! I am the tears that the rivers cry! I am the lungs that breathe the wind! I am the wolf that kills the stag, the hawk that kills the mouse, the spider that kills the fly! I am the stag, the mouse and the fly that are eaten! I am the snake of the world devouring its tail! I am everything untamed and untameable! It brought Conor up close to its eye. I am thils wild earth, come for you, Conor O'Malley.


"You look like a tree," Conor said.”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

“He knew it would come, and soon, maybe even this 12:07. The moment she would slip from his grasp, no matter how tightly he held on.”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

“And if one day,' she said, really crying now, 'you look back and you feel bad for being so angry, if you feel bad for being so angry at me that you couldn't even speak to me, then you have to know, Conor, you have to that is was okay. It was okay. That I knew. I know, okay? I know everything you need to tell me without you having to say it out loud.”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

“I would rather be ashes than dust!
I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot.
I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.
The function of man is to live, not to exist.
I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them.
I shall use my time.”
― Jack London

“The answer is that it does not matter what you think, the monster said, because your mind will contradict itself a hundred times each day. You wanted her to go at the same time you were desperate for me to save her. Your mind will believe comforting lies while also knowing the painful truths that make those lies necessary. And your mind will punish you for believing both. “But how do you fight it?” Conor asked, his voice rough. “How do you fight all the different stuff inside?” By speaking the truth, the monster said.”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

“When someone is in your heart, they're never truly gone. They can come back to you, even at unlikely times.”
― Mitch Albom, For One More Day

“You go on. You just go on. There's nothing more to it, and there's no trick to make it easier. You just go on.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Memory

“Let the mind beware, that though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“I think what you notice most when you haven’t been home in a while is how much the trees have grown around your memories.”
― Mitch Albom, For One More Day

“There is not always a good guy. Nor is there always a bad one. Most people are somewhere in between.”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

“Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.”
― Jack Kerouac

“Since no one is perfect, it follows that all great deeds have been accomplished out of imperfection. Yet they were accomplished, somehow, all the same.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Mirror Dance

“Endure pain, find joy, and make your own meaning, because the universe certainly isn't going to supply it.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Cordelia's Honor

“[Koudelka] looked back, "You?! I know you! You trust beyond reason!"
[Cordelia] met his eyes steadily, "Yes, it's how I get results beyond hope, as you may recall.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign

“Peace requires us to surrender our illusions of control. We can love and care for others but we cannot possess our children, lovers, family, or friends. We can assist them, pray for them, and wish them well, yet in the end their happiness and suffering depend on their thoughts and actions, not on our wishes.”
― Jack Kornfield

“I don’t belong to anyone! I’m not a thing, to be kept or ordered or driven to such despair that I open my own veins. Look at me, Aoife. Look at me! I’m a woman.”
― Nicola Griffith, Ammonite

“I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“People are like sweet, sweet chords - we love them when they're playing all together nicely, like in the pretty number I'm going to spin next, but it would be a crying shame to forget what a lovely little noise a D major makes strummed on a single guitar.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“I was looking for a miracle, but I got a story instead, and sometimes those are the same thing.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“Although it wasn't her voice playing over the AM radio waves, it was her complicated and wiry heart powering them. Other people have smiles and tears to show how they feel; enigmatic Beatriz Soria had a box truck full of transmitters in the Colorado desert. If she cut herself, wherever she was, the speakers in the box truck bled.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“There are so many things that can break you if there's nothing to hold you together.”
― Katja Millay, The Sea of Tranquility

“Growing up and growing old. Playing. Exploring. Like Pooh and Piglet. And then like the Famous Five. And then like Heidi and Anne of Green Gables. And then like Pandora, opening the great big box of the world and not being afraid, not even caring whether what’s inside is good or bad. Because it’s both. Everything is always both.
But you have to open it to find that out.”
― M.R. Carey, The Girl with All the Gifts

“If you don't know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Love in the high desert is a strange thing. There is something about the climate—the remoteness, the severity of the seasons, the dryness of the air, the extreme beauty—that makes people feel more deeply. Perhaps without trees or cities to dampen the enormity of the feelings, they spread out hugely. Perhaps the hard-packed dust of the San Luis Valley amplifies them, like a shout into a canyon.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, All the Crooked Saints

“Everyone has a past, but that's just it--it's in the past. You can learn from it, but you can't change it.”
― Nicholas Sparks, Safe Haven

“Do you mean to tell me that you're thinking seriously of building that way, when and if you are an architect?”
“Yes.”
“My dear fellow, who will let you?”
“That’s not the point. The point is, who will stop me?”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead