Laura > Laura's Quotes

“She wasn't feeling nothing. She was feeling too much. She was blocking it all out. That was a survival skill, and her still-beating heart was proof that it worked.”
― Rachel Vincent, Shadow Bound

“Finally, to hinder the description of illness in literature, there is the poverty of the language.  English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache.  It has all grown one way.  The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.  There is nothing ready made for him.  He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out.  Probably it will be something laughable.”
― Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill

“I wanted to tell her that I was getting better, because that was supposed to be the narrative of illness: It was a hurdle you jumped over, or a battle you won. Illness is a story told in the past tense.”
― John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

“The terror-the terror, the terror-lingered, and there was something else. It came with the dream, every time, and didn't recede with it but stayed like something a tide had washed in. Something awful-a rank leviathan corpse left to rot on the shore of her mind. It was remorse. But god, that was too bloodless a word for it,. This feeling the dream left her with, it was knives of panic and horror resting bright atop a red and meaty wound-fester of guilt.”
― Laini Taylor, Dreams of Gods & Monsters

“The despair was entire, complete as a possession, but fleeting. It released her, and was gone, but it left Karou gutted, guttered, feeling for all the world like…

…a candle flame extinguished by a scream.”
― Laini Taylor, Dreams of Gods & Monsters

“You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone's soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows that they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“All the reading she had done had given her a view of life that they had never seen.”
― Roald Dahl, Matilda

“A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Books are the mile markers of my life. Some people have family photos or home movies to record their past. I’ve got books. Characters. For as long as I can remember, books have been my safe place.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Great Alone

“Strange, isn’t it? To love a book. When the words on the pages become so precious that they feel like part of your own history because they are. It’s nice to finally have someone read stories I know so intimately.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Starless Sea

“Just because we mess up doesn’t mean all the lessons we learned are undone. Healing can be imperfect.”
― Jonathan Van Ness, Over the Top: A Raw Journey to Self-Love

“Because when you have this much personality, there’s a fear lurking just below the surface: If you knew all of me, you wouldn’t love me anymore.”
― Jonathan Van Ness, Over the Top: A Raw Journey to Self-Love

“You know those plants that are always trying to find the light? Maybe they were planted in a location that didn’t necessarily facilitate growth, but inexplicably they make a circuitous route to not only survive but bloom into a beautiful plant. That was me—my whole life.”
― Jonathan Van Ness, Over the Top: A Raw Journey to Self-Love

“There is always a way out of a situation. Might be ugly. Might leave you feeling like the earth had gone and shifted under your feet. But there is always a way around.”
― Jojo Moyes, The Giver of Stars

“I worked it out sitting here. Maybe that’s the thing we need to understand, Alice. That some things are a gift, even if you don’t get to keep them.”
There was a silence before he spoke again.
“Maybe just to know that something this beautiful exists is all we can really ask for.”
― Jojo Moyes, The Giver of Stars

“I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

“I realise now, the character in the Christmas story we should all aspire to be is the star in the sky that shines so brightly and hopefully – that someone else who is lost can find their way.”
― Greg Wise, Last Christmas: Memories of Christmases Past and Hopes of Future Ones

“I am being perfectly fucking civil.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Dream Thieves

“Because if that’s what she meant, then yes, I just stared at him. I didn’t realize it was a conversation because penis.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Blue Lily, Lily Blue

“Girls who survive trauma do wear a certain vulnerability around them, but this kind of vulnerability is from where their greatest strength stems.”
― Nikita Gill, Wild Embers: Poems of Rebellion, Fire and Beauty

“Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn't know if she would ever find out where it was or become part of it.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Generally I find men are a lot more concerned with limiting the freedoms of women than exercising personal freedom for themselves.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“White privilege is an absence of the consequences of racism. An absence of structural discrimination, an absence of your race being viewed as a problem first and foremost.”
― Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race

“Reading,' Ead said lightly. 'A dangerous pastime.”
― Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree

“No woman should be made to fear that she was not enough.”
― Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree

“Let us not think of the future this night. It is not yet dawn. We still have time for airy hopes.”
― Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree

“Just because something has always been done does not mean that it ought to be done.”
― Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree

“The stranger came out of the sea like a water ghost, barefoot and wearing the scars of his journey.”
― Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree