Tanya > Tanya's Quotes

“If you want someone to tell you what to think," the phantom answered briskly, without looking up, "you will never be short of people willing to do so." . . . "Come now," he said at last, "you can hardly claim that I have left you ignorant. I taught you to read, did I not?”
― Frances Hardinge, Fly by Night

“There is a dead spot in the night, that coldest, blackest time when the world has forgotten evening and dawn is not yet a promise. A time when it is far too early to arise, but so late that going to bed makes small sense.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Quest

“How can you just forget a person completely until the moment you see his face again?”
― Melina Marchetta, On the Jellicoe Road

“Lost: one bonnet, two clogs. Kept in spite of the odds: two thumbs, one life.”
― Frances Hardinge, Fly Trap

“The chorus of disapproval is like one of those formula songs that seem to hit number one all the time. You know the tune in a moment and it begins to bore you in two.”
― Melina Marchetta, On the Jellicoe Road

“Have you got any soul?" a woman asks the next afternoon. That depends, I feel like saying; some days yes, some days no. A few days ago I was right out; now I've got loads, too much, more than I can handle. I wish I could spread it a bit more evenly, I want to tell her, get a better balance, but I can't seem to get it sorted. I can see she wouldn't be interested in my internal stock control problems though, so I simply point to where I keep the soul I have, right by the exit, just next to the blues.”
― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

“I don't remember when exactly I read my first comic book, but I do remember exactly how liberated and subversive I felt as a result.”
― Edward Said, Palestine

“Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.”
― Terry Pratchett

“ ‘Tell me what you read and I’ll tell you who you are’ is true enough, but I’d know you better if you told me what you reread.”
― François Mauriac

“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

“She wants to know if I love her, that's all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there, like new batteries in the flashlight in the emergency kit in the hall closet.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.”
― Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid

“I like to see people reunited, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can't tell fast enough, the ears that aren't big enough, the eyes that can't take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“Why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

“If you are a student you should always get a good nights sleep unless you have come to the good part of your book, and then you should stay up all night and let your schoolwork fall by the wayside, a phrase which means 'flunk'.”
― Lemony Snicket

“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.”
― Joseph Brodsky

“To claim that music is more important than oxygen would be trite and sentimental. It would also be true.”
― Roddy Doyle, Cigar Box Banjo: Notes on Music and Life

“Fuck was the best word. The most dangerous word. You couldn't whisper it. Fuck was always too loud, too late to stop it, it burst in the air above you and fell slowly right over your head. There was total silence, nothing but Fuck floating down. For a few seconds you were dead, waiting for Henno to look up and see Fuck landing on top of you. They were thrilling seconds-when he didn't look up. It was a word you couldn't say anywhere. It wouldn't come out unless you pushed it. It made you feel caught and grabbed you the minute you said it. When it escaped it was like an electric laugh, a soundless gasp followed by the kind of laughing only forbidden things could make, an inside tickle that became a brilliant pain, bashing at your mouth to be let out. It was agony. We didn't waste it.”
― Roddy Doyle, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha

“The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone. If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German, you can look down on everyone. If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books, you can at least look down on mystery readers. Mystery readers have sci-fi readers. Sci-fi can look down on fantasy. And yes, fantasy readers have their own snobbishness. I’ll bet this, though: in a hundred years, people will be writing a lot more dissertations on Harry Potter than on John Updike. Look, Charles Dickens wrote popular fiction. Shakespeare wrote popular fiction—until he wrote his sonnets, desperate to show the literati of his day that he was real artist. Edgar Allan Poe tied himself in knots because no one realized he was a genius. The core of the problem is how we want to define “literature”. The Latin root simply means “letters”. Those letters are either delivered—they connect with an audience—or they don’t. For some, that audience is a few thousand college professors and some critics. For others, its twenty million women desperate for romance in their lives. Those connections happen because the books successfully communicate something real about the human experience. Sure, there are trashy books that do really well, but that’s because there are trashy facets of humanity. What people value in their books—and thus what they count as literature—really tells you more about them than it does about the book.”
― Brent weeks

“..because the only kind of love I have to offer is stupid and blind and so deep and powerful that I feel like I'm cracking just to hold it in.”
― Brent Weeks, The Way of Shadows

“Sleep is good, he said, and books are better.”
― George R. R. Martin

“Anyway, it's like with bikes,' said the first speaker authoritatively. 'I thought I was going to get this bike with seven gears and one of them razorblade saddles and purple paint and everything, and they gave me this light blue one. With a basket. A girl's bike.'
'Well. You're a girl,' said one of the others.
'That's sexism, that is. Going around giving people girly presents just because they're a girl.”
― Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“Reading is one form of escape. Running for your life is another.”
― Lemony Snicket

“Everybody knew that books were dangerous. Read the wrong book, it was said, and the words crawled around your brain on black legs and drove you mad, wicked mad.”
― Frances Hardinge, Fly by Night

“Where is your sense of patriotism?"

I keep it hid away safe, along with my sense of trust, Mr. Clent. I don't use 'em much in case they get scratched.”
― Frances Hardinge, Fly by Night

“True stories seldom have endings.
I don't want a happy ending, I want more story.”
― Frances Hardinge, Fly by Night

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
― Philip Pullman

“I don't want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted just like that, and it didn't mean anything? What then?”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline