Emily > Emily's Quotes

“Is it so hard for you to give up what you never had?”
― Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

“You fight the war with guns, you fight the peace with stories.”
― Omar El Akkad, American War

“Whenever I see someone reading a book, especially if it is someone I don't expect, I feel civilisation has become a little safer.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“Everything is going to be all right. Or, if not, everything is going to be, so let's not worry.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“I
Like
The Way
That when you
Tilt
Poems
On their side
They
Look like
Miniature
Cities
From
A long way
Away.
Skyscrapers
Made out
Of
Words.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“I drink some water and eat some cereal and then I take Abraham for a walk. He had spent the night eating the arm of the sofa but I don't want to judge him. He has enough issues already.”
― Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

“We are all made of flesh and stars, but we all become dust in the end. Best to shine while you can.”
― Alice Feeney, Sometimes I Lie

“I’ve been returned to my factory settings as a human being, rather than a human doing.”
― Alice Feeney, Sometimes I Lie

“I expect it's hard for witches ... now that most people work in shops and factories, and haven't any crops to ruin. They must be terribly sad, those witches, to have to go from blighting wheat fields to blighting houseplants.”
― Mallory Ortberg, The Merry Spinster

“Perhaps you would not like being married to me,' Beauty said. 'I do not know how to talk to people, and I have terrible taste in shirts.”
― Mallory Ortberg, The Merry Spinster

“Sometimes the world don’t give you what you need, no matter how hard you look. Sometimes it withholds.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“Ain't no good in using anger just to lash. You pray for it to blow up a storm that's going to flush out the truth.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“But it was impossible to not hear the animals, because I looked at them and understood, instantly, and it was like looking at a sentence and understanding the words, all of it coming to me at once.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“She talked like a woman who knew more books than people.”
― Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood

“I remembered less from my own life than I did from the books I read.”
― Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood

“Life never turns out how you imagine it will when you’re young. Everything is smaller than you think, or too big. It all smells a little funny and fits like somebody else’s shirt.”
― Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood

“Usually when I looked at people too long I started seeing them as component parts: Bony noses. Eyeballs in sockets. Odd cartilage curve of ears and fingers so strange and overevolved and makeup floating just over the skin and what the hell was with pants, and knees, and how did we walk around like all of this was normal?”
― Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood

“if you’re not with the book you want, you might as well want the book you’re with.”
― Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood

“Truth has this habit of changing after the fact, don’t you find?”
― David Mitchell, Slade House

“Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable haemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed.”
― David Mitchell, Slade House

“She knew that one extraordinary thing was bound to make the ordinariness of her life all the more painful.”
― Alma Katsu, The Hunger

“Women were always forced to smile. Tamsen had mastered it so well it sometimes frightened her.”
― Alma Katsu, The Hunger

“The world was fragile. One day, growth; the next day, kindling.”
― Alma Katsu, The Hunger

“Truth is seldom a lens, truth is a kaleidoscope,”
― Christopher J. Yates, Grist Mill Road

“I am evolving from being an animal,' he said. 'But it is going very, very slowly. Sometime I try to cry and laugh like other people, just to see if it feels like anything. Yet tears don't come. Laughter doesn't come.”
― Blaine Harden, Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West

“And so Shin’s misery never skidded into complete hopelessness. He had no hope to lose, no past to mourn, no pride to defend. He did not find it degrading to lick soup off the floor. He was not ashamed to beg a guard for forgiveness. It didn’t trouble his conscience to betray a friend for food. These were merely survival skills, not motives for suicide.”
― Blaine Harden, Escape From Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West

“The power of words. They weaseled under door crevices and through keyholes. They hooked into invididuals and wormed through generations.”
― Chloe Benjamin, The Immortalists

“When I been small, once Driver told me cricket singing was the voice of stars.”
― Sandra Newman, The Country of Ice Cream Star

“Is only skew insanities, how God survive when we all kilt. How any person worship gods, when gods ain’t even brave to die.”
― Sandra Newman, The Country of Ice Cream Star

“Shared suffering, she’d found, was no guarantee of intimacy.”
― Michel Faber, Under the Skin