Caitlin > Caitlin's Quotes

“MY FULL NAME is Cadence Sinclair Eastman. I suffer migraines. I do not suffer fools. I like a twist of meaning. I endure.”
― E. Lockhart, We Were Liars

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

“It's only that the answers in most stories are boring because they are supplied by the real world rather than, well, something better. Something more stimulating. Sit down with the Greeks and the Romans, and the boring answers get more interesting. Seasons because a girl and a crocus. Death because a girl and an apple. The moon because a girl keeps driving her daft chariot into the sea.
It's all down to girls, one way or another.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“I am human. Like all humans, I do not remember my birth. By the time we wake up to ourselves, we are little children, and our advent is something that happened an eternity ago, at the beginning of time. We live like latecomers at the theater; we must catch up as best we can, divining the beginning from the shape of later events. How many times have I gone back to the border of memory and peered into the darkness beyond? But it is not only memories that hover on the border. There are all sorts of phantasmagoria that inhabit that realm. The nightmares of a lonely child. Fairy tales appropriated by a mind hungry for story. The fantasies of an imaginative little girl anxious to explain to herself the inexplicable. Whatever story I may have discovered on the frontier of forgetting, I do not pretend to myself that it is the truth.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“I was eleven years old, and I’d lost my mother, and my soul, and the Crucible gave me you.”
“It made us roommates,” he says.
I shake my head. “We were always more.”
“We were enemies.”
“You were the centre of my universe,” I say. “Everything else spun around you.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Carry On

“Stories don't always have happy endings."

This stopped him. Because they didn't, did they? That's one thing the monster had definitely taught him. Stories were wild, wild animals and went off in directions you couldn't expect.”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

“Jane, be still; don't struggle so like a wild, frantic bird, that is rending its own plumage in its desperation."
"I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will; which I now exert to leave you.”
― Charlotte Brontë , Jane Eyre

“I was just cleaning up my own mess, Baz. Like, no one would call you a hero for cleaning up your own vomit.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Carry On

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“People aren't either wicked or noble. They're like chef's salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Grim Grotto

“The world is not a wish-granting factory.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“No child in my family watches holos before the age of twelve. We all have nature and nurture to shape us. She can watch other people’s opinions when she has opinions of her own, and no sooner. We’re not digital creatures. We’re flesh and blood. Better she learns that before the world finds her.”
― Pierce Brown, Morning Star

“That’s part of what I like about the book in some ways. It portrays death truthfully. You die in the middle of your life, in the middle of a sentence”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“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

“I hate it when people talk like friendship is less than other kinds of - as though it's some kind of runner-up prize for people who can't have sex.”
― R.J. Anderson, Quicksilver

“Because noir isn’t really a new thing at all. It’s just a fairy tale with guns. Your hardscrabble detective is nothing more than a noble knight with a cigarette and a disease where his heart should be. He talks prettier, that’s all. He’s no less idealistic—there’re good women and bad women, good jobs and bad jobs. Justice and truth are always worth seeking. He pulls his fedora down like the visor on a suit of armour. He serves his lord faithfully whether he wants to or not. And he is in thrall to the idea of a woman. It’s just that in detective stories, women are usually dead before the curtain goes up. In fairy tales, they’re usually alive.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“The moment a child thinks it is entitled to anything, they think they deserve everything. Why do you think the Core is such a Babylon? Because it’s never been told no.”
― Pierce Brown, Morning Star

“What you are is a fucking tragedy, Simon Snow. You literally couldn't be a bigger mess."
He tries to kiss me, but I pull back- "And you like that?"
"I love it." He says
"Why?"
"Because we match.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Carry On

“King Uthil says steel is the answer. I say his sight is short. Dust is the last answer to every question, now and always.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Half a War

“There was once an invisible man who had grown tired of being unseen. It was not that he was actually invisible. It was that people had become used to not seeing him.

And if no one sees you, are you really there at all?"”
― Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

“I didn’t understand the purpose of the seeds, but it was comforting to know that in a dire emergency I could hit people with my ukulele while Meg planted geraniums.”
― Rick Riordan, The Hidden Oracle

“Once upon a time there was a fairy godmother, but the rest of the time there was none. This story is about one of those other times.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
― C.S. Lewis

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Yep, that pretty much describes my life: because Poseidon.”
― Rick Riordan, The Hidden Oracle

“Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“I object to murder. It's just a silly girlish prejudice.”
― Elizabeth Peters, Silhouette in Scarlet

“Dear child, I am about to make a long journey, so take into thy keeping the keys of the thirteen doors of heaven. Twelve of these thou mayest open, and behold the glory which is within them, but the thirteenth, to which this little key belongs, is forbidden thee. Beware of opening it, or thou wilt bring misery on thyself.”
― Jacob Grimm, Grimms Fairy Tales

“I have a story to tell you. It has many beginnings, and perhaps one ending. Perhaps not. Beginnings and endings are contingent things anyway; inventions, devices. Where does any story really begin? There is always context, always an encompassingly greater epic, always something before the described events, unless we are to start every story with “BANG! Expand! Sssss…,” then itemize the whole subsequent history of the universe before settling down, at last, to the particular tale in question. Similarly, no ending is final, unless it is the end of all things…”
― Iain M. Banks, The Algebraist

“Perhaps it also demonstrates that any young girl can live quite healthily on coarse bread and clear water – so long as she has fine clothes.”
― Ann Lawrence, Tales from Perrault