Nicole Field > Nicole's Quotes

“Birthdays were wretched, delicious things when you lived in Beau Rivage. The clock stuck midnight, and presents gave way to magic.

Curses bloomed.

Girls bit into sharp apples instead of birthday cake, chocked on the ruby-and-white slivers, and collapsed into enchanted sleep. Unconscious beneath cobweb canopies, frozen in coffins of glass, they waited for their princes to come. Or they tricked ogres, traded their voices for love, danced until their glass slippers cracked.

A prince would awaken, roused by the promise of true love, and find he had a witch to destroy. A heart to steal. To tear from the rib cage, where it was cushioned by bloody velvet, and deliver it to the queen who demanded the princess's death.

Girls became victims and heroines.

Boys became lovers and murderers.

And sometimes... they became both.”
― Sarah Cross, Kill Me Softly

“War is not just the business of death, it is the antitheses of life.”
― joss whedon ( Fray)

“I can't explain the birds to you even if I tried. In the early morning, when the sun's rays peek over the mountain and subtly light up the landscape in a glow that, if audible, would sound like a hum, the birds sing. They sing in a layered symphony, hundreds deep. You really can't believe how beautiful it is. You hear bass notes from across the farm and soprano notes from the tree in front of you all at once, at varying volumes, like a massive choir that stretches across fifty acres of land. I love birds. But not as much as my wife loves them. My wife thinks about them, whereas I only notice them once they call for attention. But she looks for them, builds fountains for them, and saves them after they crash into windows. I've seen her save many birds. She holds them gently in the palm of her hand, and she takes them to one of the fountains she's built especially for them and holds their beaks up to the gentle trickle of water to let them drink, to wake them up from their dazed stupor. No matter how much time it takes, she doesn't leave them until they recover. And they mostly always do.”
― Portia de Rossi, Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain

“A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.”
― Carl Sagan

“The first draft of anything is shit.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“But I believe in true love, you know? I don't believe that everybody gets to keep their eyes or not get sick or whatever, but everybody should have true love, and it should last at least as long as your life does.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Your first crush is allowed to be on a doofus."
"Mine won't be. I'll choose a handsome gypsy boy who'll break my heart, or a soft girl with a diamond in her belly button.”
― Brigid Lowry, Guitar Highway Rose

“What cannot be seen:
our crumpled childhoods,
our scarred wrists,
how we hated our bodies,
how hard we tried,
your needle marks?
my envy.”
― Brigid Lowry, Guitar Highway Rose

“Ha," I said. "Oh, ha-ha. Yeah, ’cause they love me. You see how many vampires are up here? Zero, right?"
One," said Eric, stepping out of the stairwell.”
― Charlaine Harris, All Together Dead

“And life goes on, which seems kind of strange and cruel when you're watching someone die.”
― Melina Marchetta, On the Jellicoe Road

“Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.”
― Stephen Fry

“Dude, your girlfriend is so far past high maintenance even the janitor quit.”
― Samantha Young, Blood Past

“We are stardust, we are golden and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden.”
― Joni Mitchell

“It seems to me that the years between eighteen and twenty-eight are the hardest, psychologically. It’s then you realize this is make or break, you no longer have the excuse of youth, and it is time to become an adult – but you are not ready.”
― Helen Mirren, In the Frame

“Never love anyone who treats you like you're ordinary.”
― Oscar Wilde

“In an infinity of worlds, anything is not only possible, it's mandatory.”
― Michael Reaves, InterWorld

“There are many perks to living for twenty-one centuries, and foremost among them is bearing witness to the rare birth of genius. It invariably goes like this: Someone shrugs off the weight of his cultural traditions, ignores the baleful stares of authority, and does something his countrymen think to be completely batshit insane. Of those, Galileo was my personal favorite. Van Gogh comes in second, but he really was batshit insane.”
― Kevin Hearne, Hounded

“Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this.”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf

“Sheba’s outfits tend to be very complicated – lots of floaty layers. I know she was wearing purple shoes. And there was definitely a long skirt involved, because I remember thinking that it was in imminent danger of becoming entangled in her spokes. When she dismounted – with a lithe, rather irritating, little skip – I saw that the skirt was made of some diaphanous material. Fey was the word that swam into my mind. Fey person, I thought.”
― Zoë Heller

“Suddenly an ice-cold wind went through the vast hall, and the blind mother could feel that Death had arrived.
'How have you been able to find your way here?' he asked, 'how have you been able to get here faster than I have?'
'I'm a mother," she said.”
― Hans Christian Andersen

“Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park

“I believe that inspiration will always try its best to work with you—but if you are not ready or available, it may indeed choose to leave you and to search for a different human collaborator.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

“Our planet is inhabited not only by animals, and planets, and bacteria, but also ideas. Ideas are a disembodied energetic life-form. They are completely separated from us but capable of interacting with us.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

“Inspiration is trying to send me messages in every form it can—through dreams, through portents, through clues, through coincidences, through déjà vu, through kismet, through surprising waves of attraction and reaction, through the chills that run up my arms, through the hair that stands up on the back of my neck, through the pleasure of something new and surprising, through stubborn ideas that keep me awake all night long . . . whatever works. Inspiration is always trying to work with me. So I sit there and I work, too. That’s the deal. I trust it; it trusts me.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: How to Live a Creative Life, and Let Go of Your Fear

“Why do we read with greed? (Or play, or design, etc.?) We want to fill our minds with knowledge the way others want to fill their bellies with food. Information replaces confusion, which many of us experience in interactions with others. It is a place to focus, apart from all the external stimuli in our homes, schools, shops, etc. It is completely within our control how much we want to let in, unlike dealing with people, who are unpredictable and uncontrollable. (Even those of us who are in our own bubble, who don‘t read or seem to look outward much, may have a rich internal world and not yet have such a need to connect.)”
― Rudy Simone, Aspergirls: Empowering Females with Asperger Syndrome

“Friendships between women, as any woman will tell you, are built of a thousand small kindnesses... swapped back and forth and over again.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

“Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!”
― John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany

“On a broad level, speculative fiction is about encounters with the unknown, whether that takes the form of aliens or werewolf or eldritch creatures beyond mortal ken. Similarly, much of the diaspora experience is tied to uncertainty. You journey to a strange land you’ve only heard about in stories, one where the language is unfamiliar and the customs perplexing. You have a few things with you—a sword, a bow, a bag full of spells and paperwork for a Green Card application—but it’s still a terrifying experience. While part of that terror is necessarily tied to survival, another element is the fear of change—the literal change in environment and the ways you change in response. For both SFF protagonists and new immigrants, there’s the major question of how much you choose to fight against or welcome those change while maintaining vestiges of your previous self.”
― Cynthia Zhang