Shannon > Shannon's Quotes

“I used to think of you as my soulmate.”
“I still am.”
― Mò Xiāng Tóngxiù, 魔道祖师 [Mó Dào Zǔ Shī]

“That's why I call this place the Haunted Bookshop. Haunted by the ghosts of the books I haven't read. Poor uneasy spirits, they walk and walk around me. There's only one way to lay the ghost of a book, and that is to read it.”
― Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop

“Wish on everything. Pink cars are good, especially old ones. And stars of course, first stars and shooting stars. Planes will do if they are the first light in the sky and look like stars. Wish in tunnels, holding your breath and lifting your feet off the ground. Birthday candles. Baby teeth.”
― Francesca Lia Block

“I realize that lust stands high in the list of deadly sins. And yet lust - the tightening of the throat, the flushed cheeks, the raging appetite - is the only word accurate to describe the sensation I felt that morning, as the painted door closed and I was left with the liberty of all those books.”
― Geraldine Brooks, March

“That's how hearts get broken, you know. When you believe in promises.”
― Kathleen Glasgow, Girl in Pieces

“They are twilight creatures, beings of dawn and dusk, of standing between one thing and another, of not quite and almost, of borderlands and shadows.”
― Holly Black, The Darkest Part of the Forest

“All the cells in my body rearrange, compass needles pointing to his north.”
― Sarah McCarry, All Our Pretty Songs

“That it was a wolf was somewhat comforting. Wolves talked occasionally. So did bears. Foxes talked all the time, particularly if you caught them in the hen house, where they would do their best to addle you with fine nonsense until they could slip out the door, and it was generally believed that all cats could talk and simply refused to do so for inscrutable reasons of their own. ”
― T. Kingfisher, Toad Words and Other Stories

“Do you have a name?” asked Gerta.  “I do,” said the raven.  Gerta waited. The raven fluffed its beard. “I am the Sound of Mouse Bones Crunching Under the Hooves of God.” ”
― T. Kingfisher, The Raven and the Reindeer

“No matter how pale and pure and perfect you are, the moon is even more perfect.”
― T. Kingfisher, The Raven and the Reindeer

“There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.”
― Christopher Morley, Pipefuls

“The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.”
― Christopher Morley

“Long ago I fell back on books as the only permanent consolers. They are the one stainless and unimpeachable achievement of the human race. It saddens me to think that I shall have to die with thousands of books unread that would have given me noble and unblemished happiness.”
― Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop

“If you grew up in a rural area, you have seen how farmhouses come and go, but the dent left by cellars is permanent. There is something unbreakable in that hand-dug foundational gouge into the earth. Books are the cellars of civilization: when cultures crumble away, their books remain out of sheer stupid solidity.”
― Paul Collins, Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books

“I noticed you made a bee-line for their bookcases." It is the oldest and most incorrigible trait of the book-lover.”
― Paul Collins, Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books

“It really is an APPALLING thing to think of the people who have no books...It is only by books that most men and women can lift themselves above the sordidness of life. No books! Yet for the greater part of humanity that is the common lot. We may, in fact, divide our fellow-creatures into two branches - those who read books and those who do not.”
― Paul Collins, Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books

“The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking. ”
― Christopher Morley

“Between ourselves, there is no such thing, abstractly, as a 'good' book. A book is 'good' only when it meets some human hunger or refutes some human error. ”
― Christopher Morley

“In every man's heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.”
― Christopher Morley

“There is only one success: to be able to spend life in your own way and not to give others absurd maddening claims upon it.”
― Christopher Darlington Morley

“This book Is intended to be read in bed. Please do not attempt to read it anywhere else.”
― Christopher Morley, Mince Pie

“Night, I have discovered, has a faintly bitter taste, caused by its large ingredient of Un-attained Possibility.”
― Christopher Morley, John Mistletoe

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Once, poets were magicians. Poets were strong, stronger than warriors or kings — stronger than old hapless gods. And they will be strong once again.”
― Greg Bear

“Wolves are the witches of the animal world.”
― Katherine Rundell, The Wolf Wilder

“Sometimes all you know about where you're going is that it's away from where you are.”
― Leah Raeder, Black Iris

“Falling for someone is like pulling a loose thread. It happens stitch by stitch. You feel whole most of the time even while the seams pop, the knots loosen, everything that holds you together coming undone. It feels incredible, this opening of yourself to the world. Not like the unraveling it is. Only afterward do you glance down at the tangle of string around your feet that used to be a person who was whole and self-contained and realize that love is not a thing that we create. It's an undoing.”
― Leah Raeder, Black Iris

“The whole summer was inside of us.”
― Leah Raeder, Black Iris

“It blurred the lines between lust and inspiration in a way we’ve always intuitively known they should be blurred, because desire underlies every act of creation.”
― Leah Raeder, Black Iris

“Who fixes broken people? Is it only other broken people, ones who've already been ruined? And do we need to be fixed? It was the messiness and hurt in our pasts that drove us, and that same hurt connected us at a subdermal level, the kind of scars written so deeply in your cells that you can't even see them anymore, only recognize them in someone else.”
― Leah Raeder, Unteachable