Mandy Botlik > Mandy's Quotes

“We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin

“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

“Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 6: Fables & Reflections

“Life is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.”
― Neil Gaiman

“There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts.”
― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

“Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 3: Dream Country

“People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

“When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin, The Tombs of Atuan

“Only in silence the word,
Only in dark the light,
Only in dying life:
Bright the hawk's flight
On the empty sky.

—The Creation of Éa”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“Truth is a matter of the imagination.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

“My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“While we read a novel, we are insane—bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices... Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin, The Farthest Shore

“I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

“Remember: that giants sleep too soundly; that witches are often betrayed by their appetites; dragons have one soft spot, somewhere, always; hearts can be well-hidden, and you can betray them with your tongue. (from "Instructions")”
― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

“To hear, one must be silent.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Earthsea Trilogy

“To see a candle's light one must take it into a dark place.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“Hardly anybody ever writes anything nice about introverts. Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realise that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts. We are been taught to be ashamed of not being 'outgoing'. But a writer's job is ingoing.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin

“We broke the world to make it whole...”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Other Wind

“Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkably difficult to kill.”
― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

“We wrapped our dreams in words and patterned the words so that they would live forever, unforgettable.”
― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

“Still round the corner there may wait
A new road or a secret gate
And though I oft have passed them by
A day will come at last when I
Shall take the hidden paths that run
West of the Moon, East of the Sun.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“I will not say: do not weep; for not all tears are an evil.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“A single dream is more powerful than a thousand realities.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, Fanshawe

“People trust their eyes above all else - but most people see what they wish to see, or what they believe they should see; not what is really there”
― Zoë Marriott, Shadows on the Moon

“I've been in darkness nearly all my life, and you brought light into my existance for the first time. And maybe that's why I started to... have feeling for you. You seemed like a dream. [...] But that's just infatuation. Hero worship. It's not real. I've learned a lot about love in these last months. Abd part of what I've learned is you have to want someone for who they are, not who you want them to be. You have to love a real person, not some dream in your head. Neither of us could have lived that way.”
― Zoë Marriott, FrostFire

“Dying is easy. Anyone can throw themselves onto the pyre and rest a happy martyr. Enduring the suffering that comes with sacrifice is the real test.”
― Jay Kristoff, Stormdancer