Jocelyn > Jocelyn's Quotes

“Iron helmets will not save/
Even heroes from the grave/
Good man's blood will drain away/
While the wickid win the day.”
― Heinrich Heine

“When you go, space closes over like water behind you,
Do not look back: there is nothing outside you,
Space is only time visible in a different way,
Places we love we can never leave”
― Ivan V Lalic

“It is an emotional rather than logical equation,
an earthly rather than heavenly one,
which posits that a boy's supplications
and a father's love add up to silence”
― Li-Young Lee

“But love was always something heavy for me. Something I had to carry.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“The road was possibility, the kind she'd thought her life would never hold again, and Tess herself was motion. Motion had no past, only future. Any direction you walked was forward, and that was as must be.”
― Rachel Hartman, Tess of the Road

“The darkness was full, fuller than she would ever have guessed, and she found this curiously comforting.”
― Rachel Hartman, Tess of the Road

“There's nothing ‛just’ about stories. Stories are the most real.”
― Rachel Hartman, Tess of the Road

“The world is surprisingly hard to destroy," said Pathka gently. "Whereas saving it can be done a bit at a time. Anyway, don't be afraid. We're walking away from death, not toward it.”
― Rachel Hartman, Tess of the Road

“It's too great, too terrible, too much. You can shout words into the void forever and never fill it up.”
― Rachel Hartman, Tess of the Road

“A persona was developing in her mind, someone who would wear these breeches and this jacket with these boots. The boots sharpened her focus. A ridiculous situation was surely no hindrance with boots like these. She could kick her way out of anything.”
― Rachel Hartman, Tess of the Road

“Dying took commitment. It was easier to go on living incompetently. What if she put off deciding until tomorrow? She needed time to get the nerve up and work out a foolproof, painless way to do it. Until then, she'd walk on - badly.”
― Rachel Hartman, Tess of the Road

“Everything beautiful felt like a fist clamped around Tess's heart, squeezing.”
― Rachel Hartman, Tess of the Road

“She was just on the verge of recapturing the feeling, how she had brought the cleaver down unflinchingly, how she had been tragic and mighty, and in that moment how her bones had chipped and shattered, but it was all done in an instant.

Severed.”
― Rachel Hartman, Tess of the Road

“Anyway, it wasn't that flavor of love. She could leave and carry it with her. Time would not put a dent in it, nor distance snuff it out.”
― Rachel Hartman, Tess of the Road

“Love and guilt are like ham and eggs. So many people enjoy them together, but there’s no rule saying you must have one with the other. They don’t even come from the same animal.”
― Rachel Hartman, Tess of the Road

“You won’t like hearing this, but sometimes you can’t fix what you broke. Sometimes you just have to live with it.”
― Rachel Hartman, Tess of the Road

“It was astonishing how much meaning could be crammed into a single word. How did such words not crumble under their own weight?”
― Rachel Hartman, Tess of the Road

“One thing I've learned about grief: it's like a creditor's bill. You can put off paying, but it eventually falls due, and exacts usurious interest."

"Do they send someone to break your fingers?" said Tess, thinking of the Belgiosos.

Armando laughed softly. "You find a way to break them yourself." He paused to let her think about what that entailed; she had some idea. "There's a room in my heart full of unpaid bills," he said. "We all have one. It's useful to go in occasionally and open a few.”
― Rachel Hartman, Tess of the Road

“After the crying and the throwing up and the scrolling through his entire contacts list and realizing there wasn't a single person he could tell, and the drafting and then deleting five separate long graphic messages to all his contacts, and the deciding to kill himself, and the deciding not to, Fill went out for a walk.”
― Sam J. Miller, Blackfish City

“Slums are always a marvel; how human desperation can seem to warp the very laws of physics.”
― Sam J. Miller, Blackfish City

“I felt sad, then, for her, and angry at myself. I took that moment, that short time, to mourn, to be sad, to be angry, to feel emotions for her that I never let myself feel for me and mine, because we'd been born to this but she hadn't, and because people who only know suffering from stories are never prepared to find themselves inside one.”
― Sam J. Miller, Blackfish City

“Every city is a war. A thousand fights being fought between a hundred groups. Rich, poor, old, young, born-here, and not-born-here. The followers of this god and the followers of that one. Someone will have the upper hand in each of these battles. Those people will make the rules, whether they're administered by priests or soldiers or politicians or programs. Fixing this is hard. Put new people in power, write new laws, erase old ones, build cities out of nothingness - but the wars remain, the underlying conflicts are unaffected. Only power shifts the scales, and people build power only when they come together. When they find in each other the strength to stop being afraid”
― Sam J. Miller, Blackfish City

“But it only made her hungrier for the real thing. The bite of metal. The dark void below. The cold wind, most of all. A scaler friend of hers, quoting some old proverb: If you surrender to the wind you can ride it.”
― Sam J. Miller, Blackfish City

“This fearlessness that wasn't really fearlessness. More like - the excitement outweighed the fear, the potential positive outcomes overshadowed the potential negative ones. She didn't share it, but she'd seen it before. On her scaler friends, the ones who came from even less than she did, the orphans who hadn't lucked into a family or had ended up in an awful one. The ones who climbed the buildings beside her and stood there looking out at Qaanaaq without the sick feeling in the pit of their stomachs, the fear of falling, the fear of imprisonment, who had nothing but the open-armed embrace of the night to come, with whatever good or awful things waited for them inside it.”
― Sam J. Miller, Blackfish City

“Books have led some to learning and others to madness.”
― Petrarch

“She closed her eyes; and in the sweet slumber lying
her spirit tiptoed from its lodging place.
It's folly to shrink in fear, if this is dying;
for death looked lovely in her face.”
― Petrarch

“To everyone whose mercy is demanded, and who dreams instead of teeth.”
― Margaret Owen, The Merciful Crow

“He won the next five rounds, played in silence but for the countdown. Fie didn't care. The sooner the damned game was over, the better. She'd learned her lesson for digging into ugly truths with pretty boys.”
― Margaret Owen, The Merciful Crow

“Fie had never expected to die quiet.

Young, maybe. On the end of a sword, also likely. And doing what she did best: picking a fight over something easier left alone.”
― Margaret Owen, The Merciful Crow

“She hated Tavin for his silence, for not leaving, for driving her to spew up the sickening fire in her heart instead of letting it break her down to ash.”
― Margaret Owen, The Merciful Crow