Lana > Lana's Quotes

“I KISSED YOU AND LATER I WOULD KISS HIM TOO BEFORE I UNDERSTOOD WHAT YOU WERE, AND ALL THREE OF US LIVED TO REGRET IT—BUT WHEN I AM IN HEAVEN I WILL REMEMBER YOUR MOUTH, AND WHEN YOU ROAST DOWN IN HELL I THINK YOU WILL REMEMBER MINE”
― Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth

“Change often starts with the smallest of whispers. Like-minded people building it up to a roar.”
― T.J. Klune, The House in the Cerulean Sea

“A home isn’t always the house we live in. It’s also the people we choose to surround ourselves with. You may not live on the island, but you can’t tell me it’s not your home. Your bubble, Mr. Baker. It’s been popped. Why would you allow it to grow around you again?”
― T.J. Klune, The House in the Cerulean Sea

“We should always make time for the things we like. If we don't, we might forget how to be happy.”
― T.J. Klune, The House in the Cerulean Sea

“You hating me always meant more than anyone else in this hot and stupid universe loving me. At least I’d had your full attention.”
― Tamsyn Muir

“But Harrowhark—Harrow, who was two hundred dead children; Harrow, who loved something that had not been alive for ten thousand years—Harrowhark Nonagesimus had always so badly wanted to live. She had cost too much to die.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth

“In a battle between two men trying to control her, she'd chosen herself.”
― Tehlor Kay Mejia, We Set the Dark on Fire

“You have a big heart, a strong mind, and you will find a way to make a life you love. No matter how different it is from the one you left.”
― Tehlor Kay Mejia, We Set the Dark on Fire

“It's a viper's nest, child. I'll not deny it. See that you have the strongest venom.”
― Tehlor Kay Mejia, We Set the Dark on Fire

“Freedom has a price. People who want easy and pretty stay in their cages.”
― Tehlor Kay Mejia , We Set the Dark on Fire

“But I want to live in a world where love doesn't mean fear. Where we can survive without forgetting who we are”
― Tehlor Kay Mejia, We Set the Dark on Fire

“Forgetting... is a beautiful thing. When you forget, you remake yourself... For a caterpillar to become a butterfly, it must forget it was a caterpillar at all. Then it will be as if the caterpillar never was & there was only ever a butterfly.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“Humans are strange. … They value punishment because they think it means their actions are important—that they are important. … it's vanity.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“Life is full of beautiful dangers, dangerous beauties... They wound us in ways we cannot see: an injury ripples out, like a stone dropped in water, touching moments years into the future.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“I don't have the time or the energy to hate," says Shara. "I only wish to understand. People are what they are.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“The gods are cruel not because they make us work. They are cruel because they allow us to hope.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“I have never met a person who possessed a privilege who did not exercise that privilege to the fullest extent that they possibly could.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“I am lost among the seas of fate and time
But at least I have love.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“Scars are windows to bitterness—it is best to leave them untouched.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“Just because the nightmare you expected comes true, it doesn't make it any less terrifying.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“Envy the fire, for it is either going or not. Fires do not feel happy, sad, angry. They burn, or they do not burn.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“But you must know that if corruption is powerful enough, it’s not corruption at all—it’s law. Unspoken, unwritten, but law.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“I am sorrowful. I am sorrowful that I happened to be born into a world where being disgusted with yourself was what you were supposed to be. I am sorrowful that my fellow countrymen feel that being human is something to repress, something ugly, something nasty. It's... It's just a fucking shame. It really is.

I am penitent. I am penitent for all the relationships this shame has ruined. I am penitent that I've allowed my shame and unhappiness to spread to others. I've fucked men and I've fucked women, Father Kolkan. I have sucked numerous pricks, and I have had my pricked sucked by numerous people. I have fucked and been fucked. And it was lovely, really lovely. I had an excellent time doing it, and I would gladly do it again. I really would. I have been lucky enough to find and meet and come to hold beautiful people in my arms - honestly, some beautiful, lovely, brilliant people - and I am filled with regret that my awful self-hate drove them away.

I don't know if you made the world, Father Kolkan. And I don't know if you made my people or if they made themselves. But if it was your words they taught me as a child, and if it's your words that encourage this vile self-disgust, this ridiculous self-flagellation, this incredibly damaging idea that to be human and to love and to risk making mistakes is wrong, then... Well, I guess fuck you, Father Kolkan.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“Good historians keep the past in their head and the future in their heart.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“The city knows. It remembers. Its past is written in its bones, though the past now speaks in silences.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“Nations have no morals,” says Shara, quoting her aunt from memory. “Only interests.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“Is this how governments are made? Forcing decisions on wounded people in the middle of the night?”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“But I told myself if I could just get past my house and hammock without being sucked in by the guaranteed comfort, something else might be waiting for me on the other side, something that might color me outside the lines and flow into other parts of my life.”
― Tanya Boteju, Kings, Queens, and In-Betweens

“A reminder to remember: just because the sharpness of the sadness has faded does not mean that it was not, once, terrible. It means only that time and space, creatures of infinite girth and tenderness, have stepped between the two of you, and they are keeping you safe as they were once unable to.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House

“We deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism, because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House