Noémi > Noémi's Quotes

“All these years I've been...I'm...' He still seemed to be choking. 'I'm...an orphan. I'm...I'm alone. I'm...I'm...I'm...free.' He pushed himself up on one elbow, staring at his hands as if for the first time they had become his own. 'I can...I can do anything. I can leave Jealousy! I can break my spectacles and run off barefoot to become a...a...cobbler! I can...I can marry my housekeeper! Do I have a housekeeper? I never had time to notice! But now I can get a housekeeper! And marry her!”
― Frances Hardinge, The Lost Conspiracy

“I am anything I wish to be. The world cannot choose for me. No, it is for me to choose what the world shall be.”
― Frances Hardinge, The Lost Conspiracy

“True stories seldom have endings.
I don't want a happy ending, I want more story.”
― Frances Hardinge, Fly by Night

“Where is your sense of patriotism?"

I keep it hid away safe, along with my sense of trust, Mr. Clent. I don't use 'em much in case they get scratched.”
― Frances Hardinge, Fly by Night

“If wits were pins, the man would be a veritable hedgehog.”
― Frances Hardinge, Fly by Night

“The world is like a broken wrist that healed the wrong way, and will never be the same again.”
― Frances Hardinge, Fly by Night

“Sometimes fear made you angry. Perhaps after years anger cooled, like a sword taken from a forge. Perhaps in the end you were left with something very cold and very sharp.”
― Frances Hardinge, Fly by Night

“In Mosca’s experience, a ‘long story’ was always a short story someone did not want to tell.”
― Frances Hardinge, Fly by Night

“I find it hard to believe that a lady like...’ Pertellis hesitated, and coughed. ‘There is something elevated in the female spirit that will always hold a woman back from the coldest and most vicious forms of villainy.’

‘No, there isn’t,’ Miss Kitely said kindly but firmly, as she set a dish in his hand. ‘Drink your chocolate, Mr Pertellis.”
― Frances Hardinge, Fly by Night

“It did seem hard to be doing something heroic while everyone was too busy to notice.”
― Frances Hardinge, Fly by Night

“So this was a nest of radicals. She thought a hotbed of sedition would involve more gunpowder and secret handshakes, and less shuffling of feet and passing the sugar.”
― Frances Hardinge, Fly by Night

“I generally find,' Clent murmured after a pause, 'that it is best to treat borrowed time the same way as borrowed money. Spend it with panache, and try to be somewhere else when it runs out.'

'And when we get found, Mr. Clent, when the creditors and bailiffs come after us and it's payment time...'

'...then we borrow more, madam, at a higher interest. We embark on a wilder gamble, make a bigger promise, tell a braver story, devise a more intricate lie, sell the hides of imaginary dragons to desperate men, climb to even higher and more precarious ground...and later, of course, our fall and catastrophe will be all the worse, but later will be our watchword, Mosca. We have nothing else - but we can at least make later later.”
― Frances Hardinge, Fly Trap

“Since that time Saracen had been making a name for himself. That name was not ‘Saracen’. Indeed the name was more along the lines of ‘that hell-fowl’, ‘did-you-see-what-it-did-to-my-leg’, ‘kill-it-kill-it-there-it-goes’ or ‘what’s-that-chirfugging-goose-done-now’.”
― Frances Hardinge, Fly Trap

“I barely knew I had skin before I met you.”
― Sarah Waters, The Paying Guests

“They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.”
― Philip Larkin, High Windows

“...Alex found herself reading of emotions and experiences of which her own seemed so feeble a mockery, that she was conscious of a physical pang of sick disappointment.
Was all fiction utterly untrue to life? Or was hers the counterfeit, which the printed pages but reproduced something of a reality which was denied to her?”
― E.M. Delafield, Consequences