Loretta (Quixotic Reads) > Loretta (Quixotic Reads)'s Quotes

“Thank God we can't tell the future. We'd never get out of bed.”
― Tracy Letts, August: Osage County

“You think all existence lapses in as quiet a flow as that in which your youth has hitherto slid away. Floating on with closed eyes and muffled ears, you neither see the rocks bristling not far off in the bed of the flood, nor hear the breakers boil at their base. But I tell you—and you may mark my words—you will come some day to a craggy pass in the channel, where the whole of life's stream will be broken up into whirl and tumult, foam and noise: either you will be dashed to atoms on crag points, or lifted up and borne on by some master-wave into a calmer current—as I am now.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“They said nothing and our parents said nothing, so we sensed how ancient they were, how accustomed to trauma, depressions, and wars. We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in, and for all their caretaking and bitching about crabgrass they didn't give a damn about lawns.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

“When you find a man you wish to marry, Tessa, remember this: You will know what kind of man he is not by the things he says, but by the things he does.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Angel

“I choose to believe that I owe my very
life to you--ay--smile, and think it an exaggeration if you will.
I believe it, because it adds a value to that life to think--oh,
Miss Hale!' continued he, lowering his voice to such a tender
intensity of passion that she shivered and trembled before him,
'to think circumstance so wrought, that whenever I exult in
existence henceforward, I may say to myself, "All this gladness
in life, all honest pride in doing my work in the world, all this
keen sense of being, I owe to her!" And it doubles the gladness,
it makes the pride glow, it sharpens the sense of existence till
I hardly know if it is pain or pleasure, to think that I owe it
to one--nay, you must, you shall hear'--said he, stepping
forwards with stern determination--'to one whom I love, as I do
not believe man ever loved woman before.' He held her hand tight
in his. He panted as he listened for what should come. ”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

“There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“Do you think I am an automaton? — a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! — I have as much soul as you — and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh: it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal — as we are!”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Do not by any means destroy yourself, for if you live you may yet have good fortune, but all the dead are dead like.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy

“Does the walker choose the path, or the path the walker?”
― Garth Nix, Sabriel

“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

“When you handle books all day long, every new one is a friend and a temptation.”
― Elizabeth Kostovia, The Historian

“Recently abandoned women can be complicated.”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian

“There are no safe choices. Only other choices.”
― Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty

“One could argue that it's romantic to die for love. Of course, then you're dead and unable to take that honeymoon trip to the Alps with all the other fashionable young couples, which is a shame.”
― Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty

“Might. Is there any opiate more powerful than that word?”
― Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty

“Consequently, if you believe God made Satan, you must realize that all Satan's power comes from God and so that Satan is simply God's child, and that we are God's children also. There are no children of Satan, really.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“The only power that exists is inside ourselves.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“A secret is a strange thing.

There are three kinds of secrets. One is the sort everyone knows about, the sort you need at least two people for. One to keep it. One to never know. The second is a harder kind of secret: one you keep from yourself. Every day, thousands of confessions are kept from their would-be confessors, none of these people knowing that their never-admitted secrets all boil down to the same three words: I am afraid.

And then there is the third kind of secret, the most hidden kind. A secret no one knows about. Perhaps it was known once, but was taken to the grave. Or maybe it is a useless mystery, arcane and lonely, unfound because no one ever looked for it.

Sometimes, some rare times, a secret stays undiscovered because it is something too big for the mind to hold. It is too strange, too vast, too terrifying to contemplate.

All of us have secrets in our lives. We’re keepers or keptfrom, players or played. Secrets and cockroaches — that’s what will be left at the end of it all.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Dream Thieves

“There aren't terrible ideas. Just ideas done terribly.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Dream Thieves

“Strong women are absolutely unpredictable.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat

“We breathe the light, we breathe the music, we breathe the moment as it passes through us.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat

“It is a dangerous thing to unbelieve something only because it frightens you.”
― Marissa Meyer, Heartless

“When pleased, I beat like a drum. When sad, I break like glass. Once stolen, I can never be taken back. What am I?”
― Marissa Meyer, Heartless

“Fascinating, isn't it, how often heroic and foolish turn out to be one and the same.”
― Marissa Meyer, Heartless

“There is no good word for the opposite of lonesome.
One might be tempted to suggest togetherness or contentment , but the fact that these two other words bear definitions unrelated to each other perfectly displays why lonesome cannot be properly mirrored. It does not mean solitude, nor alone, nor lonely, although lonesome can contain all of those words in itself.
Lonesome means a state of being apart. Of being other. Alone-some.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Blue Lily, Lily Blue

“Humans were so circular; they lived the same slow cycles of joy and misery over and over, never learning. Every lesson in the universe had to be taught billions of times, and it never stuck.

Maybe it was good that the world forgot every lesson, every good and bad memory, every triumph and failure, all of it dying with each generation. Perhaps this cultural amnesia spared them all. Perhaps if they remembered everything, hope would die instead.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Blue Lily, Lily Blue

“Memory is slippery. It bends to our understanding of the world, twists to accommodate our prejudices. It is unreliable. Witnesses seldom remember the same things. They identify the wrong people. They give us the details of events that never happened. Memory is slippery, but my memories suddenly feel slipperier.”
― Holly Black, White Cat

“The head is too wise. The heart is all fire.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven King