Fanfiction Quotes

“There's a time and place for everything, and I believe it’s called 'fan fiction'.”
― Joss Whedon

“Fanfiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don't do it for money. That's not what it's about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They're fans, but they're not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.”
― Lev Grossman

“You flirt with everything." She could tell that her eyes were popping-- her eyeballs actually felt cold around the edges. "You flirt with old people and babies and everybody in between.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl

“I adore the way fan fiction writers engage with and critique source texts, by manipulating them and breaking their rules. Some of it is straight-up homage, but a lot of [fan fiction] is really aggressive towards the source text. One tends to think of it as written by total fanboys and fangirls as a kind of worshipful act, but a lot of times you’ll read these stories and it’ll be like ‘What if Star Trek had an openly gay character on the bridge?’ And of course the point is that they don’t, and they wouldn’t, because they don’t have the balls, or they are beholden to their advertisers, or whatever. There’s a powerful critique, almost punk-like anger, being expressed there—which I find fascinating and interesting and cool.”
― Lev Grossman

“Why does any kind of cynicism appeal to people? Because it seems like a mark of maturity, of sophistication, like you’ve seen everything and know better. Or because putting something down feels like pushing yourself up.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“When you are older, you will learn that the first and foremost thing which any ordinary person does is nothing.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky

“Like that's the only reason anyone would ever buy a first-aid kit? Don't take this the wrong way, Professor McGonagall, but what sort of crazy children are you used to dealing with?"

"Gryffindors," spat Professor McGonagall, the word carrying a freight of bitterness and despair that fell like an eternal curse on all youthful heroism and high spirits.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Boys," said Hermione Granger, "should not be allowed to love girls without asking them first! This is true in a number of ways and especially when it comes to gluing people to the ceiling!”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Diary,
You don't know what it's like. To wake up and see her there.
But I do.
Draco”
― Onyx_and_Elm, Breath Mints / Battle Scars

“Everybody drinks," she said calmly. The Only Rational One.
"Your sister doesn't."
When rolled her eyes. "Forgive me, but I'm not going to spend my college years sitting soberly in my dorm room, writing about gay magicians."
"Objection," Cath said, reaching for a burrito.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl

“Well, who doesn't love a good mpreg?"
"A what?"
"Sim gets man-pregnant? Gives birth to twins during a tornado?"
"I'll pretend I never heard that."
"Here, I'll read you the wedding one -"
"NO.”
― J.C. Lillis, How to Repair a Mechanical Heart

“You think, out of a room of hundreds, I'd choose you?"
"I'd choose you."
"Because, let me tell you, I fucking wou-" Draco's words stop as though he's been magically silenced.
"You what?" He asks quietly. Barely a murmur.”
― Onyx_and_Elm, Breath Mints / Battle Scars

“Irritated fans produce fanfic like irritated oysters produce pearls.”
― Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fanfiction is Taking Over the World

“That is for the person who told me she'd pick me out of a room of hundreds. If she ever decides to mean it.”
― Onyx_and_Elm, Breath Mints / Battle Scars

“And then Harry Potter had launched in to a speech that was inspiring, yet vague. A speech to the effect that Fred and George and Lee had tremendous potential if they could just learn to be weirder. To make people's live surreal, instead of just surprising them with the equivalents of buckets of water propped above doors. (Fred and George had exchanged interested looks, they'd never thought of that one.) Harry Potter had invoked a picture of the prank they'd pulled on Neville - which, Harry had mentioned with some remorse, the Sorting Hat had chewed him out on - but which must have made Neville doubt his own sanity. For Neville it would have felt like being suddendly transported into an alternate universe. The same way everyone else had felt when they'd seen Snape apologize. That was the true power of pranking.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Here he is, the epitome of self-improvement, like I knew a more primitive and lesser form of him. He wasn't a full person then, but now he is complete. Not completed by me, not at all. He's making damn sure I don't accidentally think that. And he smiles at me, the way you'd smile at a stranger, or at someone you know you're never going to see again, awkward but comforting like the encounter was not as unpleasant as it could have been. I want to snatch a hold of his shoulders and ask if he's fucking kidding me. If he's done. Because it seems to me like he is, but he's not allowed to be if I'm not.”
― Anna Green, Wolves vs. Hearts

“Without thinking about it at all, Harry stepped in front of Hermione.

There was an intake of breath from behind him, and then a moment later Hermione brushed past and stepped in front of him. "Run, Harry!" she said. "Boys shouldn't have to be in danger.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“...being written by someone who might not quite understand the subconscious nuance of the character leaves us in varying degrees of flatness.”
― Jasper Fforde, One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

“Before the boy who lived, there was another story. One of a monster inside of a man. One of a hero inside of a child. One of a traitor inside of a friend. And one of an angel inside of a demon.”
― Mordred, Forever Alive

“You wanna love me for the rest of your life?”
“Baby, I’m gonna love you for the rest of my life,” Harry says, pressing a quick, careful kiss to the corner of Louis’ mouth. “I just hope that you want to be loved by me for the rest of your life.”
― whoknows, Indestructible

“But it is cute. It's such a boy thing to do.

Drop dead.

Aw, you say the most romantic things.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“I love you,” he says, still meeting Harry’s eyes, “and it took me a while to get here, but I think that maybe I’ve always loved you. But you wanna know the other thing that I know for sure? Besides the fact that I love you?”
(...)
“I’m always going to love you,” Louis says, tucking some of Harry’s hair behind his ear. “No matter what.”
― whoknows, Indestructible

“I love you in my bed at night, and when I wake up, and I love hearing you sing, and I love telling you to stop bothering me, and I love walking to Van’s noodle house with you, and I love you – I love you, so promise you’ll be like the ocean and come back to me, even when they pull you away. Always come back to me.”
― Standbyme, Twist and Shout

“What’s the difference, really, between Malfoy and heroin? What are they but two shipwrecks, entangled by the same tide? How fucking poetic. He and I are paint splattered all over the place and we’re staining everything and maybe we absolutely don’t go together, but to me — to me we’re a fucking Jackson Pollock.”
― Onyx_and_Elm, Breath Mints / Battle Scars

“He had, at last, found his enough.”
― Brigitte Knightley, Draco Malfoy and the Mortifying Ordeal of Being in Love

“the bar is in hell, and i frequently play limbo with the devil.”
― bizarrestars, Crimson Rivers

“At my funeral there will be no flowers.
This is a request I write in the wrinkled pages of thrown away suicide notes.
There will be no white lilies stuck to cherrywood casket,
there will be no pre-wilting roses or orchids weeping in the iron fist of a father or forget-me-nots in twin palms…
Instead I imagine my funeral as I am: there is a thing lost at sea.
It is weathered by salt water and unanchored.
It is sinking.
At my funeral, the sky opens her mouth to pour.
At my funeral, the river overflows.
Flowers do not grow underwater. I learned this from a brother. Or two. I learned that grief is a thing of threes: there is no room in a mourning house for a fourth flood.
I live in rooms full of water and shipwrecks. I do not miss the flowers.
Really, I have never seen them.
At night I dream of a mother I have never met.
She has no head.
Just hands.
And she holds me as if my spine was always meant to be bent.
Curled into her arms.
Cradled.
I dream of funerals, and home grown alliums.
I dream of newly dead sons and their mothers.
There is ivy tickling my chin, soft earth cushion underneath my heavy skull.
Truthfully. I am already there-
I hear the soil is warm this time of year.”
― Zeeskit

“Tell me, which is more terrifying?(…)” “To overwhelm your enemies with raw power alone, or defeat them without even lifting a finger?”
― chuuya nakahara, bsd fanfiction (I Would Walk Through Hell If It's With You)

“Eventually he would came to learn that there was a technique in music that felt a lot like this, called ‘tempo rubato’. It involved speeding or slowing the traditional tempo of a song to invoke new feeling, as beautiful representation of freedom that relied completely on the discretion of the musician. If done incorrectly the technique could effectively butcher a thing of beauty—but if done right, it could award complete and utter freedom over the most expressive art known to man. That rubato was the thing one heard when an orchestra conductor briefly slowed a key moment in a classical piece. It was that breath at the end of a love ballad where your very heart felt as though it was shattering. It was responsible for every moment of emotion felt by conscious beings capable of hearing a music note played aloud.

Tempo rubato meant ‘robbed time’. That was the name humans gave to the concept. Like a word, time could not be captured, so people did the only thing they could, they attempted to defy it. They used surgeries to fix the physical flaws that came with age, and took photographs to help them remember a moment otherwise lost. People defied time by naming it. They called the past ‘memories’ and the future ‘what’s yet to pass’. They called hopelessness ‘rubato’, and in doing so, they granted themselves the illusion of controlling time.

At least, that's how he'd described it whenever someone cared enough to ask.

But still, it remained a comforting thought. If someone could speed up or slow down something as uncapturable as music—as pure emotion—then maybe time really was within their control. But everyone knew it wasn't possible. Not really. Whether as a conscious realisation or an inherent knowing, the answer was clear; time passed with or without people. With or without photographs or tempo. It always did, and it was easy to look back and desperately want to cling to it. Natural even, because what was behind was clear—it'd already been lived. It was the unknown ahead that scared people.

At sixteen Remus couldn’t have told anyone what a ‘tempo rubato’ was, but he’d been unknowingly experiencing it all his life. Being at school felt like the traditional, fast-moving tempo of the piece, and those few precious moments in the flat were his rubato. There he couldn’t play or make music, he could only listen and live. Conversations were without any real goal, the days blurred into one another, and the nights felt endless but not hopeless. There was very little action or adventure and that was how he liked it. The flat was rubato, one he’d never find anywhere else. There would be others, yes, but none the same. If he’d known then maybe he would’ve taken more pictures and less drugs so he could better commit them to memory.

But that’s the thing about memories—in the moment they’re not memories at all. They’re not even time.

They’re just life.”
― Motswolo, The Cadence of Part-time Poets

“You save the innocence of others because no one was there to save yours.”
― Kurinoone, Deepest Reflections