Mackenzie Kirk

“It's always mattered a lot to me to keep a wall up round my dignity, even though dignity matters fuck-all when the monsters under your bed are real.”
― Naomi Novik, A Deadly Education

“Mum always told me that you couldn’t know what people would do in a crisis, but I’d thought she just meant you should forgive people for behaving like weasels under bad circumstances, not that a stale biscuit like Khamis might suddenly come over all heroic in a tight corner.”
― Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate

“I’ve been taught any number of ways to manage anger, and they really work. What she’s never been able to teach me is how to want to manage it. So I go on seething and raging and knowing the whole time that it’s my own fault, because I do know how to stop.”
― Naomi Novik, A Deadly Education

“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”
― William Butler Yeats