quotes by Jennifer Donnelly

"Right now I want a word that describes the feeling that you get--a cold sick feeling, deep down inside--when you know something is happening that will change you, and you don't want it to, but you cant stop it. And you know, for the first time, for the very first time, that there will now be a before and an after, a was and a will be. And that you will never again quite be the same person you were."
— Jennifer Donnelly (A Northern Light)

"I know it is a bad thing to break a promise, but I think now that it is a worse thing to let a promise break you."
— Jennifer Donnelly (A Northern Light)

"“Words fail me sometimes. I have read most every word in the Webster’s International Dictionary of the English Language, but I still have trouble making them come when I want them to. Right now I want a word that describes the feeling you get – a cold sick feeling deep down inside – when you know something is happening that will change you, and you don’t want it to, but you can’t stop it. And you know you will never be the same again.” "
— Jennifer Donnelly (A Northern Light)

"There were lives in those books, and deaths. Families and friends and lovers and enemies. Joy and despair, jealousy, envy, madness, and rage. All there. I reached out and touched the cover of one called The Earth. I could almost hear the characters inside, murmuring and jostling, impatient for me to open the cover and let them out."
— Jennifer Donnelly (A Northern Light)

"I Listened as the words became sentences and the sentences became pages and the pages became feelings and voices and places and people."
— Jennifer Donnelly (A Northern Light)

"My father had put these things on the table.

I looked at him standing by the sink. He was washing his hands, splashing water on his face. My mamma left us. My brother, too. And now my feckless, reckless uncle had as well. My pa stayed, though. My pa always stayed.

I looked at him. And saw the sweat stains on his shirt. And his big, scarred hands. And his dirty, weary face. I remembered how, lying in my bed a few nights before, I had looked forward to showing him my uncle's money. To telling him I was leaving.

And I was so ashamed."
— Jennifer Donnelly (A Northern Light)

"'Cripes Miss Wilcox, they're not guns,' I said.
'No, they're not Mattie, they're books. And a hundred times more dangerous.'"
— Jennifer Donnelly (A Northern Light)

"'Make them care, Mattie,' she said softly. 'And don't you ever be sorry.'
-Emily Wilcox"
— Jennifer Donnelly (A Northern Light)

"It's another sin. Worse than all the other ones, which are immediate, violent and hot...It's the eighth deadly sin. The one God left out, Hope."
— Jennifer Donnelly (A Northern Light)

"A new word. Bright with possibilities. A flawless pearl to turn over and over in my hand, then put away for safekeeping."
— Jennifer Donnelly (A Northern Light)

""You should spend more time reading the Good Book and less reading all those novels. What are you going to tell the Lord on Judgement Day when He asks you why you didn't read your bible? Hmm?"

I will tell Him that His press agents could have done with a writing lesson or two, I said. To myself."
— Jennifer Donnelly (A Northern Light)

"As I nodded and smiled and umm-hmm'd and oh, my'd my way down the drive, I wondered if boys had any sort of magazine that told them how to attract women and, if so, did it ever tell them to put the girls' interests first?"
— Jennifer Donnelly (A Northern Light)

"What I saw next stopped me dead in my tracks. Books. Not just one or two dozen, but hundreds of them. In crates. In piles on the floor. In bookcases that stretched from floor to ceiling and lined the entire room. I turned around and around in a slow circle, feeling as if I'd just stumbled into Ali Baba's cave. I was breathless, close to tears, and positively dizzy with greed."
— Jennifer Donnelly (A Northern Light)

"French Louis Seymour of the West Canada Creek, who knew how to survive all alone in a treacherous wilderness, and Mr. Alfred G. Vanderbilt of New York City and Raquette Lake, who was richer than God and traveled in his very own Pullman car, and Emmie Hubbard of the Uncas Road, who painted the most beautiful pictures when she was drunk and burned them in her woodstove when she was sober, were all ten times more interesting to me than Milton's devil or Austen's boy-crazy girls or that twitchy fool of Poe's who couldn't think of any place better to bury a body than under his own... floor."
— Jennifer Donnelly (A Northern Light)

"She was his soulmate, as much a part of him as the very flesh and bone that made him. She was with him, in him, in everything he did. She was everything he wanted from his life, the very measure of his dreams."
— Jennifer Donnelly (The Tea Rose)

"to my future.to my life
-a northern light"
— Jennifer Donnelly