"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself."
— Lois McMaster Bujold (A Civil Campaign)

"I've always thought tests are a gift. And great tests are a great gift. To fail the test is a misfortune. But to refuse the test is to refuse the gift, and something worse, more irrevocable, than misfortune."
— Lois McMaster Bujold (Shards of Honour)

"If you make it plain you like people, it's hard for them to resist liking you back."
— Lois McMaster Bujold

"For Berry, you just be there, Whit. Be the one person in the wide green world she doesn't have to explain it to, because you were there and saw it all for yourself. Hand her a clean cloth if she cries or bleeds, and some warm thing for the pain that doubles her over. The time to hold her will come. This day isn't over yet."
— Lois McMaster Bujold (Passage)

"Money, power, sex ... and elephants."
— Lois McMaster Bujold (Memory)

"Paranoid? Probably. But just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face."
— Jim Butcher (Storm Front)

"Bob the Skull: You know how confusing the whole good-evil concept is for me."
— Jim Butcher (Proven Guilty)

"My hair had grown out long and shaggy—not in that sexy-young-rock-star kind of way but in that time-to-take-Rover-to-the-groomer kind of way."
— Jim Butcher (White Night)

"Harry, what you know about women, I could juggle."
— Jim Butcher

"Nay, but prithee, with sprinkles 'pon it instead," I said solemnly, "and frosting of white."
— Jim Butcher (Small Favor)

"When everything goes to hell, the people who stand by you without flinching -- they are your family. "
— Jim Butcher

"Let's sum up: an unknown number of enemies with unknown capabilities, supported by a gang of madmen, packs of attack animals, and superhumanly intelligent pocket change."
— Jim Butcher

"Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could."
— Louise Erdrich (The Painted Drum)

"Other freshmen were already moving into their dormitory rooms when we arrived, with their parents helping haul. I saw boxes of paperbacks, stereo equipment, Dylan albums and varnished acoustic guitars, home-knitted afghans, none as brilliant as mine, Janis posters, Bowie posters, Day-Glo bedsheets, hacky sacks, stuffed bears. But as we carried my trunk up two flights of stairs terror invaded me. Although I was studying French because I dreamed of going to Paris, I actually dreaded leaving home, and in the end my parents did not want me to leave, either. But this is how children are sacrificed into their futures: I had to go, and here I was. We walked back down the stairs. I was too numb to cry, but I watched my mother and father as they stood beside the car and waved. That moment is a still image; I can call it up as if it were a photograph. My father, so thin and athletic, looked almost frail with shock, while my mother, whose beauty was still remarkable, and who was known on the reservation for her silence and reserve, had left off her characteristic gravity. Her face and my father's were naked with love. It wasn't something thatwe talked about—love. But they allowed me this one clear look at it. It blazed from them. And then they left."
— Louise Erdrich

"Don't ask so many questions and they will all be answered."
— Michael Dorris (A Yellow Raft in Blue Water: A Novel)

"We're all made of stories. When they finally put us underground, the stories are what will go on. Not forever, perhaps, but for a time. It's a kind of immortality, I suppose, bounded by limits, it's true, but then so's everything."
— Charles de Lint

"Everytime you do a good deed you shine the light a little farther into the dark. And the thing is, when youre gone that light is going to keep shining on, pushing the shadows back. "
— Charles de Lint

"Without mysteries, life would be very dull indeed. What would be left to strive for if everything were known?"
— Charles de Lint

"There's stories and then there's stories. The ones with any worth change your life forever, perhaps only in a small way, but once you've heard them, they are forever a part of you. You nurture them and pass them on, and the giving only makes you feel better. The others are just words on a page."
— Charles de Lint (Dreams Underfoot (Newford, #1))

"Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none."
— William Shakespeare (All's Well That Ends Well)

"Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come."
— William Shakespeare (Julius Caesar)

"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages."
— William Shakespeare

"O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father refuse thy name, thou art thyself thou not a montegue, what is montegue? tis nor hand nor foot nor any other part belonging to a man
What is in a name?
That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,
So Romeo would were he not Romeo called retain such dear perfection to which he owes without that title,
Romeo, Doth thy name!
And for that name which is no part of thee, take all thyself....
- (Act II, Scene II)"
— William Shakespeare (Romeo And Juliet)

"Lord Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words.
Lord Polonius: What is the matter, my lord?
Hamlet: Between who?
Lord Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord."
— William Shakespeare (Hamlet)

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind."
— William Shakespeare (A Midsummer Night's Dream)

"I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands,
organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same
food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases,
heal'd by the same means, warm'd and cool'd by the same winter
and summer, as a Christian is?

If you prick us, do we not bleed? If
you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?
And if you wrong us, do we not revenge? If we are like you in the
rest, we will resemble you in that.
- (Act III, Scene I)"
— William Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice)

""Every time we fix something that broken, whether it's a car engine or a broken heart, that an act of magic. And what makes it magic is that we choose to create or help, just as we can choose to harm." "
— Charles de Lint

"Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."
— William Shakespeare (The Tempest)

"By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes. (Act 4, Scene 1)"
— William Shakespeare (Macbeth)

"Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?"
— William Shakespeare

"I want to be magic. I want to touch the heart of the world and make it smile. I want to be a friend of elves and live in a tree. Or under a hill. I want to marry a moonbeam and hear the stars sing. I don't want to pretend at magic anymore. I want to be magic."
— Charles de Lint

"I finally figured out that I’m solitary by nature, but at the same time I know so many people; so many people think they own a piece of me. They shift and move under my skin, like a parade of memories that simply won’t go away. It doesn’t matter where I am, or how alone--I always have such a crowded head."
— Charles de Lint (Memory and Dream (Newford, #5))

"I... believe in an everyday sort of magic -- the inexplicable connectedness we sometimes experience with places, people, works of art and the like; the eerie appropriateness of moments of syncronicity..."
— Charles de Lint

"The fey wonders of the world only exist while there are those with the sight to see them."
— Charles de Lint

"That's the thing about magic; you've got to know it's still here, all around us, or it just stays invisible for you."
— Charles de Lint

"All my life I've wanted to be the kid who gets to cross over into the magical kingdom. I devoured those books by C.S. Lewis and William Dunthorn, Ellen Wentworth, Susan Cooper, and Alan Garner. When I could get them from the library, I read them out of order as I found them, and then in order, and then reread them all again, many times over. Because even when I was a child I knew it wasn't simply escape that lay on the far side of the borders of fairyland. Instinctively I knew crossing over would mean more than fleeing the constant terror and shame that was mine at that time of my life. There was a knowledge – an understanding hidden in the marrow of my bones that only I can access ― telling me that by crossing over, I'd be coming home.
That's the reason I’ve yearned so desperately to experience the wonder, the mystery, the beauty of that world beyond the World As It Is. It's because I know that somewhere across the border there's a place for me. A place of safety and strength and learning, where I can become who I'm supposed to be. I've tried forever to be that person here, but whatever I manage to accomplish in the World As It Is only seems to be an echo of what I could be in that other place that lies hidden somewhere beyond the borders."
— Charles de Lint

"The stronger a woman gets, the more insecure the men in her life feel. It doesn’t work that way for a woman. We celebrate strength--in our partners as well as in ourselves."
— Charles de Lint (Memory and Dream (Newford, #5))

"I dont want to live in the kind of world where we dont look out for each other. Not just the people that are close to us, but anybody who needs a helping hand. I cant chnage the way anybody else thinks, or what they choose to do, but I can do my bit."
— Charles de Lint

"[She] had felt straight away that she wasn’t meeting a new friend, but recognizing an old one."
— Charles de Lint (Memory and Dream (Newford, #5))

"As far as I'm concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary. "
— Charles de Lint

"It was all cheese and applause."
— Charles de Lint (Widdershins (Newford, #16))

" "Everybody has a soul." I turn to Pelly. "And that means you, too."
"I'm not so sure of that," he says. "What does it feel like?"
"Having a soul?" I look at Maxine, but she only shrugs. "I don't know," I tell Pelly. "I don't have anything to compare it to- you know, what not having a sould would feel like."
We fall into a kind of awkward silence. I don't know about the others, but I'm working on what a soul is and not coming up with a whole lot. I mean, I just always thought of it as me- what I feel like being me. But surely Pelly feels like himself, so that means he's got a soul right? But if that's not your soul, then what is?
It's weird and not something you really think about, is it?
"
— Charles de Lint (The Blue Girl)

"There was too much going on here -- too much that strayed from odd all the way over into seriously weird."
— Charles de Lint (Someplace to Be Flying (Newford, #8))

"There are no happy endings... There are no endings, happy or otherwise. We all have our own stories which are just part of the one Story that binds both this world and Faerie. Sometimes we step into each others stories - perhaps just for a few minutes, perhaps for years - and then we step out of them again. But all the while, the Story just goes on."
— Charles de Lint (Dreams Underfoot (Newford, #1))

"A room without books is like a body without a soul."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

"Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read."
— Groucho Marx (The Essential Groucho)

"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying."
— Oscar Wilde

"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana."
— Groucho Marx