cherelle > cherelle's Quotes

“No mourners, no funerals. Another way of saying good luck. But it was something more. A dark wink to the fact that there would be no expensive burials for people like them, no marble markers to remember their names, no wreaths of myrtle and rose.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom

“I want to believe that there's more. That we could be more. Hell, we could be heroes.”
― Victoria Schwab, Vicious

“If music stops, and art ceases, and beauty fades, what have we then?”
― Julie Berry, Lovely War

“Ruin me, ruin us, and I’ll let you.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Burning God

“History has failed us, but no matter.”
― Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

“At the end, an adult and a child stand in front of the grave of a Red Guard who had died during the faction civil wars. The child asks the adult, ‘Are they heroes?’ The adult says no. The child asks, ‘Are they enemies?’ The adult again says no. The child asks, ‘Then who are they?’ The adult says, ‘History.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“The only life that matters is in your mind. The only truth is the one that lives invisibly, that waits even after you close the book. Silence, too, is a kind of music. Silence will last.”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“You’re right. In a world where doctors can cure cancer and do heart transplants, there isn’t a single pill to treat menstrual cramps.’ Her sister pointed at her own stomach. ‘The world wants our uterus to be drug-free. Like sacred grounds in a virgin forest.”
― Cho Nam-Joo, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982

“Any old horse will run when it's whipped, but only fast enough to avoid the whipping," Hilo said. "Racehorses, though, they run because they look at the horse on their left, they look at the one on their right, and they think, No way am I second to these fuckers.”
― Fonda Lee, Jade City

“You can justify anything if you do it poetically enough.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“Actors are by nature volatile—alchemic creatures composed of incendiary elements, emotion and ego and envy. Heat them up, stir them together, and sometimes you get gold. Sometimes disaster.”
― M.L. Rio, If We Were Villains

“The tides of history had shifted. She had never before believed in fate, but this she came to know with more and more certainty as each day passed: the script of the world was now wholly, inalterably colored by a brilliant crimson streak.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Burning God

“Her voice, thin and reedy, faded without echo into the frigid air. But she screamed it again, and then again, and then again. It felt so good to say that she'd survived, that she'd fucking finally come out on top, that she didn't even care that she was screaming to corpses.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Burning God

“To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The basis of optimism is sheer terror.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I know that throughout my life I have struggled to forgive my father. Now, as I get older, I wish most of all that he had been able to find a way to forgive himself.”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

“Plenty of humans were monstrous, and plenty of monsters knew how to play at being human.”
― Victoria Schwab, Vicious

“He has wondered lately if that's all living really is—one long goodbye to those we love.”
― Blake Crouch, Recursion

“It never occurred to me that our lives, until then so closely interwoven, could unravel and separate over a thing like that. But the fact was, I suppose, there were powerful tides tugging us apart by then, and it only needed something like that to finish the task. If we'd understood that back then-who knows?-maybe we'd have kept a tighter hold of one another.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
― Leo Tolstoy , Anna Karenina

“...the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.

That is their mystery and their magic.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“How do we do it?” Hilo sighed deeply. “You of all people already know the answer to that, Shae. We don’t handle this world. We make it handle us.”
― Fonda Lee, Jade Legacy

“Someday, Locke Lamora,” he said, “someday, you’re going to fuck up so magnificently, so ambitiously, so overwhelmingly that the sky will light up and the moons will spin and the gods themselves will shit comets with glee. And I just hope I’m still around to see it.”
“Oh please,” said Locke. “It’ll never happen.”
― Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora

“... It's perfect! Locke would appreciate it."

"Bug," Calo said, "Locke is our brother and our love for him knows no bounds. But the four most fatal words in the Therin language are 'Locke would appreciate it.'"

"Rivalled only by 'Locke taught me a new trick,'" added Galo.

"The only person who gets away with Locke Lamora games ..."

"... is Locke ..."

"... because we think the gods are saving him up for a really big death. Something with knives and hot irons ..."

"... and fifty thousand cheering spectators.”
― Scott Lynch, The Lies of Locke Lamora

“Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein