Coreen Rose > Coreen Rose's Quotes

“most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“We hit the sidewalk, and dropped hands. How I wished, right then, that the whole world was a street.”
― Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“I could feel the tears beginning to collect in my throat again, but I pushed them apart, away from each other. Tears are only a threat in groups.”
― Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“Sometimes, she said, mostly to herself, I feel I do not know my children...

It was a fleeting statement, one I didn't think she'd hold on to; after all, she had birthed us alone, diapered and fed us, helped us with homework, kissed and hugged us, poured her love into us. That she might not actually know us seemed the humblest thing a mother could admit.”
― Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“I didn’t mind the quiet stretches. It was like we were trying out the idea of being side by side.”
― Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“It was like we were exchanging codes, on how to be a father and a daughter, like we'd read about it in a manual, translated from another language, and were doing our best with what we could understand.”
― Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“It seemed to happen in springs, the revealing of things.”
― Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“...a Dorito asks nothing of you, which is its great gift. It only asks that you are not there.”
― Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“It was the kind of conversation you could only hold in whispers.”
― Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“I watched as she added a question mark at the end. Arc, line, space, dot.”
― Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“I loved my brother, but relying on him was like closing a hand around air.”
― Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“People see what they wish to see. And in most cases, what they are told that they see.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“Secrets have power. And that power diminishes when they are shared, so they are best kept and kept well. Sharing secrets, real secrets, important ones, with even one other person, will change them. Writing them down is worse, because who can tell how many eyes might see them inscribed on paper, no matter how careful you might be with it. So it's really best to keep your secrets when you have them, for their own good, as well as yours.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“Someone needs to tell those tales. When the battles are fought and won and lost, when the pirates find their treasures and the dragons eat their foes for breakfast with a nice cup of Lapsang souchong, someone needs to tell their bits of overlapping narrative. There's magic in that. It's in the listener, and for each and every ear it will be different, and it will affect them in ways they can never predict. From the mundane to the profound. You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone's soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows what they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift. Your sister may be able to see the future, but you yourself can shape it, boy. Do not forget that... there are many kinds of magic, after all.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“Most maidens are perfectly capable of rescuing themselves in my experience, at least the ones worth something, in any case.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“We lead strange lives, chasing our dreams around from place to place.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“I am tired of trying to hold things together that cannot be held. Trying to control what cannot be controlled. I am tired of denying myself what I want for fear of breaking things I cannot fix. They will break no matter what we do.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“Stories have changed, my dear boy,” the man in the grey suit says, his voice almost imperceptibly sad. “There are no more battles between good and evil, no monsters to slay, no maidens in need of rescue. Most maidens are perfectly capable of rescuing themselves in my experience, at least the ones worth something, in any case. There are no longer simple tales with quests and beasts and happy endings. The quests lack clarity of goal or path. The beasts take different forms and are difficult to recognize for what they are. And there are never really endings, happy or otherwise. Things keep overlapping and blur, your story is part of your sister’s story is part of many other stories, and there in no telling where any of them may lead. Good and evil are a great deal more complex than a princess and a dragon, or a wolf and a scarlet-clad little girl. And is not the dragon the hero of his own story? Is not the wolf simply acting as a wolf should act? Though perhaps it is a singular wolf who goes to such lengths as to dress as a grandmother to toy with its prey.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“The most difficult thing to read is time. Maybe because it changes so many things.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“You're in the right place at the right time, and you care enough to do what needs to be done. Sometimes that's enough.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“You think, as you walk away from Le Cirque des Rêves and into the creeping dawn, that you felt more awake within the confines of the circus.
You are no longer quite certain which side of the fence is the dream.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“People don’t pay much attention to anything unless you give them reason to”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“I couldn't tell the difference between what was real and what I wanted to be real.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“To be rather than to seem.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“People are naive about such things, and they would rather write them off as evil than attempt to understand them. An unfortunate truth, but a truth nonetheless.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“You believe you could not live with the pain. Such pain is not lived with. It is only endured. I am sorry.”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“Here is a list of terrible things,
The jaws of sharks, a vultures wings
The rabid bite of the dogs of war,
The voice of one who went before,
But most of all the mirror's gaze,
Which counts us out our numbered days.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War

“Why'd you want to sing about sad things?" Candy had asked him.
"Because any fool can be happy," he'd said to her.
"It takes a man with real heart"
—he'd made a fist and laid it against his chest—
"to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War

“A sweet slip of a girl like you, why should you have to know anything about the sorrow of the world? You just believe me when I tell you... there's no way to live your life to the full and not have a reason to shed a tear now and again. It's not a bad feeling, child. That's what a lament does. It makes you feel happy to be sad, in a strange way. D'you see?”
― Clive Barker, Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War