Rowena > Rowena's Quotes

“I walked past Malison, up Lower Main to Main and across the road. I didn’t need to look to know he was behind me. I entered Royal Wood, went a short way along a path and waited. It was cool and dim beneath the trees. When Malison entered the Wood, I continued eastward. 
I wanted to place his body in hallowed ground. He was born a Mearan. The least I could do was send him to Loric. The distance between us closed until he was on my heels. He chose to come, I told myself, as if that lessened the crime I planned. He chose what I have to offer.
We were almost to the cemetery before he asked where we were going. I answered with another question. “Do you like living in the High Lord’s kitchens?”
He, of course, replied, “No.”
“Well, we’re going to a better place.”
When we reached the edge of the Wood, I pushed aside a branch to see the Temple of Loric and Calec’s cottage. No smoke was coming from the chimney, and I assumed the old man was yet abed. His pony was grazing in the field of graves. The sun hid behind a bank of clouds.
Malison moved beside me. “It’s a graveyard.”
“Are you afraid of ghosts?” I asked.
“My father’s a ghost,” he whispered.
I asked if he wanted to learn how to throw a knife. He said, “Yes,” as I knew he would.  He untucked his shirt, withdrew the knife he had stolen and gave it to me. It was a thick-bladed, single-edged knife, better suited for dicing celery than slitting a young throat. But it would serve my purpose. That I also knew. I’d spent all night projecting how the morning would unfold and, except for indulging in the tea, it had happened as I had imagined. 
Damut kissed her son farewell. Malison followed me of his own free will. Without fear, he placed the instrument of his death into my hand. We were at the appointed place, at the appointed time. The stolen knife was warm from the heat of his body. I had only to use it. Yet I hesitated, and again prayed for Sythene to show me a different path.
“Aren’t you going to show me?” Malison prompted, as if to echo my prayer.”
― K. Ritz, Sheever's Journal, Diary of a Poison Master

“The best way to make a line appear shorter without touching it is to draw a longer line next to it. It works with grief, too.”
― Merlin Franco, Saint Richard Parker

“No one else can close the door that God has opened for you,” she quietly said under her breath. That was something that Grandma Alice had said to her many times before her death.

“I miss you, Alice,” she whispered, “and wish you were here with me now.”
― Diane Merrill Wigginton, A Compromising Position

“Forgive me darling, for having to abandon you, for having to make the ultimate sacrifice for a kingdom.”
― Patricia D'Arcy Laughlin, Sacrifices Beyond Kingdoms: A Provocative Romance Torn Between Continents and Cultures

“It was easy to make the obvious leap that the money was supposed to be my fee for whatever Lillian Holler wanted to expose. Sometimes my clients come with prepayment. I still questioned why she had picked me and how she had found me. But she was a wealthy woman and wealthy women have ways of finding out whatever it is they want to know.”
― Behcet Kaya, Treacherous Estate

“Pericles let a moment pass, then another. The Spartans needed time to set in balance the risks of accepting the offer and the joys of being rich. Not as much time as he’d expected, though.”
― Yvonne Korshak, Pericles and Aspasia: A Story of Ancient Greece

“If you always try to subjugate people by coercion, because you are strong, then sooner or later you will run into somebody who is just as strong, if not stronger. Then you'll be in trouble.”
― Max Nowaz, The Polymorph

“If he could blush through his fur, he would have.”
― Lisa Kaniut Cobb, Down in the Valley

“I have decided it's my mind that's woman. It's my narrator. It's my relationship to myself, and oddly, nothing at all to do with my body.”
― Sara Pascoe

“I'm so proud of you I could burst, but in the interest of saving the poor cleaning staff the hassle, I would, instead, like to take you to our room and lick you from stem to stern until you beg me to stop.”
― Therisa Peimer, Taming Flame

“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done, it is a far, far better rest I that I go to than I have ever known."

A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens”
― Barbara Sontheimer

“To endure oneself may be the hardest task in the universe.”
― Frank Herbert

“These are things," Trudi's father told her long before she was old enough for confession, "that the church calls sins, but they are part of being human. And those we need to embrace. The most important thing--" He paused. "--is to be kind.”
― Ursula Hegi, Stones from the River

“At that moment he didn’t like mankind, the grown-ups, the adults. He never liked them when it was dark. At such times it was his habit to think mankind away. Then the world would seem like a dark, empty house, and he felt a shudder inside himself, as if now he had to search through room after room—dark rooms where you didn’t know what was hidden in the corners—feeling his way across the thresholds where no foot would tread any more apart from his, until in one room the doors in front of and behind him would suddenly close and he would be facing the mistress of the black hordes herself. And at that moment all the locks of all the other doors he had come through would shut, and far beyond the walls the shadows of the darkness would stand watch, like black eunuchs, keeping out all human contact.”
― Robert Musil, The Confusions of Young Törless

“You don't love someone because they're perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they're not.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose.”
― John Hersey, Hiroshima

“sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. To dig for treasures shows not only impatience and greed, but lack of faith. Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach – waiting for a gift from the sea.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea