Anastasia Vanderberg > Anastasia's Quotes

“Soon, she is dreaming:  I am reading a letter addressed to me by an unknown hand:  Dear Kate.  The moon rises over the tips of the mountain peaks as we sit here in the darkness thinking of you – and remembering.  Remembering the smells of flowers long ago dried and withered away, their faint fragrances hanging in the misty air.  Remembering whispers of times gone by.  As we have done in the past, we dig deep, looking for clues to your whereabouts.  Eyes peek out at us from within the stillness of the night – eyes filled with longing and desire – curious orbs floating like lanterns in the misty void.  Looking up from the letter still within her dream, Kate finds herself face to face with two golden beacons of love-filled radiance.”
― Kathy Martone, Victorian Songlight: The Birthings of Magic & Mystery

“I don’t like anything pointing at me, dollface, that includes an umbrella, a finger, or a gun, got it?”
― A.G. Russo, The Cases Nobody Wanted

“Then there was a hard brown lozenge called the Tonsil Tickler. The Tonsil Tickler tasted and smelled very strongly of chloroform. We had not the slightest doubt that these things were saturated in the dreaded anaesthetic which, as Thwaites had many times pointed out to us, could put you to sleep for hours at a stretch. "If my father has to saw off somebody's leg," he said, "he pours chloroform on to a pad and the person sniffs it and goes to sleep and my father saws his leg off without him even feeling it."
"But why do they put it into sweets and sell them to us?" we asked him. You might think a question like this would have baffled Thwaites. But Thwaites was never baffled.
"My father says Tonsil Ticklers were invented for dangerous prisoners in jail," he said. "They give them one with each meal and the chloroform makes them sleepy and stops them rioting."
"Yes," we said, "but why sell them to children?"
"It's a plot," Thwaites said. "A grown-up plot to keep us quiet.”
― Roald Dahl, Boy: Tales of Childhood

“A falcon who chases a warlike crane can only hope for a life of pain.”
― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold

“...An average of seventy-four species become extinct every day, which was one good reason but not the only one to hold someone's hand...”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“Who was it who had said you were only as happy as your unhappiest child?”
― Jojo Moyes, One Plus One

“This particular argument was pleasanter than most, because the person setting me straight was a pretty seventeen-year-old girl, a college sophomore, and it was no strain to smile at her with good humor as she went about her work.”
― Herman Wouk, This is My God: A Guidebook to Judaism

“He was there alone with himself, collected, tranquil, adoring, comparing the serenity of his heart with the serenity of the skies, moved in the darkness by the visible splendors of the constellations, and the invisible splendor of God, opening his soul to the thoughts which fall from the Unknown. In such moments, offering up his heart at the hour when the flowers of night inhale their perfume, lighted like a lamp in the center of the starry night, expanding his soul in ecstasy in the midst of the universal radiance of creation, he could not himself perhaps have told what was passing in his own mind; he felt something depart from him, and something descend upon him, mysterious interchanges of the depths of the soul with the depths of the universe.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Will the defendant please rise for the reading of the verdict?” My heart was beating fast. Here we go again, I thought, drawing in a deep breath and holding it.”
― Steven Decker, INNOCENT AGAIN: A LEGAL THRILLER

“He clamped his eyes shut and waited for the pang of something he could no longer name to subside; it plucked at steel threads holding him together and reverberated through his system.”
― J. Rose Black, Losing My Breath

“I really like Matilda and that's not a clever book, is it? It's for children. But she's my favourite main character because she comes from an awful family and likes reading, like I do. Those special powers must've made her life a lot easier, though. She wouldn't be working in a pub at thirty-two.”
― Sara Pascoe, Weirdo

“God’s people must be free!”
― Kathryn Krick, Unlock Your Deliverance: Keys to Freedom From Demonic Oppression

“Gabe suffers from survivor’s remorse. He won’t admit it because he doesn’t see it. Can’t recognize it in himself. He overcompensates for coming back alive, when so many didn’t. He’s got issues. You’ve got issues. Everyone has issues. But issues are a part of life. And whether we like it or not, even bad things happen for a reason.”
― Lotchie Burton, Gabriel's Fire

“Charley threw Cindy on the bed and pulled a switchblade knife. He pressed the release button and a five-inch blade flipped open. “One word to anybody and your ugly dog gets his throat cut!”
― Shafter Bailey, Cindy Divine: The Little Girl Who Frightened Kings

“I was just stunned; Aunt Kathy had actually moved on to another dimension! It finally happened! That lady was damn near invincible! She had survived assaults, coronaries, fevers, famines, flus, floods, plagues, pandemics, strokes, andglobal warming for almost 100 years. I’m willing to bet she outlived the Ice Age, but there’s no way to confirm it. If anyone told the devil “You’re a Lie,” it was Aunt Kathy. She just had a way of coming back and back like a sequel to a never-ending horror story. Whenever she fell ill, she reappeared as a new being more hostile than the previous entity.”
― Harold Phifer, My Bully, My Aunt, & Her Final Gift

“What is she looking for?  She thought she had found it with Kyle.  But maybe she hadn’t. Perhaps she was looking for stability, security, sameness because her growing-up years had seemed so fragmented, and she often felt unsure of how she fit in.  Maybe stability isn’t all she is looking for.”
― Dawn Chalker, Lost and Found

“Various large trees— willowy peppers and especially the pines—seem to be reaching down to hold your hand.”
― Tom Hillman, Digging for God

“There may be humane masters, as there certainly are inhuman ones—there may be slaves well-clothed, well-fed, and happy, as there surely are those half-clad, half-starved and miserable; nevertheless, the institution that tolerates such wrong and inhumanity as I have witnessed, is a cruel, unjust, and barbarous one. Men may write fictions portraying lowly life as it is, or as it is not—may expatiate with owlish gravity upon the bliss of ignorance—discourse flippantly from arm chairs of the pleasures of slave life; but let them toil with him in the field—sleep with him in the cabin—feed with him on husks; let them behold him scourged, hunted, trampled on, and they will come back with another story in their mouths. Let them know the heart of the poor slave—learn his secret thoughts—thoughts he dare not utter in the hearing of the white man; let them sit by him in the silent watches of the night—converse with him in trustful confidence, of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," and they will find that ninety-nine out of every hundred are intelligent enough to understand their situation, and to cherish in their bosoms the love of freedom, as passionately as themselves.”
― Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave

“But della Rovere frowned and said, "Heed my warning, Guido Feltra. He's full of the devil, this son of the church.”
― Mario Puzo, The Family

“If one's friends do not openly laugh at him, they are not in fact his friends. ”
― Dean Koontz, Forever Odd

“Like most of the educated, I do harbor a fondness for the sins of my ignorant past.”
― Jane Smiley

“Follow your heart”
― John Bunyon, The Pilgrim's Progress

“Mother put it like this: “Besides taking out my misplaced appendix, he put all my other insides just where they should have been.”
― Katherine Paterson, Stories of My Life