Kel > Kel's Quotes

“Wholeness, she had learned, was not the absence of pain but the ability to hold it.”
― M.L. Wang, The Sword of Kaigen

“What are you?” Takeru whispered.
Something bigger than myself , she realized. “I’m Matsuda Misaki,” she said with pride and honesty she never attached to those words before. “I’m your wife.”
And she attacked him.”
― M.L. Wang, The Sword of Kaigen

“listening never made any man dumber, but it’s made a lot of people smarter.”
― M.L. Wang, The Sword of Kaigen

“I believed myself to be ready then; now, with the hindsight brought by greater age, I see myself for the naive and inexperienced young woman I was. We all begin in such a manner, though. There is no quick route to experience.”
― Marie Brennan, A Natural History of Dragons

“The dragon within my heart stirred, shifting her wings, as if remembering they could be used to fly.”
― Marie Brennan, A Natural History of Dragons

“It’s—it’s as if there is a dragon inside me. I don’t know how big she is; she may still be growing. But she has wings, and strength, and—and I can’t keep her in a cage. She’ll die. I’ll die. I know it isn’t modest to say these things, but I know I’m capable of more than life in Scirland will allow. It’s all right for women to study theology, or literature, but nothing so rough and ready as this. And yet this is what I want. Even if it’s hard, even if it’s dangerous. I don’t care. I need to see where my wings can carry me.”
― Marie Brennan, A Natural History of Dragons

“I healed. Not completely. A scar is never the same as good flesh, but it stops the bleeding.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Quest

“But a living is not a life.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Quest

“Sometimes a man doesn't know how badly he's hurt until someone else probes the wound.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Quest

“All of history, a great wheel, turning inexorably. Just as seasons come and go, just as the moon moves endlessly through her cycle, so does time. The same wars are fought, the same plagues descend, the same folk, good or evil, rise to power. Humanity is trapped on that wheel, doomed endlessly to repeat the mistakes we have we have already made. Unless someone comes to change it.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Quest

“Very little worth knowing is taught by fear.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

“My silences he mistook for a lack of wit rather than a lack of any need to speak.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

“And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I am made of memories.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I have done it," she says. At first I do not understand. But then I see the tomb, and the marks she has made on the stone. A C H I L L E S, it reads. And beside it, P A T R O C L U S.
"Go," she says. "He waits for you."

In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out of the sun.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Nora had always had a problem accepting herself. From as far back as she could remember, she'd had the sense that she wasn't enough. Her parents who both had their own insecurities, had encouraged that idea.
She imagined, now, what it would be like to accept herself completely. Every mistake she had ever made. Every mark on her body. Every dream she had ever made. Every mark on her body. Every dream she hadn't reached or pain she had felt. Every lust or longing she had suppressed.
She imagined accepting it all. The way she accepted nature. The way she accepted a glacier or a puffin or the breach of a whale.
She imagined seeing herself as just another brilliant freak of nature. Just another sentient animal, trying her best.
And in doing so, she imagined what it was like to be free.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library