Lauren Gilley > Lauren's Quotes

“I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, Eleonora

“Who are you?
We we're king's men when we began, the man told her, but king's men must have a king, and we have none. We were brothers too, but now our brotherhood is broken. I do not know who we are, if truth be told, nor where we might be going. I only know the road is dark. The fires have not shown me what lies at its end.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Feast for Crows

“Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.”
― Edgar Allen Poe

“It was not the thorn bending to the honeysuckles, but the honeysuckles embracing the thorn.”
― Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

“If I could but know his heart, everything would become easy.”
― Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

“She wants fire, and Dorne sent her mud.
You could make a poultice out of mud to cool a fever. You could plant seeds in mud and grow a crop to feed your children. Mud would nourish you, where fire would only consume you, but fools and children and young girls would choose fire every time.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“The more I know of the world, the more I am convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much!”
― Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

“What could he have done, one man against so many?"
He could have tried, Brienne thought.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Feast for Crows

“Touch has a memory.”
― John Keats

“For we put the thought of all that we love into all that we make.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, the Whale

“She didn’t understand love, not the golden, shimmering, romance-novel stuff that existed between mates. She was skeptical of it, and had never been one to pretend that it existed just for the sake of excitement. She didn’t know what it looked like, what it felt like…at least, she hadn’t. But she realized, amid the dancing tendrils of ivy that climbed the gazebo, that love – that good, golden kind she’d always discounted – didn’t arrive with a blast of trumpets and an earth-shattering epiphany. It was earned, formed, created, day by day, a little at a time. And it looked like Mike eating toast over her kitchen sink, felt like his hand smoothing her hair back off her face, sounded like his sudden shout of laughter when she spilled a whole sack of flour out of the top cabinet down onto her head in his kitchen, tasted like the kiss he used to make up for it.”
― Lauren Gilley, Better Than You

“How many times have you been slapped on dates?”

“Five,” he said as he checked over his shoulder and eased back out into traffic. “So hit my left side if you’re going to. The right’s my pretty side.”

“Which side is your modest side?”

“Don’t have one.”
― Lauren Gilley, Better Than You

“She didn’t know if she cried for what she’d lost as a teenager, or for the confused tangle of emotions inside her now. Either way, Mike telling her that he was sorry against the top of her head was the only answer that made any sense.”
― Lauren Gilley, Better Than You

“He knew he loved her in February: steam leaving the mug of coffee in her hands in thick curls; her hair a snarled mess around her shoulders; the morning on the other side of the window bitter and windswept; her face lovely, pale, and lonely in a way he didn’t understand. She sat in the chair in his bedroom, in his shirt and a pair of socks that went up to her knees, gooseflesh on her slender legs. A copy of Oliver Twist had been open across the arm of the chair. “I think it might snow today,” she’d said, and he’d been completely in love with her.

He thought she might have loved him back in March: in from the rain; his clothes stuck to his skin; the umbrella showering the hardwood of her entry hall; the dinner she’d planned forgotten when he’d helped her out of her jacket and she’d been shivering with cold. That day, when she’d pushed his wet shirt back off his shoulders and stretched up on her toes to kiss him, he was sure there was something new shining deep down in her coffee-colored eyes. “You’re so cute,” she’d said, and he’d known: she loved him.”
― Lauren Gilley, Better Than You

“I let him run on, this papier-maché Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe.”
― Jospeh Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“I love you, he thought. And then left her.”
― Lauren Gilley, Shelter

“Now is the dramatic moment of fate, Watson, when you hear a step upon the stair which is walking into your life, and you know not whether for good or ill.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle

“How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four

“I was there to get a Ph.D. in English literature. That's not true. I was there to read a lot of books and to discuss them with bright, insightful, book-loving people, an expectation that I pretty quickly learned was about as silly as it could be.
Certainly there were other people who loved books, I'm sure there were, but whoever had notified them ahead of time that loving books was not the point, was, in fact, a hopelessly counterproductive and naive approach to the study of literature, neglected to notify me. It turned out that the point was to dissect a book like a fetal pig in biology class or to break its back with a single sentence or to bust it open like a milkweek pod and say, "See? All along it was only fluff," and then scatter it into oblivion with one tiny breath.”
― Marisa de los Santos, Belong to Me

“He felt her heartbeat against his shoulder, through his jacket, light as raindrops.”
― Lauren Gilley, Whatever Remains

“Calculated, focused destruction – the cold cruelty of an impartial predator – was devastating. A man in his forties, lean and sharp-eyed and jaded, could draw you in with such skill you never noticed that he was planning to cut you down all along. A man like that could play charades and spin lies effortlessly; they could let you go without a backward thought. A man like that was untouchable. Jade had always thought she’d been smarter than to be fooled so thoroughly.
But she’d been wrong.”
― Lauren Gilley, Whatever Remains

“I know.” Her smile twitched, wry. “It’s taken me a while to figure out that love turns some men into shitheads every so often.” Her green eyes were too knowing. “Ben cares. Ben is freaking the hell out that a dead body turned up at you and Clara’s doorstep. That spells – ”
“Don’t say ‘love.’”
Jess almost smiled. “It’s Ben’s shriveled, mutant, parasitic brand of love. But it’s still love.”
― Lauren Gilley, Whatever Remains

“The night was a runny, watercolor black, rain sighing high in the tree tops, rustling on the pavement.”
― Lauren Gilley, Whatever Remains

“It was hesitant at first, gentle. His fingers held tight at the base of her skull and she could feel the restraint in him, the leashed energy vibrating in the space between their bodies. He needed to shave and the stubble on his chin was prickly against hers. He smelled like he always had – aftershave, Calvin Klein cologne he bought at the grocery store, and something wild and frightening, like smoke; something that was unmistakably Ben to her – and it assaulted her brain, turning keys in padlocks and laying bare her self-control.”
― Lauren Gilley, Whatever Remains

“Ben tasted like wine; felt animal beneath her hands; chased away the shadows until her room was only darkness, only them, nothing wicked.”
― Lauren Gilley, Whatever Remains

“You can’t love anything properly from a distance.”
― Lauren Gilley, Whatever Remains

“I was afraid,” she said, “and I wanted to hear your voice.”
― Lauren Gilley, Whatever Remains

“They’d dueled in the lamplight of her kitchen that night, savaging each other with accusations that could never be recalled. Now, he couldn’t remember half of what they’d said, only the colors and lights and seething tide of fear all around them. He could still taste the acrid burn of unfairness.”
― Lauren Gilley, Whatever Remains