Abby Pickus > Abby's Quotes

“A MILLION THOUGHTS POUR THROUGH MY HEAD, BUT LIKE HER, I STAY SILENT. THERE’S SIMPLY NOTHING TO SAY.”
― Marie Lu, Champion

“I feel so out of place here. No matter how much money the Republic throws at me, I will forever be the boy from the streets.”
― Marie Lu, Champion

“You drive me insane June. You're the scariest, most clever, bravest person I know, and sometimes I can't catch my breath because I'm trying so hard to keep up. There will never be another like you. You realize that, don't you? Billions of people will come and go in this world, but there will never be another like you.”
― Marie Lu, Champion

“Sometimes, the sun sets earlier. Days don’t last forever, you know. But I’ll fight as hard as I can. I can promise you that.”
― Marie Lu, Champion

“Then Day reaches out and touches my hand with his. He encloses it in a handshake. And just like that, I am linked with him again, I feel the pulse of our bond and his- tory and love through our hands, like a wave of magic, the return of a long-lost friend. Of something meant to be. The feeling brings tears to my eyes. Perhaps we can take a step forward together.

“Hi,” he says. “I’m Daniel.”
“Hi,” I reply. “I’m June.”
― Marie Lu, Champion

“Where I come from, we're more about efficiency,' he replies. 'A knife like this'll skewer food, smear butter, and slit throats all at the same time.”
― Marie Lu, Champion

“I’ve been searching a long time for something I think I lost.
I felt like I found something when I saw you back there.”
― Marie Lu, Champion

“I hope,” he replies softly, “to get to know you again. If you are open to it. There is a fog around you that I would like to clear away.”
― Marie Lu, Champion

“It hurts every day, the absence of someone who was once there.”
― Marie Lu, Champion

“In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“No one has ever become poor by giving.”
― Anne Frank, diary of Anne Frank: the play

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I'm in love with you," he said quietly.

"Augustus," I said.

"I am," he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. "I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I'm in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have, and I am in love with you.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“And Olvos said to them: “Why have you done this, my children? Why is the sky wreathed with smoke? Why have you made war in far places, and shed blood in strange lands?

And they said to Her: “You blessed us as Your people, and we rejoiced, and were happy. But we found those who were not Your people, and they would not become Your people, and they were willful and ignorant of You. They would not open their ears to Your songs, or lay Your words upon their tongues. So we dashed them upon the rocks and threw down their houses and shed their blood and scattered them to the winds, and we were right to do so. For we are Your people. We carry Your blessings. We are Yours, and so we are right. Is this not what You said?”

And Olvos was silent.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“Forgetting... is a beautiful thing. When you forget, you remake yourself... For a caterpillar to become a butterfly, it must forget it was a caterpillar at all. Then it will be as if the caterpillar never was & there was only ever a butterfly.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“Life is full of beautiful dangers, dangerous beauties... They wound us in ways we cannot see: an injury ripples out, like a stone dropped in water, touching moments years into the future.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“Death is for the weak.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“There is no crueler hells then committee work....”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“These meetings, they're like thieves—they follow you around, wait until you're not looking, and pounce.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“I am lost among the seas of fate and time
But at least I have love.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“No two persons ever read the same book.”
― Edmund Wilson

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.”
― C. S. Lewis

“Voters might have short memories. Politicians do not.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“The older you get, the more voices you get in the back of your head.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, American Elsewhere