Michelle > Michelle's Quotes

“Eventually the man comes to see that he has a mind, and that his mind is like a fist, wrapped tightly around a single thought. He cannot open the fist to look at the thought, for fear that it will fly away, but he knows that it is very important and that he must hang on to it, no matter what the cost.”
― Ben Loory, Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“How absurd it was that in all seven kingdoms, the weakest and most vulnerable of people - girls, women - went unarmed and were taught nothing of fighting, while the strong were trained to the highest reaches of their skill.”
― Kristin Cashore, Graceling

“Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Wasn't that what religions did? Squint at one another and declare, 'My unprovable belief is better than your unprovable belief. Suck it.”
― Laini Taylor, Dreams of Gods & Monsters

“Soldiers and children do as they're told. Children grow out of it, but soldiers just die.”
― Laini Taylor, Dreams of Gods & Monsters

“The two of them were stoic and stone-faced and ten feet apart, currently not even looking at each other, but Zuzana had the impression of a pair of magnets pretending not to be magnets. Which, you know, only works until it doesn’t.”
― Laini Taylor, Dreams of Gods & Monsters

“Hot, perpetually pissed-off angel seeks living pincushion for scowl practice and general stabbiness. No kissing.”
― Laini Taylor, Dreams of Gods & Monsters

“Be a Samurai.
Because you just never know what's behind the freaking sky.”
― Laini Taylor, Dreams of Gods & Monsters

“How could you tell if your instincts were just hope in disguise, and if your hope was really desperation parading as possibility?”
― Laini Taylor, Dreams of Gods & Monsters

“Happiness wasn't a mystical place to be reached or won--some bright terrain beyond the boundary of misery, a paradise waiting for them to find it--but something to carry doggedly with you through everything, as humble and ordinary as your gear and supplies.”
― Laini Taylor, Dreams of Gods & Monsters

“[She] had heard it said that there was only one emotion which, in recollection, was capable of resurrecting the full immediacy and power of the original—one emotion that time could never fade, and that would drag you back any number of years into the pure, undiluted feeling, as if you were living it anew. It wasn’t love… and it wasn’t hate, or anger, or happiness, or even grief. Memories of those were but echoes of the true feeling.

It was shame. Shame never faded.”
― Laini Taylor, Dreams of Gods & Monsters

“If this were a book or movie, she thought, she'd be able to read the stars and get her bearings. Characters always had just the right random skill set to master the situation at hand. Like, Thank god for that summer on an uncle's smuggling boat and the handsome deckhand who taught me celestial navigation. Ha.”
― Laini Taylor, Dreams of Gods & Monsters

“Maybe they're not surrendering," said the smirking soldier in false consolation. "Maybe they all just really had to piss.”
― Laini Taylor, Dreams of Gods & Monsters

“...looking up at the stars, he had accepted life as a medium for action. Something to wield like a tool. One’s own life: an instrument for the shaping of the world.”
― Laini Taylor, Dreams of Gods & Monsters

“World peace for dinner," mused Mik, scratching his beard stubble. "Does that come with fries?"

"It freaking better," said Zuzana. "Or I will send it freaking back.”
― Laini Taylor, Dreams of Gods & Monsters

“I’m lucky I’m even alive,” she announced. “When I was little, I sucked on duck eyeballs.”
― Laini Taylor, Dreams of Gods & Monsters

“A détente," he said, in a tone of warning, "can only be as strong as the least trustworthy on either side."
"Then let it not be our side," said Akiva. "It's the best we can do.”
― Laini Taylor, Dreams of Gods & Monsters

“It had worked. She understood. Things can kill you. All kinds of things, like toys, or older brothers. And as she'd grown up, that list had just gotten longer and longer.”
― Laini Taylor, Dreams of Gods & Monsters

“One's own life: an instrument for the shaping of the world.”
― Laini Taylor, Dreams of Gods & Monsters

“And strangely fold the hours as the end draws near.”
― Laini Taylor, Dreams of Gods & Monsters

“Her mind was still tiptoeing along the boundary of consciousness, in that state of semi-waking that spins threads between dream and real, and for a moment she felt herself to be a girl who has come down off a porch to confront a great darkness with a tiny light.”
― Laini Taylor, Dreams of Gods & Monsters

“And that was why she was angry. Because they weren't giving her a reason to be angry.

Feelings. Were. Stupid.”
― Laini Taylor, Dreams of Gods & Monsters

“There was some new quiet in her, but it didn't shrink or wilt her. Rather, it seemed to enlarge her. She was no mere weapon as she was trained to be, but a woman in full command of her power, unbowed and unbroken, and that was a dangerous thing.”
― Laini Taylor, Dreams of Gods & Monsters

“It was unreal how two souls could look out through the same set of eyes in such drastically different fashion, seeming to reshape them entirely.”
― Laini Taylor, Dreams of Gods & Monsters

“A substance so far beyond their ken that they might have been carrion birds pecking at the eyes of god.”
― Laini Taylor, Dreams of Gods & Monsters

“All of this cuteness, it was one of nature's great bait and switches, because... that wasn't all there was to Zuzana Nováková. Not even a little bit.

Deciding to take her on was akin to a fish deciding idly to gobble up that pretty light bobbing in the shadows and then--OH GOD THE TEETH THE HORROR!--meeting the anglerfish on the other side.”
― Laini Taylor, Dreams of Gods & Monsters

“But for half a minute she wished it was a different sort of day, even though she knew that nothing good could come from wanting at the world.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Slow Regard of Silent Things

“The sky is everywhere, it begins at your feet.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“Nobody's lives just fit together. Fitting together is something you work at. It's something you make happen - because you love each other.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Landline