Azure Simmons > Azure's Quotes

“And She knows, because She warns him, and Her instincts never fail, That the Female of Her Species is more deadly than the Male. —Rudyard Kipling, “The Female of the Species”
― Ariel Lawhon, The Frozen River

“This is my apothecary, my sanctuary, and it smells of lavender and woodsmoke, basil and vetiver. Mint. Catnip. Lemongrass.”
― Ariel Lawhon, The Frozen River

“Memory is a wicked thing that warps and twists. But paper and ink receive the truth without emotion, and they read it back without partiality.”
― Ariel Lawhon, The Frozen River

“This is the trouble faced by any woman who sets pen to paper in a busy household. I am never guaranteed the certainty of quiet, much less a solid length of time to chase my thoughts and bind them together. That is the luxury of men with libraries, butlers, and wives. Mothers find a different way to get their work done.”
― Ariel Lawhon, The Frozen River

“This is what it means to age, I think. The days are long, but the years are short.”
― Ariel Lawhon, The Frozen River

“Remember that the next time you panic and call a man to do a woman’s job.”
― Ariel Lawhon, The Frozen River

“The fact of the matter is that I am lonely. And then I laugh. If anyone had told me two decades ago, when I was buried in small children and endless chores, that one day I would sit at my desk in a warm, quiet house while the snow fell outside and complain of loneliness, I would have slapped them. That future seemed as far away as Constantinople.”
― Ariel Lawhon, The Frozen River

“Do you like it?” I loved the home, and I loved the man,”
― Ariel Lawhon, The Frozen River

“It also smells of mating. Not sex per se, that is entirely different—though none of the parents here tonight are fool enough to think it couldn’t happen—but mating, that ritual common to all species. The flirting. Posturing. Choosing. Dancing. The occasional kiss, stolen in the dark, hidden from watchful eyes. It all has an ancient smell. Like dark soil and ripe fruit. Like humanity at the most basic, elemental level.”
― Ariel Lawhon, The Frozen River

“I have been at home. Me too, Martha. Me too.”
― Ariel Lawhon, The Frozen River

“Thresholds are dangerous places, neither here nor there, and walking across one is like stepping off the edge of a cliff in the naive faith that you’ll sprout wings halfway down. You can’t hesitate, or doubt. You can’t fear the in-between.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“Words and their meanings have weight in the world of matter, shaping and reshaping realities through a most ancient alchemy.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“It’s a profoundly strange feeling, to stumble across someone whose desires are shaped so closely to your own, like reaching toward your reflection in a mirror and finding warm flesh under your fingertips. If you should ever be lucky enough to find that magical, fearful symmetry, I hope you’re brave enough to grab it with both hands and not let go.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“There’s only one way to run away from your own story, and that’s to sneak into someone else’s.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“Listen, not every story is made for telling. Sometimes just by telling a story you’re stealing it, stealing a little of the mystery away from it.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“Let that be a lesson to you: If you are too good and too quiet for too long, it will cost you. It will always cost you, in the end.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“Once we have agreed that true love exists, we may consider its nature. It is not, as many misguided poets would have you believe, an event in and of itself; it is not something that happens, but something that simply is and always has been. One does not fall in love; one discovers it.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“The house was a tired, settling sort of structure, half-buried in the hill behind it, which emitted a strong smell of goats on warm afternoons. It had only two rooms, a blackened oven occupied by several generations of mice, and a bed of straw-stuffed canvas. The mason who chiseled their names into the stone mantel thought privately it was a grim, lean home for a young family, but to Yule and Ade it was the most beautiful building ever to claim four walls and a rooftop.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“Something about having a child bends you back to your beginnings, as if you have been drawing a circle all your life and now are compelled to close it.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“Men like myself cannot see anything beyond our own pain; our eyes are inward-facing, mesmerized by the sight of our own broken hearts.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“Already I imagine I see the effects of their absence in this world: a subtle stagnation, a staleness, like a house that has been left shut up all summer. There are empires upon which the sun will never set, railways that cross continents, rivers of wealth that will never run dry, machines that never grow tired. It’s a system too vast and ravenous to ever be dismantled, like a deity or an engine, which swallows men and women whole and belches black smoke into the sky. Its name is Modernity, I am told, and it carries Progress and Prosperity in its coal-fired belly—but I see only rigidity, repression, a chilling resistance to change.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“each precious and painful to me in some secret way I can’t explain, and I’m not ready to show them to anyone else yet. I want to hold them for a while in the quiet undercurrents of myself, until their edges are worn smooth as river stones.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“I hope to every god you have the guts to do what needs doing. I hope you will find the cracks in the world and wedge them wider, so the light of other suns shines through; I hope you will keep the world unruly, messy, full of strange magics; I hope you will run through every open Door and tell stories when you return.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“In Russian, Frost was called Morozko, the demon of winter. But long ago, the people called him Karachun, the death-god. Under that name, he was king of black midwinter who came for bad children and froze them in the night.”
― Katherine Arden, The Bear and the Nightingale

“The serving-women muttered that she could tame animals, dream the future, and summon rain.”
― Katherine Arden, The Bear and the Nightingale

“The years slipped by like leaves.”
― Katherine Arden, The Bear and the Nightingale

“She looked like a wild thing new-caught and just barely groomed into submission.”
― Katherine Arden, The Bear and the Nightingale

“I am only a country girl,” said Vasya. She reached again into the blackberry bush, wary of thorns. “I have never seen Tsargrad, or angels, or heard the voice of God. But I think you should be careful, Batyushka, that God does not speak in the voice of your own wishing. We have never needed saving before.”
― Katherine Arden, The Bear and the Nightingale

“Before the end, you will pluck snowdrops at midwinter, die by your own choosing, and weep for a nightingale.”
― Katherine Arden, The Bear and the Nightingale

“To small minds,” she told him, spine very straight, “any skill must look like sorcery.”
― Katherine Arden, The Girl in the Tower