Kristen Mohr > Kristen's Quotes

“I have missed you so much I could kiss you,” he whispered.

September’s face fell. “Oh, but Saturday! I’ve had my First Kiss and I didn’t mean to, I didn’t want to, but your shadow is very rude and impulsive, and he took it before I could say two words! And I’ve had my second and third and maybe fifth, too. Come to think of it, this has all involved rather a lot of kissing.”

Saturday furrowed his brow. “Why should I care about your First Kiss?” he said. “You can kiss anyone you like. But if you sometimes wanted to kiss me, that would be all right, too.” His blush was so deep September could feel the heat of it.

She leaned in, and kissed her Marid gently, sweetly. She tried to kiss him the way she’d always thought kisses would be. His lips tasted like the sea.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“Why do girls always feel like they have to apologize for giving an opinion or taking up space in the world? Have you ever noticed that?" Nicole asked. "You go on websites and some girl leaves a post and if it's longer than three sentences or she's expressing her thoughts about some topic, she usually ends with, 'Sorry for the rant' or 'That may be dumb, but that's what I think.”
― Libba Bray, Beauty Queens

“Shows what you know, sunny-girl! I’m sure you’ve heard people talk about their Heart’s Desire—well that’s a load of rot. Hearts are idiots. They’re big and squishy and full of daft dreams. They flounce off to write poetry and moon at folk who aren’t worth the mooning. Bones are the ones that have to make the journey, fight the monster, kneel before whomever is big on kneeling these days. Bones do the work for the heart’s grand plans. Bones know what you need. Hearts only know want. I much prefer to deal with children, boggans, and villains, who haven’t got hearts to get in the way of the very important magic of Getting-Things-Done.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There

“Do you suppose you will look the same when you are an old woman as you do now? Most folk have three faces—the face they get when they’re children, the face they own when they’re grown, and the face they’ve earned when they’re old. But when you live as long as I have, you get many more. I look nothing like I did when I was a wee thing of thirteen. You get the face you build your whole life, with work and loving and grieving and laughing and frowning.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There

“I will not disappoint you, I promise. My name is Gleam. Take me with you. I held you in the dark. I defied straw sandals to bring you sunfruit. I am worth something. One hundred and twelve years is worth something.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

“Now that's a concept that's always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world - we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us. But clearly these people have a far more tightly circumscribed definition of reality, one that I find deeply mysterious, and an almost pathologically intense need to bring others into line with that definition.”
― Tana French, The Likeness

“And then there’s its hair,” Justin said, pushing the vegetables across to me. “Don’t forget the hair. It’s horrible.”

“It’s wearing a dead person’s hair,” Rafe informed me. “If you stick a pin in the doll, you can hear screaming coming from the graveyard. Try it.”

“See what I mean?” Abby said, to me. “Wusses. It’s got real hair. Why he thinks it’s from a dead person—”

“Because your poppet was made in about 1890 and I can do subtraction.”
― Tana French, The Likeness

“Stories have a way of changing faces. They are unruly things, undisciplined, given to delinquency and the throwing of erasers. This is why we must close them up into thick, solid books, so they cannot get out and cause trouble.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

“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

“One: A Library Is the Size of the Universe and the Universe Is the Size of a Library. Two: Everyone Is Looking for a Book Strong Enough to Change Them. Three: Books Operate Under Unstable Physicks so Turn out the Lights when You Lock Up.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There

“Marriage is a wrestling match where you hold on tight while your mate changes into a hundred different things. The trick is that you're changing into a hundred other things, but you can't let go. You can only try to match up and never turn into a wolf while he's a rabbit, or a mouse while he's still busy being an owl, a brawny black bull while he's a little blue crab scuttling for shelter. It's harder than it sounds.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

“Living is a risk,” I snapped at him. “Every decision, every interaction, every step, every time you get out of bed in the morning, you take a risk. To survive is to know you’re taking that risk and to not get out of bed clutching illusions of safety.”
― Maria V. Snyder, Magic Study

“As the old saying goes, "Some people come into our lives and quickly go. Others lose their virginity to your brother, name his wang after a luxury hotel, and traumatize you forever by talking about how sexy he is.”
― Nicole Knepper, Moms Who Drink and Swear: True Tales of Loving My Kids While Losing My Mind

“I am for that thing in your genome that demands it. I am for that thing which keeps you animals alive. I am, at most, a slice of monkey suspended within the stuff of universal intelligence. You are a monkey in nice clothes.

In the harsh environment you refer to as a habitable planet, group behaviors are required to survive long enough to procreate. Since you are stupid monkeys, you have no natural affinity for group altruism.

And so you have evolved a genetic pump that delivers pleasant chemicals to your monkey brains. One that is triggered by awe and fear of an anthropomorphism of your environment. Earth mothers. Sky gods. Bits of bush that catch fire. Interesting-looking rocks. An oddly-shaped branch. You’re not fussy.

When your brain does this idiot work, you stop in front of that bump or stick and consider it fiercely. Other monkeys will, like as not, stop next to you and emulate you. Your genetic pump delivers morphine for your souls. You have your fellow monkeys join in. Perhaps so they can feel it too. Perhaps because you feel it might please the stick god to have more monkeys gaze at it in narcotic awe.

The group must be defended. Because as many monkeys as possible must please the stick god, and you can continue to get your fix off praying to it.

You draw up rules to organize and protect the group. Two hundred thousand years later, you put Adolf Hitler into power. Because you are, after all, just monkeys.

I am your stash.”
― Warren Ellis, Supergod

“When the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“In this way he continued until he was fourteen years of age, when his extraordinary destiny took him by the hand, and led him, step by step, through adventures so wonderful that words can scarce describe them.”
― Arabian Nights

“Battles that involve oatmeal are just never going to end up being historic, you know?" Jake went on. "Gettysburg? No major oatmeal involvement. The Battle of Midway? Neither side used oatmeal. Desert Storm? No oatmeal.”
― Katherine Applegate

“Nick demonstrated twenty-three ways of communicating without words by fanning himself with a napkin. "This one means oops, your fly is open, sir, and if you lower the fan a little and look at someone over the top of it, it means wow, I'd like to marry you. But if you do it the other way around, it means ha ha, we are now at war with Spain.”
― Kerstin Gier, Saphirblau

“They sat close to each other, and he told her a story about her eyes. They were beautiful dark lakes in which her thoughts swam about like mermaids. And her forehead was a snowy mountain, grand and shining. These were lovely stories.”
― Hans Christian Andersen

“They were inconveniently reasonable, these women.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland

“Have you no respect for the past? For what was thought and believed by your foremothers?”
“Why, no,” she said. “Why should we? They are all gone. They knew less than we do. If we are not beyond them, we are unworthy of them—and unworthy of the children who must go beyond us.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland

“Montana was naked, and so was Billy, of course. He had a tremendous wang, incidentally. You never know who'll get one.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

“If anybody studying psychology wants a concrete example of what a narcissist looks like, I advise them to consider any man who cheats on his wife. These guys are the textbook me-firsters, the ones who think the rules don't apply to them, the ones who tell themselves as long as she doesn't know, there's no harm done. No woman needs to sleep with these guys. There are so many single self-absorbed narcissists who will fuck you poorly.”
― Julie Klausner, I Don't Care About Your Band: Lessons Learned from Indie Rockers, Trust Funders, Pornographers, Felons, Faux-Sensitive Hipsters, and Other Guys I've Dated

“Toadstool mandarins are a form of toxic jellyfish whose tentacles are loaded with entheogenic venom. The effects of a mandarin sting are threefold. The first is a sharp stinging sensation; the second a nasty red welt, which may fester if not treated with a salve of toadstool mandarin doodoo. And the third is a bold of self-awareness, thanks to the entheogens in the venom. Having been stung, a victim's typical reaction will be something like:
Owww. Zark, that hurts.
Then:
Oh no. Look at this nasty red welt. I'm in the swimsuit competition later.
And finally:
What? I'm a latent misogynist with father issues!
If a person is allergic to mandarin venom, one sting will prompt total self-awareness, leading to either immediate catatonia or a career as a talk show pundit.”
― Eoin Colfer, And Another Thing...

“Just be happy, and if you can't be happy, do things that make you happy. Or do nothing with the people that make you happy.”
― Esther Earl, This Star Won't Go Out: The Life and Words of Esther Grace Earl

“I dislike the phrase 'Internet friends,' because it implies that people you know online aren't really your friends, that somehow the friendship is less real or meaningful to you because it happens through Skype or text messages. The measure of a friendship is not its physicality but its significance.”
― John Green, This Star Won't Go Out: The Life and Words of Esther Grace Earl

“Remain true to yourself, child. If you know your own heart, you will always have one friend who does not lie.”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Forest House

“You want to know what pain is? Try running out of Advil when you've got a Category Five period. I've had cramps that would make grown men beg for a bullet between the eyes."
- Jennifer, "Beauty Queens”
― Libba Bray, Beauty Queens

“The world expected girls to pluck and primp and put on heels. Meanwhile, boys dressed in rumpled T-shirts and baggy pants and misplace their combs, and yet you were suppose to fall at their feet? Unacceptable.”
― Libba Bray, Beauty Queens