Becket > Becket's Quotes

“I wished I could take her to the library and hand her over to the librarians. Please teach her about everything, I'd say.”
― A.S. King, Glory O'Brien's History of the Future

“Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.”
― Terry Pratchett

“Do I have to talk to insane people?"
"You're a librarian now. I'm afraid it's mandatory.”
― Jasper Fforde, The Woman Who Died a Lot

“...Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk.”
― Henry Jenkins

“But you want murderous feelings? Hang around librarians," confided Gamache. "All that silence. Gives them ideas.”
― Louise Penny, A Rule Against Murder

“No," Cath said, "Seriously. Look at you. You’ve got your shit together, you’re not scared of anything. I’m scared of everything. And I’m crazy. Like maybe you think I’m a little crazy, but I only ever let people see the tip of my crazy iceberg. Underneath this veneer of slightly crazy and socially inept, I’m a complete disaster.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl

“Some love is so powerful after all, that it must always include sadness, because encrypted within it is the knowledge that someday it will come to an end.”
― M.T. Anderson, Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

“Imagining isn't perfect. You can't get all the way inside someone else...But imagining being someone else, or the world being something else, is the only way in. It is the machine that kills fascists.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“Buffy's high school was built on top of a vortex of evil, the Hellmouth. And whose wasn't?”
― Sarah Vowell, The Partly Cloudy Patriot

“Zoology, eh? That's a big word, isn't it."

"No, actually it isn't," said Tiffany. "Patronizing is a big word. Zoology is really quite short.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men

“To be nobody but
yourself in a world
which is doing its best day and night to make you like
everybody else means to fight the hardest battle
which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.”
― E.E. Cummings

“My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.”
― Adrienne Rich

“How oft do they rescue or ruin us, through whimsy or design or a combination of both, the adults to whom we entrust our care!”
― Rick Yancey, The Monstrumologist

“To make matters worse, some of the books had actually become migratory. In the nineteenth century Brakebills had appointed a librarian with a highly Romantic imagination who had envisioned a mobile library in which books fluttered from shelf to shelf like birds, reorganizing themselves spontaneously under their own pwer in response to searches. For the first few months the effect was sadi to have been quite dramatic. A painteding the scned survived as a mural behind the circulation desk, with enormaous atlases soaring around the place like condors.
But the system turned out to be totally impractical. The wear and tear o the spines alone was too costly, and the books were horribly disobedient. The librarian had imagined he could summon a given book to perch on his hand just by shouting out its call number, but in actuality they were just too willful, and some were actively predatory. The librarian was swiftly dposed, and his successor set about domesticating the books again, but even now there were stragglers, notably in Swiss History and Architecture 300-1399, that stubbornly flapped around near the ceiling. Once in a while an entire sub—sub-category that had long been thought safely dormant would take wing with an indescribably papery susurrus.”
― Lev Grossman

“History is the heavy traffic that prevents us from crossing the road. We're not especially interested in what it consists of. We wait, more or less patiently, for it to pause, so that we can get to the liquor store or the laundromat or the burger bar.”
― Mal Peet, Life: An Exploded Diagram

“We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a ridiculous attempts to survive our deaths...The real heroes anyway aren't the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Being a nerd, which is to say going too far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know. For me, the spark that turns an acquaintance into a friend has usually been kindled by some shared enthusiasm . . . At fifteen, I couldn't say two words about the weather or how I was doing, but I could come up with a paragraph or two about the album Charlie Parker with Strings. In high school, I made the first real friends I ever had because one of them came up to me at lunch and started talking about the Cure.”
― Sarah Vowell, The Partly Cloudy Patriot

“That girl--all of them--hated Eleanor before they'd even laid eyes on her. Like they'd been hired to kill her in a past life.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Eleanor & Park

“In some cases, she was actively trying not to make friends, though she usually stopped short of being rude. (Uptight, tense, and mildly misanthropic? Yes. Rude? No.)”
― Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl

“You shouldn't reward me for endangering your life, you know. Think of the precedent you're setting.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl

“Boys like him didn't die; they got bronzed and installed outside public libraries.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Dream Thieves

“Now...get Thoth a raspberry chocolate latte with the cream and chocolate sprinkles! Thoth commands, librarian! Obey! Sprinkles! THOTH HAS SPOKEN!”
― James Turner, Rex Libris #1

“That was the beauty in stacking up words--they got cheaper, the more you had of them.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl

“You’ve read the books?”
“I’ve seen the movies.”
Cath rolled her eyes so hard, it hurt. (Actually.) (Maybe because she was still on the edge of tears. On the edge, period.) “So you haven’t read the books.”
“I’m not really a book person.”
“That might be the most idiotic thing you’ve ever said to me”
― Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl

“She said the words, and then she had a strange moment of seeing them, hanging there over her head.

"You're going to vacuum up that squirrel!"

There is just no predicting what kind of sentences you might say, thought Flora. For instance, who would ever think you would shout, "You're going to vacuum up that squirrel!"?”
― Kate DiCamillo, Flora & Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures

“William Spiver said that the universe was expanding…that means there will be more of everything! More cheese puffs, more jelly sandwiches, more words, more poems, more love. And more giant donuts…maybe even gianter donuts. Is gianter a word? It should be.”
― Kate DiCamillo, Flora & Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures

“Flora’s heart, the lonely, many-armed squid of it, flipped and flailed inside her.”
― Kate DiCamillo, Flora & Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures

“It is hard to stop seeing your son as a son and to start seeing him as a human being.
It is hard to stop seeing your parents as parents and to start seeing them as human beings.
It's a two-sided transition, and very few people manage it gracefully.”
― David Levithan, Two Boys Kissing

“The first sentence of the truth is always the hardest. Each of us had a first sentence, and most of us found the strength to say it out loud to someone who deserved to hear it. What we hoped, and what we found, was that the second sentence of the truth is always easier than the first, and the third sentence is even easier than that. Suddenly you are speaking the truth in paragraphs, in pages. The fear, the nervousness, is still there, but it is joined by a new confidence. All along, you've used the first sentence as a lock. But now you find that it's the key.”
― David Levithan, Two Boys Kissing

“The phrase rush to judgment is a silly one. When it comes to judgment, most of us don't have to rush. We don't even have to leave the couch. Our judgment is so easy to reach for.”
― David Levithan, Two Boys Kissing