Other Rachel > Other Rachel's Quotes

“There is a candle in your heart, ready to be kindled.
There is a void in your soul, ready to be filled.
You feel it, don't you?”
― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

“Don't be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.”
― Rumi, The Essential Rumi

“I said: what about my eyes?
He said: Keep them on the road.

I said: What about my passion?
He said: Keep it burning.

I said: What about my heart?
He said: Tell me what you hold inside it?

I said: Pain and sorrow.
He said: Stay with it. The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
― Rumi

“There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.”
― Leonard Cohen, Selected Poems, 1956-1968

“That's how you get deathless, volchitsa. Walk the same tale over and over, until you wear a groove in the world, until even if you vanished, the tale would keep turning, keep playing, like a phonograph, and you'd have to get up again, even with a bullet through your eye, to play your part and say your lines.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“It was a cruel trick of the universe, thought August, that he only felt human after doing something monstrous.”
― Victoria Schwab, This Savage Song

“Shared pain is lessened.
Shared joy is increased.
Thus we refute entropy.”
― Spider Robinson

“Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse”
― Joseph Brodsky

“But the teacher had been right about one thing: violence breeds.
Someone pulls a trigger, sets off a bomb, drives a bus full of tourists off a bridge, and what's left in the wake isn't just she'll casings, wreckage, bodies. There's something else. Something bad. An aftermath. A recoil. A reaction to all that anger and pain and death.”
― Victoria schwab, This Savage Song

“The increase of disorder or entropy is what distinguishes the past from the future, giving a direction to time.”
― Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

“Many boys will bring you flowers. But someday you'll meet a boy who will learn your favorite flower, your favorite song, your favorite sweet. And even if he is too poor to give you any of them, it won't matter because he will have taken the time to know you as no one else does. Only that boy earns your heart.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows

“If my life is going to mean anything, I have to live it myself.”
― Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief

“I would have come for you. And if I couldn't walk, I'd crawl to you, and no matter how broken we were, we'd fight our way out together-knives drawn, pistols blazing. Because that's what we do. We never stop fighting.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom

“He needed to tell her...what? That she was lovely and brave and better than anything he deserved. That he was twisted, crooked, wrong, but not so broken that he couldn't pull himself together into some semblance of a man for her. That without meaning to, he'd begun to lean on her, to look for her, to need her near. He needed to thank her for his new hat.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows

“Most people felt lost after high school. Sometimes I felt like I'd never really been found in the first place.”
― Lish McBride, Hold Me Closer, Necromancer

“You will always go into that tent. You will see her scar and wonder where she got it. You will always be amazed at how one woman can have so much black hair. You will always fall in love, and it will always be like having your throat cut, just that fast. You will always run away with her. You will always lose her. You will always be a fool. You will always be dead, in a city of ice, snow falling into your ear. You have already done all of this and will do it again.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“Perhaps that's what all human relationships boil down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?”
― Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

“Must I accept the barren Gift?
-learn death, and lose my Mastery?
Then let them know whose blood and breath
will take the Gift and set them free:
whose is the voice and whose the mind
to set at naught the well-sung Game-
when finned Finality arrives
and calls me by my secret Name.

Not old enough to love as yet,
but old enough to die, indeed-
-the death-fear bites my throat and heart,
fanged cousin to the Pale One's breed.
But past the fear lies life for all-
perhaps for me: and, past my dread,
past loss of Mastery and life,
the Sea shall yet give up Her dead!

Lone Power, I accept your Gift!
Freely I make death a part of me;
By my accept it is bound
into the lives of all the Sea-

yet what I do now binds to it
a gift I feel of equal worth:
I take Death with me, out of Time,
and make of it a path, a birth!

Let the teeth come! As they tear me,
they tear Your ancient hate for aye-
-so rage, proud Power! Fail again,
and see my blood teach Death to die!”
― Diane Duane, Deep Wizardry

“There is kindness in the world, if we know how to look for it. If we never start denying it the door.”
― Seanan McGuire, Beneath the Sugar Sky

“The desire to live life to its fullest, to acquire more knowledge, to abandon the economic treadmill, are all typical reactions to these experiences in altered states of consciousness. The previous fear of death is typically quelled. If the individual generally remains thereafter in the existential state of awareness, the deep internal feeling of eternity is quite profound and unshakable.”
― Edgar Mitchell, The Way of the Explorer: An Apollo Astronaut's Journey Through the Material and Mystical Worlds

“Who's the real you? The person who did something awful, or the one who's horrified by the awful thing you did? Is one part of you allowed to forgive the other?”
― Rebecca Stead, Goodbye Stranger

“There were many versions of Gansey, but this one had been rare since the introduction of Adam's taming presence. It was also Ronan's favorite. It was the opposite of Gansey's most public face, which was pure control enclosed in a paper-thin wrapper of academia. But this version of Gansey was Gansey the boy. This was the Gansey who bought the Camaro, the Gansey who asked Ronan to teach him to fight, the Gansey who contained every wild spark so that it wouldn't show up in other versions. Was it the shield beneath the lake that had unleashed it? Orla's orange bikini? The bashed-up remains of his rebuilt Henrietta and the fake IDs they'd returned to? Ronan didn't really care. All that mattered was that something had struck the match, and Gansey was burning.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Dream Thieves

“This girl who stands so quiet and grave at the mouth of hell. This girl who is all quietness and sanity and innocence. You wondered why I wanted her?”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Two harpies, one stone,” he added, and then saw the way Serene was looking at him. “A diplomatic stone! A diplomatic stone.”
― Sarah Rees Brennan, In Other Lands

“Grave robbing was still viewed as socially inappropriate, and doing it when the sun was up was generally viewed as unwise.”
― Seanan McGuire, Beneath the Sugar Sky

“I thought that it was more likely the opposite. I must have shut grief out. Found it in books. Cried over fiction instead of the truth. The truth was unconfined, unadorned. There was no poetic language to it, no yellow butterflies, no epic floods. There wasn't a town trapped underwater or generations of men with the same name destined to make the same mistakes. The truth was vast enough to drown in.”
― Nina LaCour, We Are Okay

“We were miraculous.
We were beach creatures.
We had treasures in our pockets and each other on our skin.”
― Nina LaCour, We Are Okay

“I learn that I am a tiny piece of a miraculous world.”
― Nina LaCour, We Are Okay

“I'd rather die on an adventure than live standing still.”
― V.E. Schwab, A Darker Shade of Magic

“In his own country, Death can be kind.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless