Julie > Julie's Quotes

“In new situations, all the trickiest rules are the ones nobody bothers to explain to you. (And the ones you can’t google.) Like, where does the line start? What food can you take? Where are you supposed to stand, then where are you supposed to sit? Where do you go when you’re done, why is everyone watching you?… Bah.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl

“Hindsight, I thought, was like a punishment, remorseless in its clarity and painfully unable to change what had gone before. Turning”
― Susanna Kearsley, The Splendour Falls

“He inhaled deeply and exhaled the word “people.” Not so much an indictment as in wonderment. That there could be so much deliberate cruelty and so much kindness in one species.”
― Louise Penny, A Great Reckoning

“We are now perched on a strange cusp of history,” Edmond continued, “a time when the world feels like it’s been turned upside down, and nothing is quite as we imagined. But uncertainty is always a precursor to sweeping change; transformation is always preceded by upheaval and fear. I urge you to place your faith in the human capacity for creativity and love, because these two forces, when combined, possess the power to illuminate any darkness.”
― Dan Brown, Origin

“he was always so brave. So resilient, I suppose—that seems to be the word du jour. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel things—many’s the time I saw him weep—but he dealt with his disappointment, with his hardship and grief; he picked himself up and went on, every time. And not like a mad person who refuses to recognize adversity, but like someone who accepts that life is inherently unfair. That the only truly fair thing about it is the randomness of its unfairness.” She topped up their glasses. “I’m telling you all this not because I feel like a stroll down memory lane or because I like to tell my young friends sad stories on sunny Friday evenings; I just— I wanted you to understand. I wanted you to see what a balm love is. What it is to share one’s life, to really share it, so that very little matters outside the certainty of its walls. Because the world is very noisy, Elodie, and although life is filled with joy and wonder, there’s evil and sorrow and injustice, too.”
― Kate Morton, The Clockmaker's Daughter

“Entitlement was, she knew, a terrible thing. It chained the person to their victimhood. It gobbled up all the air around it. Until the person lived in a vacuum, where nothing good could flourish.”
― Louise Penny, Kingdom of the Blind

“unnecessary discomfort is a form of martyrdom with which I have no sympathy.”
― Elizabeth Peters, The Hippopotamus Pool

“I step across any reflections that are too dark with great strides, and when I am in my right mind, I find life acceptable because it is eternal. You call that my dreaming. I call it my faith and my strength. No, nothing dies, nothing is lost, nothing ends, whatever you may say. —George Sand, in a letter to Delacroix”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Dream Lover: A Novel of George Sand

“The dead lie beyond any struggle, so we living must struggle for them. We must remember, because there are other wheels that turn besides the wheel of justice. Time is a wheel, vast and indifferent, and when time rolls on and men forget, we face the risk of circling back. We slouch yawning to a new horizon and find ourselves gazing at old hatreds seeded and watered by forgetfulness and flowering into new wars. New massacres. New monsters like die Jägerin.

Let this wheel stop.

Let us not forget this time.

Let us remember.”
― Kate Quinn, The Huntress

“She occasionally daydreamed about being the sort of character in a story who could faint and leave everyone else to sort things out. But that wasn’t going to happen.”
― Genevieve Cogman, The Lost Plot

“But the love of sisters needs no words. It does not depend on memories, or mementos, or proof. It runs as deep as a heartbeat. It is as ever present as a pulse.”
― Lisa Wingate, Before We Were Yours

“She would have been considered a beauty in any period of history other than the early twenty-first century, when the only acceptable shape for a beautiful woman was that of a hungry six-year-old who had inexplicably grown solid apple-shaped tits out of her shoulder blades.”
― Jenny Colgan, Meet Me at the Cupcake Cafe

“A certain kind of man looked at God’s own land, she thought, as she drew closer, and instead of beauty and wonder, all he saw was dollar signs.”
― Jojo Moyes, The Giver of Stars

“We’ll talk more later, all right? You let me know if you need anything. Mumma says you hired Willig, Williams & White to handle the divorce.”
― Beatriz Williams, The Wicked Redhead

“It was funny how so many men were defined by their downfall. Caesar, Fred Goodwin, Trotsky, Harvey Weinstein, Hitler, Jimmy Savile. Women hardly ever. They didn’t fall down. They stood up.”
― Kate Atkinson, Big Sky

“But all those years . . . all those years, she told herself, got you where you are now. All those years were necessary. If you were just happy from the day you were born, how would you ever know? How would you appreciate how good life could be if it had never been crap?”
― Jenny Colgan, Summer at Little Beach Street Bakery

“A woman who knows her mind is a surprise to a certain type of man. They do not know how to react to it, so they generally obey,”
― Deanna Raybourn, A Murderous Relation

“She moved about the world surrounded by an invisible cloud of disorder and disarray. She could walk into a room, have a conversation with someone, and then leave without apparently having touched anything. Once she was gone, the room would be in a state of chaos, as though a storm had passed through.”
― T E Kinsey, A Picture of Murder

“It’s a spy’s search. A male spy, at that.’ ‘How so?’ ‘He kicked the door open when it would have taken him less than a minute to pick the lock. That’s masculine problem-solving.”
― T E Kinsey, Death Beside the Seaside

“She wants to unburden herself, I can see that. Most people do. We all carry some burden or another, pressing into that tender spot between neck and shoulder, invisible to others, which we wouldn’t mind shucking off for a blessed moment. But we rarely do. To shuck off our burden is to show it to the world, and then what would the world say? The world would judge your burden, that’s what. The world would judge it, and how you’ve carried it all these years, and whether your burden is more or less than any other person’s, and what all this says about you. Sometimes you’re just better off carrying the damn thing into eternity.”
― Beatriz Williams, Her Last Flight

“Here it is. You think you know someone and then next thing they tell you is that they want a Chihuahua named Chardonnay.”
― Janet Evanovich, Fortune and Glory: Tantalizing Twenty-Seven

“That's the key isn't it? To know the darkness will always remain, but how you choose to face it, handle it...that's the important part. To not let it consume. To focus upon the good, the things that fill you with wonder." She gestured to the stars zooming past. "The struggle with that darkness is worth it, just to see such things.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A ​Court of Silver Flames

“Hatred, revenge—they’re just as bad as trying to protect yourself from more hurt—they can make you brittle inside. And if you’re brittle, you break. One way or another, you break.”
― Jacqueline Winspear, The Consequences of Fear

“She sipped her sirupy stimulant with sibylline susurrations.”
― Charlotte MacLeod, The Palace Guard

“If you are alive—whether of blood or bark—you will be struck by pain, love, longing, fear, anger, and the particular ache of sadness. There will be joys that quiver your leaves and betrayals that will sever your roots, poisoning the water you pull. These are the varying notes in the music of living. Look up, to close your eyes is to stagnate. To rot and stop the song. My gift to you is to know that we are here, all around you, talking to one another and dreaming of your success. Sorcery is everywhere, in the silver stroll of a slug and lighting up the very veins of you. Open those beautiful eyes to a world who is a mosaic of magic. She is just waiting for you to notice.”
― Kira Jane Buxton, Hollow Kingdom

“Maybe it’s animalness that will make the world right again: the wisdom of elephants, the enthusiasm of canines, the grace of snakes, the mildness of anteaters. Perhaps being human needs some diluting. —Carol Emshwiller”
― Kira Jane Buxton, Feral Creatures

“In case you are wondering what a human is, they were essentially bald apes that covered their genitals with cloth and experienced incessant outrage. Holy Funyuns, everything set them off—noises, the weather, the interminable celestial mystery of what happened to their socks, but mostly other humans.”
― Kira Jane Buxton, Feral Creatures

“I was experiencing acute déjà poo—the feeling that I’d heard this crap before.”
― Kira Jane Buxton, Feral Creatures

“Family doesn’t have to look like you; they can have feathers and scales and scutes. What matters is that you’re loved for who you are in your heart. We survive when we are seen.”
― Kira Jane Buxton, Feral Creatures

“We can only see this infinitesimally small slice of time, this instant, and now this instant. Maybe serenity is realizing that the only way to change your circumstances is to live right now. Otherwise you’re either too early, or you’re too late.”
― Lyndsay Faye, The King of Infinite Space