Althea Ann > Althea's Quotes

“Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means...”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“I suppose love falls where it falls.'
'Generally, one can see it toppling from afar, and make an effort to get out of the way.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Half a War

“Everyone finds a way to make their side the right one, after all.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Half a War

“Trust is like glass. Lovely, but only a fool rests lots of weight on it.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Half a War

“All too often when we topple something hateful, rather than breaking it and starting afresh, we raise ourselves up in its place.”
― Joe Abercrombie

“A man who's not content with what he's got, well, more than likely he won't be content with what he hasn't.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Half a War

“Memories change and shift, ferment in our minds; they are never the same when we take them out as they were when first we put them in.”
― Angela Slatter, Of Sorrow and Such

“Confess how you worship and obey Lucifer, the fallen one.”
"You fool. I worship none, and what woman with a brain in her head obeys anyone, let alone a failure?”
― Angela Slatter, Of Sorrow and Such

“The problem with crying in the woods, by the side of a white road that leads somewhere terrible, is that the reason for crying isn't inside your head. You have a perfectly legitimate and pressing reason for crying, and it will still be there in five minutes, except that your throat will be raw and your eyes will itch and absolutely nothing else will have changed.”
― T. Kingfisher, The Seventh Bride

“It is somehow easier to face things when one is not alone. Courage still does most of the heavy lifting, but Pride gets its shoulder in there, too, just to keep you from embarrassing yourself in front of the other person...or hedgehog, as the case may be.”
― T. Kingfisher, The Seventh Bride

“Roses have thorns. That's the price of roses. When you start to forget that, that's when things go wrong.”
― T. Kingfisher

“I trained as a librarian, and I run a bookstore. Fucking right I can use a gun. ... if I have to engage somebody between the counter and the door, only the political autobiographies are in danger and who gives a fuck about those?”
― Jonathan L. Howard, Carter & Lovecraft

“the unknown breeds dragons in map margins”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Shards of Honour

“This is only a record of broken and apparently unrelated memories, some of them as distinct and sequent as brilliant beads upon a thread, others remote and strange, having the character of crimson dreams with interspaces blank and black -- witch-fires glowing still and red in a great desolation.”
― Ambrose Bierce, The Moonlit Road and Other Ghost and Horror Stories

“some want a god who doesn't carry a sword”
― Paul M.M. Cooper, River of Ink

“Most of us are safe. If you're not a delirious dream the gods are having, if your beauty doesn't trouble the constellations, nobody's going to cast a spell on you.”
― Michael Cunningham, A Wild Swan: And Other Tales

“O, the things we kill for our dreams, forgetting all the while we shall wake up to find them naught but dust and ash!
What fools we are to pretend that when we walk to war, we do not bring our loved ones with us.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Blades

“There's no such thing as a good death ... It's just a dull, stupid thing we all have to do eventually. To ask meaning of it is to ask meaning of a shadow.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Blades

“Deserve.' How preoccupied we are with that. With what we should have, with what we are owed. I wonder if any word has ever caused more heartache.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Blades

“...history, as you may know, is much like a spiral staircase that gives the illusion of going up, but never quite goes anywhere.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“Historians, I think, should be keepers of truth. We must tell things as they are - honestly, and without subversion. That is the greatest good one can do.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs

“every myth, every fable must have some roots. Something lies among those roots.'
'It does. ... Most often a dream, a wish, a desire, a yearning. Faith that there are no limits to possibility. And occasionally chance.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, Miecz przeznaczenia

“It is easy to kill with a bow, girl. How easy it is to release the bowstring and think, it is not I, it is the arrow. The blood of that boy is not on my hands. The arrow killed him, not I. But the arrow does not dream anything in the night.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, Miecz przeznaczenia

“Our world is in equilibrium. The annihilation, the killing, of any creatures that inhabit this world upsets that equilibrium. And a lack of equilibrium brings closer extinction; extinction and the end of the world as we know it.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, Sword of Destiny

“I was what some foolish persons are pleased to call, and others, more foolish, are pleased to be called - an aristocrat.”
― Ambrose Bierce

“she ignited her heart by touching it to his; and after that there was no peace for either of them.”
― Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria

“A singer learned her roles for life - your repertoire was a library of fates held close, like the gowns in this closet, yours until your voice failed.”
― Alexander Chee, The Queen of the Night

“She wanted only to be feared. I wanted to be feared and loved. I didn't want everything she had as she stood onstage that night. I wanted more.”
― Alexander Chee, The Queen of the Night

“I felt astonishment this system's folk put up with such a monarch. The attractions of kingship are well documented, but sentimental indulgence can become an illness if it isn't looked to.”
― David Brin

“The queer and strange, the unrestrained, the grotesque is not only interesting: it is valuable. It is not always necessary to purge it out altogether in order to attain to the Sublime.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien