Leanne Olson > Leanne's Quotes

“Real magic can never be made by offering someone else's liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

“It is not more surprising to be born twice than once; everything in nature is resurrection.”
― Voltaire

“When I was your age, television was called books.”
― William Goldman, The Princess Bride

“To enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Yet, for all the hours Imogen spent as an adult cocooned in her apartment, she still wasn’t sure if she’d ever felt truly at home anywhere. Sometimes in the company of a tree—or a creek, or a moss-covered rock, or a desert night haloed by the Milky Way—she felt the tension inside her finally relent. There—out there—was a place where she belonged.”
― Zoje Stage, Getaway

“It's hard, isn't it, to find you're not at all the thing you thought you were?”
― Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood

“It turned out that sometimes it's enough to start doing things differently now.”
― Laini Taylor, Muse of Nightmares

“But the world I wanted wasn't the world I lived in, and if I would do nothing until I could repair every terrible thing at once, I would do nothing forever.”
― Naomi Novik, Spinning Silver

“There is nothing wrong with being a monster.”
― Cassandra Khaw, The Salt Grows Heavy

“People acted like it was inevitable—that my destiny was a ditch outside a cemetery from day one. But that’s not how I was born. That’s not how I lived.”
― Cherie Dimaline, Funeral Songs for Dying Girls

“This is important. I need you to remember this: I was loved. I was profoundly and fully loved. This is critical, because people like to tell a version of stories where we were born to be neglected or forgotten or hurt.”
― Cherie Dimaline, Funeral Songs for Dying Girls

“Children accept absurdity because everything is absurd, everything made up of complex rules and systems that they don’t understand. Arbitrary rules that are arbitrarily enforced. You know what that’s like, if you let yourself remember. Maybe, in addition to regular rules, you were given a god who watched everything from an easy, safe distance. A god you poured love into, who gave you rules and condemnation in exchange. A magic man demanding perfect obedience and the performance of a life instead of the living of one.”
― Kiersten White, Mister Magic

“From the day a girl is born she's told she needs a love story to survive. It's everywhere: in poetry, in music, in films and books. She's told life is worthless without love. She's told she is worthless without love.' She lowers her voice. 'But what no one tells her, what no one talks about, is that it can kill her. That the very thing they say can save her can destroy her. Love is a trap, darling. It lures you in then digs its bony fingers into your chest, breaks open your ribs, and yanks out your bloody, beating heart, and still leaves you alive.”
― Shubnum Khan, The Djinn Waits a Hundred Years

“We all choose to be skeptics when the truth is inconvenient.”
― S.A. Cosby, All the Sinners Bleed

“Old Testament, New Testament, it was just words with a little w, written by zealots as PR for their new cult founded in the memory of a dead carpenter.”
― S.A. Cosby, All the Sinners Bleed

“I guess hearts are slippery because they’re covered in blood. I wish I could bleed mine dry. Then I’d miss you less.”
― Jade Song, Chlorine

“The Grim Reaper sneaks up behind you and squeezes you until shit fills your adult diaper and an artery bursts in your chest. He works his bony fingers in your guts and makes your own cells eat you alive from the inside. He skull fucks you until your brain retreats inside itself and you forget how to even breathe.”
― S.A. Cosby, Blacktop Wasteland