Ascolta > Ascolta's Quotes

“This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”
― Sid Ziff

“I cannot get you close enough, I said to him, pitiful as a child, and never can and never will. We cannot get from anyone else the things we need to fill the endless terrible need, not to be dissolved, not to sink back into sand, heat, broom, air, thinnest air. And so we revolve around each other and our dreams collide. It is embarrassing that it should be so hard. Look out the window in any weather. We are part of all that glamour, drama, change, and should not be ashamed.”
― Ellen Gilchrist

“Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary? Does it improve upon the silence?”
― Mona Simpson, Casebook

“Too many times I'd left him reaching for me, from a babysitter's arms. "Am I still a mother?" I asked myself... What parts of the day could I cut out and still give him enough? Paul never asked himself that. He thought he was a great dad.”
― Mona Simpson, My Hollywood

“Maybe she’d always wished to be beautiful and didn’t quite dare to, because she could tell that people didn’t say she was and more attention was given to other women, but she still had a frail hope that there’d been a mistake and she was after all.”
― Mona Simpson, Casebook

“I knew I would hate my best memory because it would prove that people could fake love or that love could end or worst of all, love was not powerful enough to change a life.”
― Mona Simpson

“Prologue: There are three wants which can never be satisfied: that of the rich wanting more, that of the sick, wanting something different, and that of the traveler, who says, "anywhere but here." —Ralph Waldo Emerson”
― Mona Simpson, Anywhere But Here

“He was painfully shy, which, as is often the manner of the painfully shy, he overcompensated for by being too loud at the wrong times.”
― Neil Gaiman, Stardust

“Does being true to one's self mean offering the literal truth or the truth that should have been, the truth of the image of one's self? It hardly matters by this time. By this time the border between seeing straight on and seeing round the corners of solid objects, between the world as smooth and coherent and the world as dissociated skinless particle, is thoroughly blurred. No longer a case of double vision, but of two separate eyes whose separate visions - what happened and what might have happened - come together in what we call the past, which we see with hindsight. Memory is revision. I have just destroyed another piece of my past, to tell a story.”
― Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Leaving Brooklyn

“But if you remove a tyrant in anything other than an open and visible way, another tyrant soon stands up to replace him.”
― Juliet Marillier, Shadowfell

“You think very little of me, don't you?"
"On the contrary. I think very highly of you and become disappointed when you do not live up to my standards.”
― Emma Hamm, Heart of the Fae

“My body remembers what part of my mind wants to forget—because there are times when I struggle to reconcile what I gave up to be here, in this very moment, despite how much I wanted it. How much I do want it. The past may be prologue, but it’s with me, every day.”
― Samira Ahmed, Love, Hate & Other Filters

“The scariest monsters are the ones who seem the most like you.”
― Samira Ahmed, Internment

“I think writing Young Adult fiction is about writing into the realm of possibility. At that age, people are so much on the cusp between childhood and adulthood, and it's both this time of making decisions and this time of opportunity. I visualize it as a place where there are all these doors that are closed, but not necessarily locked. It's about kids having this choice—not every door is going to be easy to open. Some doors are going to be pulling back against those kids. But I think Young Adult literature is about opening those doors.”
― Samira Ahmed

“I plan for the worst,’ Silver said. ‘That way, at least I’m dressed for the occasion.”
― Genevieve Cogman, The Masked City

“Oh well, hindsight always had all the best ideas.”
― Genevieve Cogman, The Lost Plot

“Management positions always come with ulcers attached.”
― Genevieve Cogman, The Lost Plot

“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

“I think he and the Princess are engaged in an unofficial game of Who Can Show They're More Important by Arriving Last, not that either of them would admit it.”
― Genevieve Cogman, The Mortal Word

“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Such nonsense!" declared Dr Greysteel. "Whoever heard of cats doing anything useful!"
"Except for staring at one in a supercilious manner," said Strange. "That has a sort of moral usefulness, I suppose, in making one feel uncomfortable and encouraging sober reflection upon one's imperfections.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“Houses, like people, are apt to become rather eccentric if left too much on their own; this house was the architectural equivalent of an old gentleman in a worn dressing-gown and torn slippers, who got up and went to bed at odd times of day, and who kept up a continual conversation with friends no one else could see.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“I have a scholar's love of silence and solitude. To sit and pass hour after hour in idle chatter with a roomful of strangers is to me the worst sort of torment.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“..The argument he was conducting with his neighbor as to whether the English magician had gone mad because he was a magician, or because he was English.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“Mr. Robinson was a polished sort of person. He was so clean and healthy and pleased about everything that he positively shone - which is only to be expected in a fairy or an angel, but is somewhat disconcerting in an attorney.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“Mr Norrell determined to establish himself in London with all possible haste. "You must get a house, Childermass," he said. "Get me a house that says to those that visit it that magic is a respectable profession - no less than Law and a great deal more so than Medicine."
Childermass inquired drily if Mr Norrell wished him to seek out architecture expressive of the proposition that magic was as respectable as the Church?
Mr Norrell (who knew there were such things as jokes in the world or people would not write about them in books, but who had never actually been introduced to a joke or shaken its hand) considered a while before replying at last that no, he did not think they could quite claim that.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“At the moment, the Stones were blaring out of the speakers, and Mick Jagger was bemoaning the fact that he didn’t always get what he wanted.”
― Stina Leicht, Of Blood and Honey

“Stories can die. Of course they can. Ask any author who's had an idea wither in their head, fail to thrive and bear fruit. Or a book that spoke to you as a child but upon revisiting it was silent and empty. Stories can die from neglect, from abuse, from rot. Even war, as Shakespeare warned, can turn books to graves.
We seek to preserve the books, of course. But we forget the flip side of that duty: treasure what we have. Honor the stories that speak to you, that give you something you need to keep going. Cherish stories while they are here.
There's a reason the unwritten live on something as fragile as paper.”
― A.J. Hackwith, The Library of the Unwritten

“How much easier it would be if everyone knew their role: the hero, the sidekick, the villain. Our books would be neater and our souls less frayed. But whether you have blood or ink, no one's story is that simple.”
― A.J. Hackwith, The Library of the Unwritten