Nikki > Nikki's Quotes

“People say I love you all the time - when they say, ‘take an umbrella, it’s raining,’ or ‘hurry back,’ or even ‘watch out, you’ll break your neck.’ There are hundreds of ways of wording it - you just have to listen for it, my dear.”
― John Patrick, The Curious Savage

“Beauty was your armor. Fragile stuff, all show. But what's inside you? That's steel. It's brave and unbreakable. And it doesn't need fixing.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Ruin and Rising

“If people sat outside and looked at the stars each night, I'll bet they'd live a lot differently. ”
― Bill Watterson

“Have I told you how hideous you look tonight?” Cardan asks, leaning back in the elaborately carved chair, the warmth of his words turning the question into something like a compliment.
“No” I say, glad to be annoyed back into the present. “Tell me.”
"I can't.”
― Holly Black, The Cruel Prince

“I am always trying to convey something that can’t be conveyed, to explain something which is inexplicable, to tell about something I have in my bones, something which can be expressed only in the bones.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“The world is vicious.'

Thomas brushed a lock of hair back from my face, his gaze thoughtful. 'The world is neither kind nor is it cruel. It simply exists. We have the ability to view it however we choose.”
― Kerri Maniscalco, Hunting Prince Dracula

“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”
― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.”
― John Muir, The Mountains of California

“I like that stick of yours," he said.
"It's a staff." Jem swung out to knock another automaton sideways. "Made by the Iron Sisters, only for Silent Brothers."
[...]
"Anyone can sharpen a stick."
"It's a staff," Jem repeated, and saw Will's quicksilver smile out of the corner of his eye.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Princess

“He looks up at me with his night-colored eyes, beautiful and terrible all at once. “For a moment,” he says, “I wondered if it wasn’t you shooting bolts at me.”

I make a face at him. “And what made you decide it wasn’t?”

He grins up at me. “They missed.”
― Holly Black, The Wicked King

“I haven’t had a very good day. I think I might still be hung over and everyone’s dead and my root beer’s gone.” Horrifyingly, she felt her eyes prick with sudden tears.
He bent down and picked up Aidan, slinging him over one shoulder. “We’ll get you another day,” Gavriel said, with such odd sincerity that she had to smile.”
― Holly Black, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

“Fear was a poison that people mistook as protection. Making choices to stay safe could be just as treacherous.”
― Stephanie Garber, Finale

“For there are no limits to the stars; their numbers are infinite. Which is precisely why I measure my love for you by them. An amount too boundless to count.”
― Kerri Maniscalco, Hunting Prince Dracula

“Mistakes were a learning experience, not the end of the universe.”
― Kerri Maniscalco, Hunting Prince Dracula

“You will lose someone you can’t live without,and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.”
― Anne Lamott

“But I don't want to feel differently. I want to feel love in its every form. I used to be scared of it, but now I think love is another type of magic. It makes everything brighter, it makes people who have it stronger, it breaks rules that aren't supposed to exist, it's infinitely valuable. I can't imagine my life without it.”
― Stephanie Garber, Excerpt: Finale

“The Darkling slumped back in his chair. “Fine,” he said with a weary shrug. “Make me your villain.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Shadow and Bone

“No mourners, no funerals. Another way of saying good luck. But it was something more. A dark wink to the fact that there would be no expensive burials for people like them, no marble markers to remember their names, no wreaths of myrtle and rose.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom

“Would you like an adventure now, or would like to have your tea first?”
― J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“There are many different kinds of bravery. There's the bravery of thinking of others before one's self. Now, your father has never brandished a sword nor fired a pistol, thank heavens. But he has made many sacrifices for his family, and put away many dreams.
Michael: Where did he put them?
Mrs. Darling: He put them in a drawer. And sometimes, late at night, we take them out and admire them. But it gets harder and harder to close the drawer... He does. And that is why he is brave.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“Mock me all you like. Whatever I imagined then, now it is I who would beg and grovel for a kind word from your lips." His eyes are black with desire. "By you, I am forever undone.”
― Holly Black, The Queen of Nothing

“Pain makes you strong, Madoc once told me, making me lift a sword again and again. Get used to the weight.”
― Holly Black, The Wicked King

“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. Easy to wish we'd developed other other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we'd worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do the people we didn't do and the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.
But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.
We can't tell if any of those other versions would of been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“From the first moment he had set eyes on Eliana, he had known her in his bones, in the knit of his muscles, in the roar of his blood. As a boy, he had cradled her tiny infant body in his arms and done everything he could to hold on to her even as the world ripped itself apart at their feet. And now, as a man, her closeness changed the air around him, drawing his senses taut as bowstrings and lighting his skin from the inside out, as if he had consumed a brew of stars that wouldn’t stop spinning. But in the war room, the air remained dull and unremarkable, and he knew she wasn’t there even before he scanned the room to confirm it. Ordinarily, he wasn’t one to make a scene, but in that instance, he felt dangerously close to it. “Where is she?” he said very quietly,”
― Claire Legrand, Kingsbane

“I’m going to go back and stop your son from killing her.”
The queen’s face fell. For a moment, she looked as old as the years she’d spent lying in a suspended state. “That is not a small mistake to fix. If you do this, Time will take something equally valuable from you.”
The Fate gave the queen a look more vicious than any curse. “There is nothing of equal value to me.”
― Stephanie Garber, The Ballad of Never After

“You could have had anything else in the world, and you asked for me."
She smiled up at him. Filthy as he was, covered in blood and dirt, he was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen.
"But I don't want anything else in the world.”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Glass

“I don’t like anything here at all.” said Frodo, “step or stone, breath or bone. Earth, air and water all seem accursed. But so our path is laid.”

“Yes, that’s so,” said Sam, “And we shouldn’t be here at all, if we’d known more about it before we started. But I suppose it’s often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo, adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and
looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t. And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on, and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming home, and finding things all right, though not quite the same; like old Mr Bilbo. But those aren’t always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of a tale we’ve fallen into?”

“I wonder,” said Frodo, “But I don’t know. And that’s the way of a real tale. Take any one that you’re fond of. You may know, or guess, what kind of a tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending, but the people in it don’t know. And you don’t want them to.”
― Tolkien John Ronald Reuel, The Lord of the Rings

“I guess that's how they were able to do it, in the way they did it, all at once, without anyone knowing beforehand. If there had still been portable money, it would have been more difficult.
It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics at the time.
I was stunned. Everyone was, I know that. It was hard to believe, the entire government gone like that. How did they get in, how did it happen?
That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“When the world is hard, love must be harder still.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Stone Sky

“I’m starting to understand how ridiculous it is to demand civility when the world is so disgustingly uncivil.”
― M.L. Wang, Blood Over Bright Haven