R.M. Romero > R.M.'s Quotes

“Don’t you want to be alive before you die?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“All your life you wait, and then it finally comes, and are you ready?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“The tales of Elfland do not stand or fall on their actuality but on their truthfulness, their speaking to the human condition, the longings we all have for the Faerie Other.”
― Jane Yolen, Touch Magic: Fantasy, Faerie & Folklore in the Literature of Childhood

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

“Imagine that the world is made out of love. Now imagine that it isn’t. Imagine a story where everything goes wrong, where everyone has their back against the wall, where everyone is in pain and acting selfishly because if they don’t, they’ll die. Imagine a story, not of good against evil, but of need against need against need, where everyone is at cross-purposes and everyone is to blame.”
― Richard Siken

“He is no true knight, but he saved me all the same,” she told the mother. “Save him if you can, and gentle the rage inside him -Sansa”
― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

“Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.”
― Anne Carson (Translator), Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

“I write to close my eyes.”
― Franz Kafka

“Tolkien understood about the things that happen after the end. Because this is after the end, this is all the Scouring of the Shire, this is figuring out how to live in the time that wasn’t supposed to happen after the glorious last stand. I saved the world, or I think I did, and look, the world is still here, with sunsets and interlibrary loans. And it doesn’t care about me any more than the Shire cared about Frodo.”
― Jo Walton, Among Others

“Wolves have no kings.”
― Robin Hobb, Royal Assassin

“The crows assert that a single crow could destroy the heavens. This is certainly true, but it proves nothing against the heavens, because heaven means precisely: the impossibility of crows.”
― Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms

“It’s the well-behaved children that make the most formidable revolutionaries. They don’t say a word, they don’t hide under the table, they eat only one piece of chocolate at a time. But later on, they make society pay dearly.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“Come now, my child, if we were planning to harm you, do you think we'd be lurking here beside the path in the very darkest part of the forest?”
― Kenneth Patchen

“She made herself stronger by fighting with the wind.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

“then the voice in my head said

WHETHER YOU LOVE WHAT YOU LOVE

OR LIVE IN DIVIDED CEASELESS
REVOLT AGAINST IT

WHAT YOU LOVE IS YOUR FATE ”
― Frank Bidart, In the Western Night: Collected Poems, 1965-1990

“When you look at pain as material it makes all the difference in the world. I thought, the pain that is too big to be eased by its use as material would be a pain I couldn't (and wouldn't want to) even imagine.”
― Francesca Lia Block, Violet & Claire

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
― W.B. Yeats

“Love is a myth.'
'Love is a myth,' Grandfather Trout said. 'Like summer.'
'What?'
'In winter,'Grandfather Trout said, 'summer is a myth. A report, a rumor. Not to be believed in. Get it? Love is a myth. So is summer.”
― John Crowley, Little, Big

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“That's how you get deathless, volchitsa. Walk the same tale over and over, until you wear a groove in the world, until even if you vanished, the tale would keep turning, keep playing, like a phonograph, and you'd have to get up again, even with a bullet through your eye, to play your part and say your lines.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“I come to you and you see me whole,' he says. 'You love me all the way around the equator and not just for some story I wrote. When the door closes and the world's outside, we're eye to eye.”
― Stephen King, Lisey's Story

“All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.

All of them?

Sure, he says. Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist.”
― Margaret Atwood

“For there is nothing lost, that may be found, if sought.”
― Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene

“Loneliness had taught Harriet that there was always someone who understood - it was just so often that they were dead, and in a book.”
― Eva Ibbotson, A Company of Swans

“I wanted to write you a story about magic. I wanted rabbits appearing from hats. I wanted balloons lifting you into the sky. It turned out to be nothing but sadness, war, heartbreak. You never saw it, but there’s a garden inside me.”
― Shane Jones, Light Boxes

“Fairy tales have always been about getting through the worst of everything, the darkest and the deepest and the bloodiest of events. They are about surviving, and what you look like when you emerge from the trial. The reason we keep telling fairy tales over and over, that we need to keep telling them, is that the trials change. So the stories change too, and the heroines and villains and magical objects, to keep them true. Fairy tales are the closets where the world keeps its skeletons.”
― Catherynne M. Valente

“All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."

REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

"So we can believe the big ones?"

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

"They're not the same at all!"

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"

MY POINT EXACTLY.”
― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

“All things are true. God's an Astronaut. Oz is Over the Rainbow, and Midian is where the monsters live." - Peloquin”
― Clive Barker

“To live would be an awfully big adventure.”
― J.M.Barrie, Peter Pan