Erin > Erin's Quotes

“Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign

“Adult librarians are like lazy bakers: their patrons want a jelly doughnut, so they give them a jelly doughnut. Children’s librarians are ambitious bakers: 'You like the jelly doughnut? I’ll get you a jelly doughnut. But you should try my cruller, too. My cruller is gonna blow your mind, kid.”
― John Green

“If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin.”
― Ivan Turgenev

“I loved getting my M. B. A., and I really enjoyed being an accountant and financial analyst before I quit my day job twenty-five years ago to write full time. I just liked writing more…plus, I knew even then that as a full-time writer, I'd get plenty of chances to do business-type stuff, while as an accountant, I probably wouldn't get a lot of opportunities to write about dragons.”
― Patricia C. Wrede

“Well, it doesn't sound particularly noble and knightly to say you've rescued the Chief Cook and Librarian, does it? And it has cut down on the number of interruptions. I used to get two or three knights a day, and now there's only about one a week. And the ones who do come are at least smart enough to figure out that I'm still a princess even if the dragons call me Chief Cook”
― Patricia C. Wrede, Searching for Dragons

“If you want to write a fantasy story with Norse gods, sentient robots, and telepathic dinosaurs, you can do just that. Want to throw in a vampire and a lesbian unicorn while you're at it? Go ahead. Nothing's off limits. But the endless possibility of the genre is a trap. It's easy to get distracted by the glittering props available to you and forget what you're supposed to be doing: telling a good story. Don't get me wrong, magic is cool. But a nervous mother singing to her child at night while something moves quietly through the dark outside her house? That's a story. Handled properly, it's more dramatic than any apocalypse or goblin army could ever be.”
― Patrick Rothfuss

“It's all your fault, Mother,' said Larry austerely; 'you shouldn't have brought us up to be so selfish.' 'I like that!' exclaimed Mother. 'I never did anything of the sort!' 'Well, we didn't get as selfish as this without some guidance,' said Larry.”
― Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals

“We diminish ourselves too,” she said at last, “when feeling sorry for someone who has done a dreadful wrong leads us to excuse him and simply hope he will mend his ways. Feeling sorry for someone but acknowledging that justice ought nevertheless to be done is more appropriate to moral beings.”
― Mary Balogh, Someone to Romance

“children who spent time in green spaces between the ages of seven and twelve tend to think of nature as magical. As adults they are the people most likely to be indignant about lack of nature protection, while those who have had no such experience tend to regard nature as hostile or irrelevant and are indifferent to its loss. By expurgating nature from children's lives we are depriving the environment of its champions for the future.”
― Isabella Tree, Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm

“We can never be gods, after all--but we can become something less than human with frightening ease.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

“librarians are in the library all day, and their jobs include handling difficult and sometimes violent people nearly every day. The topic is bigger than libraries; it is a topic for society to solve.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

“not everyone had had the benefits of a cantankerous relative beating the need to learn to think for oneself into their heads at a young age.”
― Victoria Goddard, The Hands of the Emperor

“The world changes one person and one decision at a time. None of us know what decision, precisely, is the telling one.”
― Victoria Goddard, The Hands of the Emperor

“When men talk about honor,” Hyperia said, “they usually mean pride. True honor goes about its business without making speeches or taking umbrage over a hand of whist.”
― Grace Burrowes, A Gentleman in Search of a Wife