Val > Val's Quotes

“Amity was the cold, steady gaze of a double-barreled shotgun, bearing down. She was the glint of pinprick pupils gleaming through a night-lit window, the rythmic blast of a door left banging in a gale wind. The slither of a flesh-flayed limb beneath a bed skirt, a welcome note etched in blood. Amity's forever was reflected in the glimmering edge of an ax, in the rushing footprints, the twitching tail, the brushing fingertips of a zephyr, a cipher, a wordless, formless shape.”
― Micol Ostow, Amity

“Must lessons always be so hard? Must battles be so bloody? And must it always be our kind that keep the wheels in motion? The year, it turns, and it turns, and turns. Now it has come full circle. Winter and summer: life and death; the adder stone and the wedding-ring; all echo that endless coming of age. Who can stop the word turning?”
― Joanne M. Harris, A Pocketful of Crows

“And if I never have a veil, or a golden ring on my hand, I will still have you, my love, and that will be enough for me. Sleep well, love, and dream of me. And know that, if I were to live for a thousand years, there would still not be enough nights in which to dream of you.”
― Joanne Harris, A Pocketful of Crows

“If only I had patience. If only I could sleep till spring. If only I were the hawthorn tree, too old to love, too wise to hate.”
― Joanne Harris, A Pocketful of Crows

“How can you fly with a stone around your neck? How can you run with a chain on your feet?
'But I love him,' I said.
That's the stone. That's the chain, said the hawthorn. And until you can give them back, you will never be free again.”
― Joanne Harris, A Pocketful of Crows

“There it was again. Fate. As a child, the word was often my only companion. It whispered to me from dark corners during lonely nights. It was the song of the birds in spring and the call of the wind through bare branches on a cold winter afternoon. Fate. Both my anguish and my solace. My escort and my cage.”
― Leslye Walton, The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender

“Any decent human being, witch or otherwise, has the capacity to do good in this world. It's merely a case of whetever one chooses to do so.”
― Leslye Walton, The Price Guide to the Occult

“The girl's a rancid bucket of leeches on the inside, but she has a face that could move angels to murder.”
― Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway

“Endings are beginnings in disguise, dear Tru. They signify one door closing and another one opening. They mark the point where the heroine transforms from a person who's been beaten and badgered and bolstered by life into someone who's about to shed her past and metamorphose into an entirely new creature.”
― Cat Winters, Odd & True

“The moon is the friendliest of the celestial bodies, after all, glowing warm and white and welcoming, like a friend who wants only to know that all of us are safe in our narrow worlds, our narrow yards, our narrow, well-considered lives. The moon worries. We may not know how we know that, but we know it all the same: that the moon watches, and the moon worries, and the moon will always love us, no matter what.”
― Seanan McGuire, Down Among the Sticks and Bones

“The thought that babies would become children, and children would become people, never occurred to them. The concept that perhaps biology was not destiny, and that not all little girls would be pretty princesses, and not all little boys would be brave soldiers, also never occurred to them. Things might have been easier if those ideas had never slithered into their heads, unwanted but undeniably important. Alas, their minds were made up, and left no room for such revolutionary opinions.”
― Seanan McGuire, Down Among the Sticks and Bones

“Life is hard. What an understatement.
Hard is too mild for the trouble we've seen. Life is hell shot with just enough heaven to make the pains of hope all the sharper.
Life is impossible. Ugly. Agonizing. Inexplicable. Torture.”
― Amy Harmon, From Sand and Ash

“She screamed, long and feral, that savage beast rising up in her chest like it would break her in half -tear her meat apart and emerge, blood-soaked and grief-starved, ready to die, ready to burn, ready to do whatever it took as long as she died with her enemies howling beneath her claws.”
― Hope Cook, House of Ash

“They should fear me, she thought. They should look in my eyes and know that I'm a devil too.”
― Hope Cook, House of Ash

“The sea was as black as basalt, covered with churning foam, ice-green, clotted cream, shivering high walls full of needles of air going up and up and crashing down on other walls of water on the crumbling coasts of the world.”
― A.S. Byatt, Ragnarok

“Later, years later, I would hear a song made of our meeting. [...] I was not surprised by the portrait of myself: the proud witch undone before the hero's sword, kneeling and begging for mercy. Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.”
― Madeline Miller, Circe

“You can force me to cast wishes, take my breath, take my hope, but may the Creator help if you touch her, because I will burn your world to ashes.”
― J.C. Welker, The Wishing Heart

“On our wedding night," she said, "I will cut out your tongue and swallow it. Then both tongues that spoke our marriage vows will belong to me, and I will be wed only to myself. You will most likely choke to death on your own blood, which will be unfortunate, but I will be both husband and wife and therefore not a widow to be pitied.”
― Kiersten White, And I Darken

“Her spine was steel. Her heart was armor. Her eyes were fire.”
― Kiersten White, And I Darken