Kiki > Kiki's Quotes

“Now all we have to worry about is all the other books, and, of course, life, which is huge and complicated and will not warn you before it hurts you.”
― Neil Gaiman, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

“She bent most of the rules. She broke the rest.”
― V.E. Schwab, A Gathering of Shadows

“Be lost. Give up. Give In. in the end It would be better to surrender before you begin. be lost. Be lost And then you will not care if you are ever found.”
― Victoria Schwab, Vicious

“Plenty of humans were monstrous, and plenty of monsters knew how to play at being human.”
― V.E. Schwab, Vicious

“The world resists, when you break its rules.”
― Victoria Schwab, Vicious

“The beautiful thing about books was that anyone could open them.”
― Victoria Schwab, This Savage Song

“Not with a bang, but with a whimper.
In with gunfire and out with smoke.”
― Victoria Schwab, This Savage Song

“I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown I back, throat to the stars, "more like deer than human being." To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“There are such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that. And we believe in them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Anything is grand if it's done on a large enough scale.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“The problem with wanting," he whispered, his mouth trailing along my jaw until it hovered over my lips, "is that it makes us weak.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Shadow and Bone

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

“Harry -- yer a wizard.
I'm a what?”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

“Don't worry. You're just as sane as I am.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

“He would see her again. He knew he would. Magic bent the world. Pulled it into shape. There were fixed points. Most of the time they were places. But sometimes, rarely, they were people. For someone who never stood still, Lila felt like a pin in Kell's world. One he was sure to snag on.”
― Victoria Schwab, A Darker Shade of Magic

“Lila Bard knew in her bones that she was meant to be a pirate.”
― Victoria Schwab, A Darker Shade of Magic

“Myths do not happen all at once.
They do not spring forth whole into the world. They form slowly, rolled between the hands of time until their edges smooth, until the saying of the story gives enough weight to the words—to the memories—to keep them rolling on their own.”
― V.E. Schwab, A Conjuring of Light

“On vis och," he told himself.

Dawn to dusk. A phrase that meant two things in his native tongue.

A fresh start. A good end.”
― V.E. Schwab, A Conjuring of Light

“Words were different when they lived inside of you.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“I got to thinking that poems were like people. Some people you got right off the bat. Some people you just didn't get--and never would get.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“I wondered what that was like, to hold someone’s hand. I bet you could sometimes find all of the mysteries of the universe in someone’s hand.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You