Kathryn (Dragon Bite Books) > Kathryn (Dragon Bite Books)'s Quotes

“They walked as it were in a black vapour wrought of veritable darkness itself that, as it was breathed, brought blindness not only to eyes but to the mind, so that even the memory of colours and of forms and of any light faded out of thought. Night had always been, and always would be, and night was all.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

“All your words are but to say: you are a woman, and your part is in the house. But when the men have died in battle and honour, you have leave to be burned in the house, for the men will need it no more. But I am of the House of Éorl and not a serving-woman. I can ride and wield blade, and I do not fear either pain or death.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“The truth is that the world is full of dragons, and none of us are as powerful or cool as we’d like to be. And that sucks. But when you’re confronted with that fact, you can either crawl into a hole and quit, or you can get out there, take off your shoes, and Bilbo it up.”
― Patrick Rothfuss

“Sure, it's simple writing for kids…just as simple as bringing them up.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin

“Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills, as I have found out long ago.”
― C.S. Lewis

“The past is another land, and we cannot go to visit. So, if I say there were dragons, and men who rode upon their backs, who alive has been there and can tell me that I'm wrong?”
― Cressida Cowell, How to Be a Pirate

“Pure truth," I said. "You are my bright penny by the roadside. You are worth more than salt or the moon on a long night of walking. You are sweet wine in my mouth, a song in my throat, and laughter in my heart. [...] "You are too good for me," I said, "You are a luxury I cannot afford. Despite this, I insist you come with me today. I will buy you dinner and spend hours waxing rhapsodic
over the vast landscape of wonder that is you." [...] "I will play you music. I will sing you songs. For the rest of the afternoon, the rest of the world cannot touch us.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear

“If I were in the habit of befriending fictional people, I'd be happy to make his acquaintance, but the trouble with fictional friendships is that you tend to find yourself sitting in a café talking excitedly to an empty chair. After several hours, the staff will probably force you to leave, even if there are still uneaten madeleines sitting on your plate, all ready to be covered with strawberry jam. Normally, if you were being treated unfairly, you could count on a friend to help you, but a fictional friend--even one with fictional magic powers--will probably just stand there with a confused and fictional look on his or her face.”
― Lemony Snicket

“Violence was a disease Gansey didn't think he could catch. But all around him, his friends were slowly infected.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Blue Lily, Lily Blue

“The best fantasy is written in the language of dreams. It is alive as dreams are alive, more real than real ... for a moment at least ... that long magic moment before we wake.

Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest Airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true?

We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the songs the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La.

They can keep their heaven. When I die, I'd sooner go to middle Earth.”
― George R.R. Martin

“According to how gifted we are, we are all given a large or small key to this treasury of wonders. I have been blessed with a small key to the world of the young. It's a place where good and evil are clearly stamped. It's a place where the better part of human nature triumphs over tragedies, and where innocence rides high. It is a great pleasure to write there, because the young have what the rest of us only envy, and that is a belief in goodness and perpetual hope. ”
― Rosemary Wells

“People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination

“Books choose their readers, not the other way around. I believe that booksellers are the matchmakers. Thank you.”
― Cecelia Ahern

“The problem, in a nutshell, is that collecting books is much more than a hobby. The sheer amount of space required to house most book collections means that whoever shares your living area needs to be very understanding, or more ideally a co-conspirator, because the rest of their lives will be spent making room for your incredibly invasive pastime, until one day they trip on a folio and plummet to their doom down a staircase.”
― Oliver Darkshire, Once Upon a Tome: The Misadventures of a Rare Bookseller

“There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they'll take you.”
― Beatrix Potter

“Don’t think of fantasy as mere entertainment, then, but as a way to train for reality. It always has been, after all.”
― N.K. Jemisin

“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life

“Think not of the books you’ve bought as a ‘to be read’ pile. Instead, think of your bookcase as a wine cellar. You collect books to be read at the right time, the right place, and the right mood.”
― Luc van Donkersgoed

“Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.”
― David Quammen, The Boilerplate Rhino: Nature in the Eye of the Beholder

“Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.”
― Arnold Lobel

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.”
― Oscar Wilde