As Old as Time Quotes

“You had a magic mirror that let you see life outside your tiny world. Your castle. I had books. Reading them is like traveling to other places. Being other people. Living other lives. It made life far less...lonely.”
― Liz Braswell, As Old as Time

“She wished, just once, someone would show an interest in the same things she did”
― Liz Braswell, As Old as Time

“I had books. Reading them is like travelling to other places. Being other people. Living other lives.”
― Liz Braswell, As Old as Time

“...and you cannot blame an entire group for the actions of one.”
― Liz Braswell, As Old as Time

“Rooms of books.
When other children dreamed of mansions with fountains and big silky beds and servants to do their bidding, this was what Belle dreamed about. The money to buy all the books she ever wanted from all over the world- and a place to keep them.”
― Liz Braswell, As Old as Time

“Books can tell you almost everything that mankind knows. Or imagines.”
― Liz Braswell, As Old as Time

“Magic comes back to you, just as the actions of people do.”
― Liz Braswell, As Old as Time

“Life is a strange mixture of all of these genres, she mused, and it doesn’t have nearly as neat and happy an ending as you often get in books.”
― Liz Braswell, As Old as Time

“Every age has its darkness.”
― Liz Braswell, As Old as Time

“Everyone should have a journey—and everyone should also have a home, too. Go out into the world for adventure, come home for love.”
― Liz Braswell, As Old as Time

“In adventure books there weren't awkward pauses or embarrassing social scenes. In morality plays and farces there were rarely serious discussions of racial tension, mob mentality, pogroms, or plague. In scientific books there were no dinnertime revelations of a terrible matter.
'Life is a strange mixture of all of these genres,' she mused, 'and it doesn't have nearly as neat and happy an ending as you often get in books.”
― Liz Braswell, As Old as Time

“Trying to steel her nerves, she walked forward more forcefully, as if this were her choice. As if she were just going to seek out a mystery she forgot. Not a scared, lonely girl in her nightgown with a candle, like some daft heroine from one of the lighter romance books she read. This thought, too, gave her courage; she was Belle, not an idiot.”
― Liz Braswell, As Old as Time

“You can't have adventures without risk. You can't have great things if you constantly fear loss.”
― Liz Braswell, As Old as Time

“Whether you're Huguenot or Catholic or Jewish or gypsy or short or have dark skin- or blue skin. Everyone is different. Each person has his or her own soul and is master of his or her own destiny.”
― Liz Braswell, As Old as Time

“Don't judge a book by its cover.”
― Liz Braswell, As Old as Time

“Go out into the world for adventure, come home for love.”
― Liz Braswell, As Old as Time

“Amor does not vincit omnia, you ignorant man... when the woman doesn't amat you back!”
― Liz Braswell, As Old as Time

“Cooking. Reading. Is there anything you can't do?"
Belle grabbed his big paw and shoved it into the water as well. "Oh yes, I'm a veritable domestic demigoddess," she said archly. "You should see me turn invisible and walk on water.”
― Liz Braswell, As Old as Time

“It wasn't enough to catch a glimpse of these lands and ideas through the small window of the pages she turned. She wanted to step through and feel the yellow waters of the Yangtze herself, to hear the celestial music of foreign pipes, to taste the foods described by adventurers who traveled purposefully into the areas on maps labeled 'Here be tygres.”
― Liz Braswell, As Old as Time

“They’re delightful,” Belle said, sighing. “I wish I had a dozen of them at home.” “Children?” the Beast said, eyes wide and eyebrows high. "Talking teacups.”
― Liz Braswell, As Old as Time

“Forget your magic mirror," she decided to say. "If I lived here, I would spend my whole life in here, reading."
"They're just... books...."
He carefully lit the candelabra at the front and placed Lumière on the floor, dismissing him.
"Just books? That's like saying Alexandria is just a library." She ran over to the closest shelf and tilted her head, reading the titles. "You don't understand. I don't understand how you don't understand. Look- here's an ancient text in Greek about astronomy... and next to it is everything Galileo Galilei ever wrote!! This whole section is about the stars and planets and the entire universe!"
The Beast stood, looking slightly embarrassed, scratching the back of his neck with his hand.
Belle grabbed a book and ran over to him, shoving it in his face. "Up until this man, Copernicus, everyone thought the entire universe rotated around the earth- that we were the center of it all." She flipped open to a page that had an engraving of planets and their paths, little callouts to their names and the length of their orbits. "Thanks to men like him and Tycho Brahe and Kepler, we now know nothing revolves around the earth- except the moon.”
― Liz Braswell, As Old as Time

“Belle, go. If I was your age, I wouldn't have hesitated for a moment. You will always come back here, and I will always be here. And we will have those talks we need. Everyone should have a journey - and everyone should also have a home, too. Go out into the world for adventure, come home for love.”
― Liz Braswell, As Old as Time

“Would her mother have taken her into the rose garden and taught her all of the names, would she have plucked a blossom and placed it in her daughter's hair? Would she have made rose hip tea for her daughter?
Would she have made raspberry leaf tea for Belle when she first began to have her monthly blood? 'So that thirteen-year-old me wouldn't have had to research the possible balms and soothing medicines for it by myself?”
― Liz Braswell, As Old as Time

“How could Belle, a lonely little bookworm of a country girl, ever come from someone so great that she meted out curses and blessings like candy and then took over an entire castle with her presence?”
― Liz Braswell, As Old as Time

“Maybe... maybe the little accessories were right. Maybe he just didn't know how to ask nicely.
No.
Belle shook her head. She had read about this. The victims of kidnapping often wound up sympathizing with the perpetrator. It was a sickness, a very scientifically predictable one.
This was the eighteenth century. The age of reason. And a man-beast had thrown her father into prison for simply trespassing. This wasn't just about a failure to be polite. This was about breaking the laws of France. Even if the little magical castle was hidden far from the worlds of Paris and Versailles.
But...”
― Liz Braswell, As Old as Time

“Belle's mind populated the castle with royalty from all the eras she could imagine:
Recent ones with great powdered wigs and hats in the shapes of fanciful things like ships, great skirts that billowed out, ugly garish makeup on the faces of those who gossiped behind embroidered silk fans.
Renaissance rulers with thick curled collars and poison rings, intellect and conspiracy at every dinner.
Ancient kings and queens in long, heavy dresses and cloaks, wise looks on their faces and solid gold crowns on their heads, innocents in a world they believed to possess unicorns and dragons, and maps whose seas ran off at the edges, beyond where the tygres were.
Of course, maybe around here there were dragons and unicorns. Who knew? They had talking teacups.”
― Liz Braswell, As Old as Time

“Belle, girl, you can't find real adventures that way. You have to go out into the world... you have to meet people..."
"You don't," she protested.
"I did when I was younger," he said gently. "That's how I met your mother. True love doesn't just fall into your lap. You have to go out and find your other half."
"But your... my... she fell out of your lap. She just kept going.”
― Liz Braswell, As Old as Time

“He shouldn't have trespassed!"
The voice sounded petulant. Not diabolical.
It gave Belle hope, how human it seemed. In all of her fairy tales and adventure books- the ones with the heroes who were clever rather than strong- this was how you outwitted an opponent. By finding a chink in his armor, a personality flaw to exploit. Then you got him to show off his power by turning into a tiny (and easily stompable) mouse, or slitting open his own stomach.
All she needed was a flaw, and time.”
― Liz Braswell, As Old as Time

“Giggling and making little tinkling noises on the floor, the teacups scurried over to the marble-topped occasional table. There was a pretty woven and quilted hot pad on it, which they carefully arranged themselves on like a pile of puppies bedding down for the night.”
― Liz Braswell, As Old as Time

“Almost everything was fluttering and shuffling: the china was indeed waking from whatever slumber it enjoyed; dishes were very carefully shuddering themselves to life; teacups were bouncing and trying to get out of their glass cabinet prison. The stove, which seemed so cheerful and warm and fiery at the end of the room, now began to yawn and stretch its great black iron arms and exhaust pipe.”
― Liz Braswell, As Old as Time