Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All Quotes

“According to my mother, no book is only a book. A book can improve your mind or it can break it.”
― Laura Ruby, Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All

“There's always a fire.”
― Laura Ruby, Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All

“Every little decision you made, every person you met could change your life, set it on a different course, or end it.”
― Laura Ruby, Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All

“Nothing is funny about war. But one must find reasons to laugh anyways, especially when nothing is funny. Sometimes joy is the only defense you have, and your only weapon. Remember that" -Sister Bert”
― Laura Ruby, Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All

“One more thing: be happy, Frankie, as happy as you can. And if you can't be happy, just live as much as you can. Be like Francie in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, be something every minute of every day, be sad, be cold, be warm, be hungry, be full, be ragged or well dressed, be truthful, be a liar and a sinner, only be something every blessed minute. Make art, make the most beautiful art you can, drawn everything you see, everything you feel. And when you sleep, dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is lost" -Loretta”
― Laura Ruby, Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All

“Hell is never what you think it's going to be" -Guardian”
― Laura Ruby, Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All

“Frankie didn't know that the boys opened every letter, any letter, as if it were a dispatch from another world, a kinder one, a pleasant dream they'd once had when they were young.
She didn't know they weren't young any more.”
― Laura Ruby, Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All

“I'm not going to ask for your forgiveness, because you only ask for that if you think you're doing something wrong. I don't care what anyone says, this isn't wrong" -Loretta”
― Laura Ruby, Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All

“Once I'd confessed to my own mother that I thought God was a woman, because who but a woman would care so much about the oceans and the plants and the animals, who but a woman could build a whole world in seven days? " -Guardian”
― Laura Ruby, Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All

“Most of the time, she didn't think about them at all. Yet she had her quiet days, her pensive ones, those days when she dug through her memories, trying to find the truth at the bottom of them. As if the truth were a jewel you could unearth and hold in your hand, as if the truth wasn't more like something you'd find under a rock, gray and faceless and squirming away from the light.”
― Laura Ruby, Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All

“When Charles Kent started coming to call on me, too rich and too important for war—even a Great one—my father had my mother order a dozen new dresses for me, and three painrs of handmade leather shoes. I needed to play my part, too—the beautiful, dutiful daughter, soon to be a richer man’s wide. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t yet eighteen. I didn’t matter.

Once upon a time, a banker and a banker arranged a merger, traded a girl for a stake in a corporation, agreed over a handshake and a scotch. And on a chilly afternoon, while my parents were out, Charles Kent tore one of those lovely new gowns off my back because I didn’t want to play. He laughed as I shivered in the sudden cold, he laughed as I gathered myself by the fire.

He stopped laughing when I hit him with the poker. He cried when I hit him again.

War is hell.”
― Laura Ruby, Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All

“Girls were punished so hard for their love, so hard, hard enough to break them.”
― Laura Ruby, Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All

“Frankie had no idea that too many people believed you could be from a right place or a wrong one.”
― Laura Ruby, Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All

“be something every minute of every day, be sad, be cold, be warm, be hungry, be full, be ragged or well dressed, be truthful, be a liar and a sinner, only be something every blessed minute. Make art, make the most beautiful art you can, draw everything you see, everything you feel. And when you sleep, dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is lost.”
― Laura Ruby, Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All

“But one must find reasons to laugh anyway, especially when nothing is funny. Sometimes joy is the only defense you have, and your only weapon. Remember that.”
― Laura Ruby, Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All

“I'd gotten lucky too, if that was the word for it. if I hadn't been watching Frankie at the orphanage, if I hadn't followed her for so long, maybe I would never have met Marguerite, maybe I never would have remembered myself, come back to myself, rewritten my own story. The door to heaven didn't open up for me, but not everyone was that kind of angel" -Pearl”
― Laura Ruby, Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All

“I know you didn't have much time with Sam. And it isn't fair. But that doesn't mean it was any less real. That's something to hold on to, so hold on to it" -Loretta”
― Laura Ruby, Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All

“Hell didn't burn. And the only devils to be found were the ones you find on earth, and there were too many of those, and they looked like everybody else.

Hell, though. Hell was empty. Hell was nowhere. A dead silent plain of echoes and dust and empty arms rocking. Of dead boys shot down over vast, cold oceans. Where people didn't even care enough about you to hate you. Where the people who'd promised to love you forgot your name.

Hell was cold. The coldest place in the universe.”
― Laura Ruby, Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All

“Hell didn't burn. And the only devils to be found were the ones you find on earth, and there were too many of those, and they looked like everybody else.”
― Laura Ruby, Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All

“That was his problem, you see, staying in love. When you fall in love as quickly as Gaspare did, when you can be swayed by the merest hint of feeling, the merest hitch in the blood, you can fall out of love just as fast - with places, with jobs, with women.”
― Laura Ruby, Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All

“That if she could choose, Sister Bert would dive into one of those books and never come back out again.”
― Laura Ruby, Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All

“Frankie sat there, oblivious to them all, the pastel warm between her fingers, thinking about the fact that Sam knew her name, thinking about the way his lower lip curled under his teeth to pronounce it, thinking about his lips and teeth and hair and bones and all the other truths of a body that seem so mundane when that body is yours, and so fascinating when that body belongs to someone else.”
― Laura Ruby, Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All

“No one is ever ready for something like this. You don't do it because you're ready. You do it because you're weary. And I am weary. I have been weary for too long.”
― Laura Ruby, Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All

“Frankie wouldn't always let herself remember these things. Most of the time, she didn't think about them at all. Yet she had her quiet days, her pensive ones, those days when she dug through her memories, trying to find the truth at the bottom of them. As if the truth were a jewel yo could unearth and hold i your hand, as if the truth wasn't more like something you'd find under a rock, gray and faceless and squirming away from the light.”
― Laura Ruby, Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All

“Frankie put her hand to her middle again. I remembered doing that, remembered when the feelings were so strong they turned your insides to a frothing stew" -Guardian”
― Laura Ruby, Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All

“She flew higher and higher into the plush and generous darkness, the long forgiving night, until she slipped through a star, a doorway, and heaven welcomed her in.”
― Laura Ruby, Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All