Emily > Emily's Quotes

“What she had realized was that love was that moment when your heart was about to burst.”
― Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

“But she wished she had had the guts to go up to him and say hello. Or possibly break his legs, she wasn't sure which.”
― Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played with Fire

“I wanted to tell the book thief many things, about beauty and brutality. But what could I tell her about those things that she didn't already know? I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race-that rarely do I ever simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“I see that you are working this vampire angle with some success. And kudos. Lots of girls love that sensitive-undead thing. But I'd drop the whole musician angle if I were you. Vampire rock stars are played out, and besides, you can't possible be very good.”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Glass

“You couldnt erase everything that caused you pain with recollection.Every memory was valuable; even the bad ones”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Glass

“Misfortune is no excuse for cruelty.”
― Ned Vizzini, The Other Normals

“Sometimes it feels good to take the long way home.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“Watching people is a good hobby, but you have to be careful about it. You can’t let people catch you staring at them. If people catch you, they treat you like a first-class criminal. And maybe they’re right to do that. Maybe it should be a crime to try to see things about people they don’t want you to see.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“You can build a whole world around the tiniest of touches.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“I like the word clandestine. It feels medieval. Sometimes I think of words as being alive. If clandestine were alive, it would be a pale little girl with hair the color of fall leaves and a dress as white as the moon.”
― Carol Rifka Brunt, Tell the Wolves I'm Home

“Sometimes, she said, mostly to herself, I feel I do not know my children...

It was a fleeting statement, one I didn't think she'd hold on to; after all, she had birthed us alone, diapered and fed us, helped us with homework, kissed and hugged us, poured her love into us. That she might not actually know us seemed the humblest thing a mother could admit.”
― Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

“I often think we should have tattooed on the back of whatever hand we use to shoot or write, 'I might be wrong.”
― Louise Penny, A Fatal Grace

“I had learned early to assume something dark and lethal hidden at the heart of anything I loved. When I couldn't find it, I responded, bewildered and wary, in the only way I knew how: by planting it there myself.”
― Tana French, In the Woods

“I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect.”
― Tana French, In the Woods

“We think about mortality so little, these days, except to flail hysterically at it with trendy forms of exercise and high-fiber cereals and nicotine patches.”
― Tana French, In the Woods

“Now death is uncool, old-fashioned. To my mind the defining characteristic of our era is spin, everything tailored to vanishing point by market research, brands and bands manufactured to precise specifications; we are so used to things transmuting into whatever we would like them to be that it comes as a profound outrage to encounter death, stubbornly unspinnable, only and immutably itself.”
― Tana French, In the Woods

“Self-immolation's a nice gesture, but it doesn't usually achieve very much.”
― Tana French, In the Woods

“I had, of course, sworn never to let the place cross my mind again; but human beings can't help being curious, I suppose, as long as the knowledge doesn't come at too high a price.”
― Tana French, In the Woods

“Loss was like that, Gamache knew. You didn't just lose a loved one. You lost your heart, your memories, your laughter, your brain and it even took your bones. Eventually it all came back, but different. Rearranged”
― Louise Penny

“I wanted to tell her that being loved is a talent too, that it takes as much guts and as much work as loving; that some people, for whatever reason, never learn the knack”
― Tana French, The Likeness

“When you're too close to people, when you spend too much time with them and love them too dearly, sometimes you can't see them”
― Tana French, The Likeness

“Being easily freaked out comes with its own special skill set: you develop subtle tricks to work around it, make sure people don't notice. Pretty soon, if you're a fast learner, you can get through the day looking almost exactly like a normal human being.”
― Tana French, The Likeness

“Some people are little Chernobyls, shimmering with silent, spreading poison: get anywhere near them and every breath you take will wreck you from the inside out.”
― Tana French, The Likeness

“Have you noticed how easily the very young die? They make the best martyrs for any cause, the best soldiers, the best suicides. It's because they're held here so lightly: they haven't yet accumulated loves and responsibilities and commitments and all the things that tie us securely to this world. They can let go of it as easily and simply as lifting a finger. But as you get older, you begin to find things that are worth holding onto, forever.”
― Tana French, The Likeness

“Now that's a concept that's always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world - we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us. But clearly these people have a far more tightly circumscribed definition of reality, one that I find deeply mysterious, and an almost pathologically intense need to bring others into line with that definition.”
― Tana French, The Likeness

“That kind of friendship doesn't just materialize at the end of the rainbow one morning in a soft-focus Hollywood haze. For it to last this long, and at such close quarters, some serious work had gone into it. Ask any ice-skater or ballet dancer or show jumper, anyone who lives by beautiful moving things: nothing takes as much work as effortlessness.”
― Tana French, The Likeness

“Do you see now why I believe in miracles? I used to imagine time folding over, the shades of our future selves slipping back to the crucial moments to tap each of us on the shoulder and whisper: Look, there, look! That man, that woman: they're for you; that's your life, your future, fidgeting in the line, dripping on the carpet, shuffling in that doorway. Don't miss it.”
― Tana French, The Likeness

“The only thing money really buys?...Space. A bigger house, a bigger car, a larger hotel room. First-class plane tickets. But it doesn't even buy comfort. No one complains more than the rich and entitled. Comfort, security, ease. None of them come with money.”
― Louise Penny, A Rule Against Murder

“Her tragedy was that she always found men to save her. She never had to save herself. She never knew she could.”
― Louise Penny, A Rule Against Murder

“Not everything needed to be brought into the light, he knew. Not every truth needed to be told.”
― Louise Penny, A Rule Against Murder