ŷ������

“Please tell a story about a girl who gets away.��
I would, even if I had to adapt one, even if I had to make one up just for her. “Gets away from what, though?��
“From her fairy godmother. From the happy ending that isn’t really happy at all. Please have her get out and run off the page altogether, to somewhere secret where words like ‘happy�� and ‘good�� will never find her.��
“You don’t want her to be happy and good?��
“I’m not sure what’s really meant by happy and good. I would like her to be free. Now. Please begin.”
― Helen Oyeyemi, White Is for Witching

“Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.”
― Virginia Woolf

“Indeed, four men like them, four men devoted to each other from their money to their lives, four men always supporting each other, never retreating, performing singly or together the resolutions they had made in common; four arms threatening the four points of the compass or all turning to a single point, must inevitably, be it surreptitiously, be it openly, be it by mines, by entrenchments, by guile, or by force, open a way to the end they wanted to reach, however well defended or far off it might be.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers

“It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are still alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger for them.”
― George Eliot

“I will never leave him. It will be this, always, for as long as he will let me.
If I had had words to speak such a thing, I would have. But there were none that seemed big enough for it, to hold that swelling truth.
As if he had heard me, he reached for my hand. I did not need to look; his fingers were etched into my memory, slender and petal-veined, strong and quick and never wrong.
“Patroclus,�� he said. He was always better with words than I.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“When you're twenty-one, life is a roadmap. It's only when you get to be twenty-five or so that you begin to suspect that you've been looking at the map upside down, and not until you're forty are you entirely sure. By the time you're sixty, take it from me, you're fucking lost.”
― Stephen King, Joyland

“Being the only female in what was basically a boys�� club must have been difficult for her. Miraculously, she didn’t compensate by becoming hard or quarrelsome. She was still a girl, a slight lovely girl who lay in bed and ate chocolates, a girl whose hair smelled like hyacinth and whose scarves fluttered jauntily in the breeze. But strange and marvelous as she was, a wisp of silk in a forest of black wool, she was not the fragile creature one would have her seem.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“She imagines him imagining her. This is her salvation.
In spirit she walks the city, traces its labyrinths, its dingy mazes: each assignation, each rendezvous, each door and stair and bed. What he said, what she said, what they did, what they did then. Even the times they argued, fought, parted, agonized, rejoined. How they’d loved to cut themselves on each other, taste their own blood. We were ruinous together, she thinks. But how else can we live, these days, except in the midst of ruin?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“Every so often, a lightning flash would reveal us to each other, and the expression on his face - so rapt, so helpless, so utterly mine - was the most beautiful thing I ever expected to see in my life.”
― April Lindner, Jane

“I would think for hours how strange it was that some parts of words are silent, just like some parts of our lives. Did the people who wrote the dictionaries decide to mirror language to our lives, or did it just happen that way?”
― Rene Denfeld, The Enchanted

“A marriage is a private thing. It has its own wild laws, and secret histories, and savage acts, and what passes between married people is incomprehensible to outsiders. We look terrible to you, and severe, and you see our blood flying, but what we carry between us is hard-won, and we made it just as we wished it to be, just the color, just the shape.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“I want to kiss you,�� Nikolai said. “But I won’t. Not until you’re thinking of me instead of trying to forget him.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Siege and Storm

“Love is so easily bruised by the necessity of making choices.”
― Susan Vreeland, The Passion of Artemisia

“Still, the longer I was around her, the more I could see the colors of her mind and the recesses of her heart. There was a beast in there. But there was also a girl who was afraid of being a beast, and who wondered if other people had beasts in their hearts too. There was strength, and there was also just the determination to look strong. She guarded herself like a secret.”
― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily

“I often feel as if I’m moving about as a double in my own skin, a Doppelganger walking a divergent path of my life’s choices.”
― Lindsay Smith

“Sin ought to be something exquisite, my dear boy.”
― Emile Zola

“It was Hell, if hell is where the life we love cannot exist.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles

“You can do better than that." He loops his arms around my waist and pulls me to him.

"Where are your gloves?"

"Better than that too." He drops a kiss on my collarbone. "Good to see you, Cass. I dreamed about you, Cass...Feel free to improvise."

"Aren't you supposed to be wearing those work gloves? When you're working? Because otherwise your poor hands won't..."

Gah. I sound like Mom, or the school nurse.

I'm no good at this.

Luckily, Cass is good enough for both of us. "I missed you, Gwen. It's good to see you, Gwen. I dreamed about you, Gwen. Yeah, haven't gotten around to the gloves. More important things to focus on. Want me to tell you what they are?”
― Huntley Fitzpatrick, What I Thought Was True

“She was a lovely lady, with a romantic mind and such a sweet mocking mouth. Her romantic mind was like the tiny boxes, one within the other, that come from the puzzling East, however many you discover there is always one more; and her sweet mocking mouth had one kiss on it that Wendy could never get, though there it was, perfectly conspicuous in the right-hand corner.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“Don Quixote took windmills for giants and sheep for armies; d'Artagnan took every smile for an insult and every glance for a provocation. As a result of which he kept his fist clenched from Tarbes to Meung, and all in all brought his hand to the pommel of his sword ten times a day; however the fist never landed on any jaw, and the sword never left its scabbard. Not that the sight of the wretched yellow nag did not spread many smiles across the faces of passersby; but since above the nag clanked a sword of respectable size, and above this sword shone an eye more fierce than proud, the passersby restrained their hilarity, or, if hilarity won out over prudence, they tried at least to laugh on one side only, like antique masques. D'Artagnan thus remained majestic and intact in his susceptibility until that unfortunate town of Meung.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers

“Treville understood admirably well the warfare of that period, when, if you did not live at the enemy's expense, you lived at the expense of your compatriots: his soldiers formed a legion of daredevils, undisciplined for anyone else but him.”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers

“It is almost impossible for a parent to hold a secret from a child. Children, without the skills of language, spend years developing instead an intuition. By the time they are fifteen, as I was, they are masters of a kind of clairvoyance that tells them, He is depressed, He is frightened, He is pleased.”
― Cynthia Rylant, I Had Seen Castles

“These rough sketches, which are born in an instant in the heat of inspiration, express the idea of their author in a few strokes, while on the other hand too much effort and diligence sometimes saps the vitality and powers of those who never know when to leave off.”
― Giorgio Vasari

“A young woman across the dock pulled her winter coat tightly around herself and ducked her chin down as the crowd of sailors passed. Her shoulders might have shaken, just a little, but she kept to her path without letting the men's boisterous laughter keep her from her course. In her I saw myself, a fellow lost girl, headstrong and headed anywhere but home.”
― William Ritter, Jackaby

“We don't need to have just one favorite. We keep adding favorites. Our favorite book is always the book that speaks most directly to us at a particular stage in our lives. And our lives change. We have other favorites that give us what we most need at that particular time. But we never lose the old favorites. They're always with us. We just sort of accumulate them.”
― Lloyd Alexander

“Italics provide a wonderful advantage: you see, right away, that the words are in a rush. When something exists at a slant, you can't help but consider irony.”
― Ann Beattie, Walks With Men

“Wolves, and stars, and snow: Those things made sense.”
― Katherine Rundell, The Wolf Wilder

“Stories are compasses and architecture, we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice.”
― Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

“The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story; it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.”
― Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

“One summer morning at sunrise a long time ago
I met a little girl with a book under her arm.
I asked her why she was out so early and
she answered that there were too many books and
far too little time. And there she was absolutely right.”
― Tove Jansson