If We Were Villains Quotes

For someone who loved words as much as I did, it was amazing how often they failed me.

You can justify anything if you do it poetically enough.

But that is how a tragedy like ours or King Lear breaks your heart—by making you believe that the ending might still be happy, until the very last minute.

How tremendous the agony of unmade decisions.

What is more important, that Caesar is assassinated or that he is assassinated by his intimate friends? … That,’ Frederick said, 'is where the tragedy is.

Per aspera ad astra. I’d heard a variety of translations, but the one I liked best was Through the thorns, to the stars.

If we were in a film, the villain would turn out to be the least-expected person. But as we aren’t in a film, I’d go for the character who tried to strangle you.

One thing I'm sure Colborne will never understand is that I need language to live, like food—lexemes and morphemes and morsels of meaning nourish me with the knowledge that, yes, there is a word for this. Someone else has felt it before.

Were you in love with him?' 'Yes,' I say, simply. James and I put each other through the kind of reckless passions Gwendolyn once talked about, joy and anger and desire and despair. After all that, was it really so strange? I am no longer baffled or amazed or embarrassed by it. 'Yes, I was.' It's not the whole truth. The whole truth is, I'm in love with him still.

It’s not the whole truth. The whole truth is, I’m in love with him still.

Actors are by nature volatile—alchemic creatures composed of incendiary elements, emotion and ego and envy. Heat them up, stir them together, and sometimes you get gold. Sometimes disaster.

There is no comfort like complicity.

Which of us could say we were more sinned against than sinning? We were so easily manipulated - confusion made a masterpiece of us.

You were real to me. Sometimes I thought you were the only real thing.

I never asked where he went, worried he wouldn’t ask me to follow.

The things about Shakespeare is, he's so eloquent...he speaks the unspeakable. He turns grief and triumph and rapture and rage into words, into something we can understand. He renders the whole mystery of humanity comprehensible.

Secrets carry weight, like lead.

I don't know, it's like I look at you and suddenly the sonnets makes sense. The good ones, anyway.

For us, everything was a performance.” A small, private smile catches me off guard and I glance down, hoping he won’t see it. “Everything poetic.

James laughed brokenly, and I felt something deep between my lungs crack clean in two.

Do you blame Shakespeare for any of it?” The question is so unlikely, so nonsensical coming from such a sensible man, that I can’t suppress a smile. “I blame him for all of it.

Hatred is the sincerest form of flattery.

When did we become such terrible people?” “Maybe we’ve always been terrible.

The future is wide and wild and full of promise, but it is precarious, too. Seize on every opportunity that comes your way and cling to it, lest it be washed back out to sea.

Imagine having all your own thoughts and feelings tangled up with all the thoughts and feelings of a whole other person. It can be hard, sometimes, to sort out which is which.

One sin, I know, another doth provoke; Murder’s as near to lust as flame to smoke.

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeits of our own behavior) we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the Dragon's tail, and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows I am rough and lecherous. I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.

How could we explain that standing on a stage and speaking someone else's words as if they are your own is less an act of bravery than a desperate lunge at mutual understanding?

We’re only ever playing fifty percent of a character. The rest is us, and we’re afraid to show people who we really are. We’re afraid of looking foolish if we reveal the full force of our emotions.

But in Shakespeare's world, passion is irresistible, not embarrassing.

We're all monsters in the end. At least mine lives in the light.

The real sky was enormous overhead, making our mirrors and twinkling stage lights seem ridiculous- Man’s futile attempt to imitate God

No one is an unjust villain in his own mind. Even - perhaps even especially - those who are the worst of us. Some of the cruelest tyrants in history were motivated by noble ideals, or made choices that they would call 'hard but necessary steps' for the good of their nation. We're all the hero of our own story.

I felt her sigh, and when she breathed her sadness out, I breathed it in.

Make art, make mistakes, and have no regrets.

WE WERE ALL VILLAINS in the beginning.

Anything can feel like punishment if it’s taught poorly.

I seemed doomed to always play supporting roles in someone else’s story. Far too many times I had asked myself whether art was imitating life or if it was the other way around.

So what do you do? Ignore your grief, or indulge it?

Courage, man; the hurt cannot be much.

You can’t quantify humanity. You can’t measure it—not the way you mean to. People are passionate and flawed and fallible. They make mistakes. Their memories fade. Their eyes deceive them.

We had, like seven siblings, spent so much time together that we had seen the best and worst of one another and were unimpressed by either.

But I stayed where I was, afraid to move toward him, afraid I might lose my footing on solid ground, detach from what had anchored me before and drift out into the void of space - a vagabond, wandering moon.

This,” James said, when he had disappeared. “This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeit of our own behavior—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars … as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc’d obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting-on!

When it was his turn to speak I watched him closely, uncertain whether he was acting only, or if he and I were both gnashing secrets between our teeth.

I knew by then the way the story went. Our little drama was rapidly hurtling towards its climactic crisis. What next, when we reached the precipice? First, the reckoning. Then, the fall.

I am all too aware of my own desperate need to find a message in the madness, and as it takes shape I am suspicious, afraid to hope. But the implications of the text and its small part in our story are impossible to ignore, too critical for a scholar as meticulous as James to overlook.

I need language to live, like food—lexemes and morphemes and morsels of meaning nourish me with the knowledge that, yes, there is a word for this. Someone else has felt it before.

At some point, we're all someone's hero and another's villain. It's all a matter of perspective.

Something changed irrevocably, in those few dark minutes James was submerged, as if the lack of oxygen had caused all our molecules to rearrange.

Look for causes, not villains.

The water, too, was still, and I thought, what liars they are, the sky and the water. Still and calm and clear, like everything was fine. It wasn’t fine, and really, it never would be again.

He was too spotless to talk of blood and murder like Macbeth, but in the red glare of the fire he no longer looked so angelic. Instead he was handsome the way you think of the devil as handsome—forbiddingly so.

He'd never been in my house and I was self-conscious, embarrassed by it. I was painfully aware of the fact that we didn't have enough books.

You know, you scare the hell out of me [...] I don't know, it's like, I look at you and suddenly the sonnets make sense.

Nothing unites men like a common enemy.

Are we changing the subject because you're embarrassed that you were an Evil Overlord in Distress?

Nobody is a villain in their own story. We're all the heroes of our own stories.

I’ve hope to live, and am prepared to die.

Through the thorns, to the stars

There were seven of us then, seven bright young things with wide precious futures ahead of us, though we saw no farther than the books in front of our faces.

Was I not always his right-hand man, his lieutenant? Banquo or Benvolio or Oliver - little difference.

Nothing makes sense to him either. His whole world is falling apart, and once he realizes he can’t stop it or fix it or change it, there’s only one thing left to do.” My eyes adjusted slowly, maddeningly. “What’s that?” His shadow shrugged in the gloom. “Absolve yourself. Blame it on fate.

Oliver, I don’t understand,” he said. “Why?” “You know why.” I was done pretending otherwise.

We were always surrounded by books and words and poetry, all the fierce passions of the world bound in leather and vellum. (I blame this in part for what happened.)

human beings have a strong dramatic instinct toward binary thinking, a basic urge to divide things into two distinct groups, with nothing but an empty gap in between. We love to dichotomize. Good versus bad. Heroes versus villains. My country versus the rest. Dividing the world into two distinct sides is simple and intuitive, and also dramatic because it implies conflict, and we do it without thinking, all the time.

When we first walked through those doors, we did so without knowing that we were now part of some strange fanatic religion where anything could be excused so long as it was offered at the altar of the Muses. Ritual madness, ecstasy, human sacrifice.

For all cats have this particularity, each and every one, from the meanest alley sneaker to the proudest, whitest she that ever graced a pontiff's pillow — we have our smiles, as it were, painted on. Those small, cool, quite Mona Lisa smiles that smile we must, no matter whether it's been fun or it's been not. So all cats have a politician's air; we smile and smile and so they think we're villains

Everyone in the room was watching James—how could they not?—but I was the only one who really knew him, every inch.

It's not fair. It's not our fault. We have no say in our own lives. We're living a fairy tale someone else wrote.

From Hamlet. That’s what he reminded me of.” “Oh,” he said. “Not sure I can see him as a sparrow. Too . . . delicate.” “So what sort of bird would he be?” “Dunno. The sort that smacked into a window trying to have a go at its own reflection.

His voice sounded flat, wrong, as if someone had struck a false note on the piano.

What did she want to tell me that was so tremendous it had drawn tears from her, a woman made of marble?

I am wretched. Destitute.

My martyrdom is not the selfless kind. I can't look at Filippa, shamed by all the injuries I've inflicted- like a man with a bomb strapped to his chest, ready to blow himself up without a thought for the collateral damage.

Whatever we did—or, more crucially, did not do—it seemed that so long as we did it together, our individual sins might be abated. There is no comfort like complicity.

Like she’s a shark and you’re an oblivious fur seal.” Me: “Why is that the word everyone’s using to describe me lately?” James: “Who else called you a fur seal?” Me: “Not that. Never mind.

Eli drew his fingers through a ring of water on the table. “I don’t want to be forgotten.” He said it so softly he worried Victor wouldn’t hear, not over the chatter of the bar, but he clamped his hand down on Eli’s shoulder. For a moment he looked so serious, but then he let go and slumped back in his seat. “Tell you what,” said Victor. “You remember me, and I’ll remember you, and that way we won’t be forgotten.” “That’s shit logic, Vic.” “It’s perfect.” “And what happens when we’re dead?” “We won’t die, then.” “You make cheating death sound so simple.” “We do seem awfully good at it,” said Victor cheerfully. He lifted his glass. “To never dying.” Eli lifted his. “To being remembered.” Their glasses clinked as Eli added, “Forever.

Necessity used to be the mother of invention, but then we ran out of things that were necessary. The postmodern mother of invention is desire; we don’t really “need” anything new, so we only create what we want.

We're a team. It's part of our job to help each other out, and to forgive each other quickly. Otherwise, we'd never get anything done.

if you haven’t made any enemies in life, you’ve been living too safely. And that is what I wish to discourage

I have nothing of my own now, not even secrets.

We're all good. We're all bad. The hero in our own stories. The villain in someone else's.

I was seized by the strange unfounded idea that she was debating whether or not to say I love you. But the difference between us was that she assumed people just knew these sorts of things, while I always worried that they didn’t.

We cracked up", I say, but the phrase feels wrong. It was not so simple, or as clean, as a piece of fractured glass. "But we didn't really shatter until we were all back together again.

We're like Romeo and Juliet." "We're both going to die?" he asks in alarm. "Smart Romeo and Juliet." "You're going to kill my cousin?" He seems less alarmed about this. "I take it you don't like your cousin?" "He's a bit of an asshole, if I'm being honest." "I'm glad you've embraced being Juliet.

You’re not a villain,” I said. Or else we were two villains in a pod.

We're all the heroes of our own tales. Even villains.

Why, Sam,” he said, “to hear you somehow makes me as merry as if the story was already written. But you’ve left out one of the chief characters; Samwise the stout hearted. ‘I want to hear more about Sam, dad. Why didn’t they put in more of his talk, dad? That’s what I like, it makes me laugh. And Frodo wouldn’t have got far without Sam, would he, dad?’ ” “Now, Mr. Frodo,” said Sam, “you shouldn’t make fun. I was serious.” “So was I,” said Frodo, “and so I am. We’re going on a bit too fast. You and I, Sam, are still stuck in the worst places of the story, and it is all too likely that some will say at this point ‘Shut the book now, dad; we don’t want to read any more’.” “Maybe,” said Sam, “but I wouldn’t be one to say that. Things done and over and made into part of the great tales are different. Why, even Gollum might be good in a tale, better than he is to have by you, anyway. And he used to like tales himself once, by his own account. I wonder if he thinks he’s the hero or the villain?” “Gollum!” he called. “Would you like to be the hero, now where’s he got to again?

How could we explain that standing on a stage and speaking someone else’s words as if they are your own is less an act of bravery than a desperate lunge at mutual understanding? An attempt to forge that tenuous link between speaker and listener and communicate something, anything, of substance.

Maybe every day we let grief in, we’ll also let a little bit of it out, and eventually we’ll be able to breathe again. At least, that’s how Shakespeare would tell the story. Hamlet says, ‘Absent thee from felicity awhile’. But just awhile. The show’s not over. ‘Now cracks a noble heart. Goodnight’. The rest of us must go on.

We were innocent once. This bloodlust was forced upon us by our parents, turning us from prey to predator. We are the demons lurking in the shadow, We are the savage villains in fairy tales told to children. But not for my child. Not for Hope. In her story, we are the knights in shining armour. Without you by my side, I don't think I can survive my own love for my daughter. I need you. I need you, brother. The monster in me can only be checked by the monster in you. Only together can we defeat our demons and save our family.

She says, "Were you love in him?" "Yes" I say, simply. After all that, was it so strange? I am no longer baffled, or amazed, or embarrassed by it. "Yes I was" It wasn't the whole truth. The whole truth is, I am in love with him still.

My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself,” he said. “Because it is an enemy to thee.” The balcony scene. Too mistrustful to guess at the meaning, I said, “Don’t do that, James, please—right now can we just be ourselves?” He crouched down, lifted the mangled script from the floor. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s easier now to be Romeo, or Macbeth, or Brutus, or Edmund. Someone else.

Can we start with the cat?” I asked, sitting. CATS, Hera typed. PERSEPHONE IS MY INTERN. Persephone looked at me and mewed. “Paid internship, I hope,” I joked. OF COURSE, Hera typed back. WE’RE ANIMALS, NOT MONSTERS. I paused. “Do you actually get paid?” I asked my cat. YES. “How much?” MORE THAN YOU.

But see you, we should travel by night. Dark times for dark business, as they says. No sun to bother Valeriana or you, Kaylana's surely no' disadvantaged, and I know I work better in darkness. Anybody looking for us will have a harder time of it. Besides, marching in daylight is for the heroes. If we're going to do this, we may as well go all out.

People love superheroes.  It's true we're  impressed by their bravery and fortitude, their supernatural gifts and physical brawn.  But the fact is, villains possess these same qualities.  So why our admiration for the hero and not the nemesis?  Because of virtue.   A superhero gives everything to defend what's good and right without seeking praise or reward.  Think about it.  All the great heroes give without taking, help without grumbling, sacrifice without asking recompense.  A superhero's real strength, what we absolutely fall in love with, is his finer virtue.

I came to Oxford looking for a Once-in-a-Lifetime Experience. I chose to experience a lifetime. I know that one day he will lose to the waterfall, slip behind its turbulent curtain forever, lost to me like something out of a fairy tale. But in our story, there's no villain, no witch, no fairy godmother, no moral imperative or cautionary conclusion. No happily-ever-after. It just is. It's life. The water keeps flowing as we come and go. We were never forever, Jamie and I. Nothing is in this life. But if you love someone and are loved by someone, you might find forever after. Whatever and wherever it is.

I learned a lot, when I was a child, from novels and stories, even fairytales have some point to them--the good ones. The thing that impressed me most forcibly was this: the villains went to work with their brains and always accomplished something. To be sure they were "foiled" in the end, but that was by some special interposition of Providence, not by any equal exertion of intellect on the part of the good people. The heroes and middle ones were mostly very stupid. If bad things happened, they practised patience, endurance, resignation, and similar virtues; if good things happened they practised modesty and magnanimity and virtues like that, but it never seemed to occur to any of them to make things move their way. Whatever the villains planned for them to do, they did, like sheep. The same old combinations of circumstances would be worked off on them in book after book--and they always tumbled. It used to worry me as a discord worries a musician. Hadn't they ever read anything? Couldn't they learn anything from what they read--ever? It appeared not. And it seemed to me, even as a very little child, that what we wanted was good people with brains, not just negative, passive, good people, but positive, active ones, who gave their minds to it. "A good villain. That's what we need!" I said to myself. "Why don't they write about them? Aren't there ever any?" I never found any in all my beloved story books, or in real life. And gradually, I made up my mind to be one.

If you have read this far in the chronicle of the Baudelaire orphans - and I certainly hope you have not - then you know we have reached the thirteenth chapter of the thirteenth volume in this sad history, and so you know the end is near, even though this chapter is so lengthy that you might never reach the end of it. But perhaps you do not yet know what the end really means. "The end" is a phrase which refers to the completion of a story, or the final moment of some accomplishment, such as a secret errand, or a great deal of research, and indeed this thirteenth volume marks the completion of my investigation into the Baudelaire case, which required much research, a great many secret errands, and the accomplishments of a number of my comrades, from a trolley driver to a botanical hybridization expert, with many, many typewriter repairpeople in between. But it cannot be said that The End contains the end of the Baudelaires' story, any more than The Bad Beginning contained its beginning. The children's story began long before that terrible day on Briny Beach, but there would have to be another volume to chronicle when the Baudelaires were born, and when their parents married, and who was playing the violin in the candlelit restaurant when the Baudelaire parents first laid eyes on one another, and what was hidden inside that violin, and the childhood of the man who orphaned the girl who put it there, and even then it could not be said that the Baudelaires' story had not begun, because you would still need to know about a certain tea party held in a penthouse suite, and the baker who made the scones served at the tea party, and the baker's assistant who smuggled the secret ingredient into the scone batter through a very narrow drainpipe, and how a crafty volunteer created the illusion of a fire in the kitchen simply by wearing a certain dress and jumping around, and even then the beginning of the story would be as far away as the shipwreck that leftthe Baudelaire parents as castaways on the coastal shelf is far away from the outrigger on which the islanders would depart. One could say, in fact, that no story really has a beginning, and that no story really has an end, as all of the world's stories are as jumbled as the items in the arboretum, with their details and secrets all heaped together so that the whole story, from beginning to end, depends on how you look at it. We might even say that the world is always in medias res - a Latin phrase which means "in the midst of things" or "in the middle of a narrative" - and that it is impossible to solve any mystery, or find the root of any trouble, and so The End is really the middle of the story, as many people in this history will live long past the close of Chapter Thirteen, or even the beginning of the story, as a new child arrives in the world at the chapter's close. But one cannot sit in the midst of things forever. Eventually one must face that the end is near, and the end of The End is quite near indeed, so if I were you I would not read the end of The End, as it contains the end of a notorious villain but also the end of a brave and noble sibling, and the end of the colonists' stay on the island, as they sail off the end of the coastal shelf. The end of The End contains all these ends, and that does not depend on how you look at it, so it might be best for you to stop looking at The End before the end of The End arrives, and to stop reading The End before you read the end, as the stories that end in The End that began in The Bad Beginning are beginning to end now.