Kate Milford Quotes

Nobody said it had to be a story with an ending all neatly tied up like some ridiculous fairy tale. This story's true, and true stories don't have endings, because things just keep going.

Everybody feels better when there's cake

Places, like people, are complex, and loving them isn't simple.

Always check for traps, left is always right unless there's a middle, always put your healer in the best armor and wear your magic rings on your toes instead of your fingers...What else?...Always have rope.

... The thing about attics and basements was, everything in there had once been a treasure to someone.

Troube comes when a person starts asking for money; it never does what they think it will do. And then there's the problem of destiny. Things never turn out well when you try to outwit destiny. Only fools do that.

It is not merely our adversaries we must investigate...We must always work to know ourselves better, too.

Every city, every town, hides beneath a certain amount of glamour that- either intentionally or not- can misdirect the eye or hide something worth finding. Learning to see through those glamours is part of the process of calling any place home.

Even places you know well can take on a touch of the unknown when you arrive there from a different direction.

When there's evil standing in your way, you got to get around it however you can, Natalie. You got to look it in the eye, let it know you see it and that it can't creep up on you. What's dangerous is pretending it isn't there at all and letting it get closer and closer while you're looking someplace else, until suddenly evil's walking alongside you like you were two friends out for a stroll on Sunday. So you look it in the face. You tell it with your eyes that you know what it is, that it don't have you fooled. You tell it you know what GOOD looks like.

Most things cost something you can give up, but they aren’t worth anything – not really, not in the end. But some things . . . some have to be given free, because if you had to put a price on them, their true value would be too great for any one person to afford.

any book in the world - if there was only one way to read and understand it, what would be the point of reading that book?

The beauty of fantasy is that it allows the protagonist to pass through fear to come to know this different reality and to find a place in it.

Well . . . well, yes, I suppose it’s very old. Perhaps someone just assumed that since it was an antique, it must be worth something.

But if home suddenly becomes not like home, what then?

She was thirteen, the daughter of a bicycle mechanic, and she couldn't ride this bicycle. It fought her; it threw her; it hated her.

A crossroads can be something special, a compass with arms reaching to places you might never find the way to again; places that might exist, or might have existed once, or might exist someday, depending on whether or not you decide to look for them.

The world is not simple. The world is not one place. It's the sum of an impossible number of incomprehensible things, and if you start out on any road in the world and follow it for any distance at all, sooner or later you enter into a strange country.

Everyone know—or at least, was probably told as a child—that you can make a wish on a shooting star. Not everyone knows that the only way to be sure it will come ture is to speak it aloud before the star disappears, and this is a nearly imposssible fet to manage.

Never overlook folklore if you want to really know about the place it came from.

But Milo had a shiny gold present to open, and presents trumped sad trees any day of the week.

And this is the world you saved. Did you expect it to be different, suddenly? Did you expect it to be grateful?

I always assume people are hiding parts of themselves from each other. People do that.

You have to look at a thing long enough for it to really show itself to you...

Cities have the capability to at any moment shift out of the familiar, even if you've lived in one all your life.

Found it,” Mr. Pine said, waving a plastic bottle of colorless liquid and a box of matches. “It was on the liquor shelf, ’cause that’s both logical and safe. Your mother, sometimes . . .

In a city, with all of its enclaves and boundaries, both real and imagined, it is impossible not to feel the presence of those who are not like you and impossible not to feel like an outsider.

In a tabletop game? Chance and probability. The higher your ability score, the better your chances. You roll a die to see if you succeed. For you, here and now?” She grinned. “Believe you can do it and try hard.

I've never understood all this stock people put into destiny anyhow. Only fools rely on destiny. ... Plus, if destiny exists, it doesn't seem it would be very functional if you could thwart it with a single wish.

This house had survived for many, many years. It had copper pipes that reached down into the earth like roots, its woodwork had taught its stonework how to breathe in exchange for lessons in strength, and the ironwork that chased the eaves and climbed the walls and curled along the windows danced in the sunset.

It is the magic of that-which-remains, of that-which-is-alone. It is, in many ways, the magic of desperation, but it is never the magic of chance. When one remains, it is the one that was meant to remain. It is the one that is special; it is precious because it is unique; it is powerful because that is how it survived. There is one bone in a cat that may call me, but it must be separated from the others to do its work. It has potential when it is connected to the rest, but when it is sundered away, its potential becomes power.

But when things were passed to you, you were supposed to pass them on to someone else eventually too.

Plus, the thing about attics and basements was, everything in there had once been a treasure to someone. Otherwise there'd have been no reason to keep it.

There is a right way to do things and a wrong way, if you're going to run a hotel in a smugglers' town.

An entire notebook in code?” He dropped it on the bed and stared at Sirin. “What on earth is going on with all these people?

I think,” Mr. Hakelbarend said, taking a sip, “that the point of a story of the miraculous is to convey a truth, not necessarily to be true.

yeah,” Sirin whispered. “Two stories with eye sockets.

There are more hidden spaces in a city, more hidden lives and hidden emptinesses, and more darkened windows where shadow people pass fleetingly in and out of sight.

There was a city that could not be mapped, and inside it a house that could not be drawn.

There is the world you know, the world you have always known; and then you blink, and there is a place you never had any inkling of, and it spreads out across your eyescape. And then, most shockingly of all: there is the realization that these two places are one and the same. It turns out you never really knew the world around you at all. This is often the moment at which adventure begins.

The Wayfaring Galleria emblazoned on its side. Across the top of the picture was the title: The Odd Trails: Scavengers, Peddlers, and Huntsmen of the Roaming World (Advanced Player’s Handbook). “Cool!

...But if you want to be a good mayor—there seem to be so very few of them—that must be the sort of thing you have to be destined for. And a wish that goes against your destiny...that's always a bad idea.. Only a fool scoffs at destiny.' "'I think only a fool relies on it,' Julian grumbled. 'How can destiny decide what I'm going to be before I do?

In situations when you need the parts of you that trace their lineage to the monks of the air, the ecstatic in you will still be present, keeping you from flying as effortlessly as a monk who does not carry a sun. And at times when you need that sun to burn its brightest, the part of you that is a monk will shiver its wings. Perhaps your greatest challenge will be finding a way to be at peace with yourself. As your mother, I could wish you did not have to face that trial. But I would not have you face the agony of denying who you are, either.

Sirin pointed to the hat. “Helm of Revelations,” she said, deadpan. “Eyes of True and Aching Clarity,” she added, indicating the glasses. “Now you’re just making stuff up,” Negret protested. “Obviously, though it’s interesting that it was magic glasses that clued you in rather than the invisibility cloak.” She grinned. “It’s fun. Look.” She took a pair of brown leather gloves from the pocket of her pants. “For you. Wildthorn’s Crackerjack Gauntlets, for Pickers of Locks and Creepers Through Windows Needing Nimble and Foxy Fingers.” She eyed the roof overhead, creaking under the weight of winter. “Also guaranteed to be useful when it’s cold.

on the doorstep of December.

Smugglers are always going to be flush with cash as soon as they find a buyer for the eight cartons of fountain pen cartridges that write in illegal shades of green, but they never have money today. You should, if you are going to run a smugglers' hotel, get a big account book and assume that whatever you write in it, the reality is, you're going to get paid in fountain pen cartridges. If you're lucky. You could just as easily get paid with something even more useless.

Blackjacks of the Roads: Highwaymen, Sharpers, and Empirics (Advanced Player’s Handbook). “Awesome.

I’m a gardener. I work up at the monastery at the top of the hill, only what with the weather I got stuck on my way home. Home being down in Shantytown, miss, which is rather a long trip to take on such a wretched night. You can see how I wound up here. Nothing strange about it at all.

Snakebird (colloquial): any bird of the genus Anhinga, so called for its serpentine neck. A predatory waterfowl able to alter its natural buoyancy when in water, sometimes showing only its head above the surface. Generally silent. Subsists on fish, which it impales upon its sharp, piercing bill. Often seen with wings upraised and outstretched in a fan over its head, for which reason it is often confused with a related species, the cormorant.

Just as he’d said he would, Mr. Otterwill saved a few minutes at the end of class to explain the mathematical paradox Nialla had asked about, which had to do with how you fit an extra person into a hotel with an infinite number of rooms already occupied by an infinite number of guests.

Milo Pine did not run a smugglers’ hotel, but his parents did. It was an inn, actually; a huge, ramshackle manor house that looked as if it had been cobbled together from discarded pieces of a dozen mismatched mansions collected from a dozen different cities. It was called Greenglass House, and it sat on the side of a hill overlooking an inlet of harbors, a little district built half on the shore and half on the piers that jutted out into the river Skidwrack like the teeth of a comb. It was a long climb up to the inn from the waterfront by foot, or an only slightly shorter trip by the cable railway that led from the inn’s private dock up the steep slope of Whilforber Hill. And of course the inn wasn’t only for smugglers, but that was who turned up most often, so that was how Milo thought of it.

Doc Holystone, maybe?

aboard a sailing ship sometime around the War of 1812,

All his life, ever since he was really small, Milo had been very bothered by sudden changes of plan. More than bothered. Being surprised made him uneasy at the best of times. Now, tromping across the fresh snow in the bitter cold to haul a stranger up the hill, an unexpected stranger who was going to require him to work when all he really wanted was a quiet week or so with his parents and his house to himself . . . well, that made the uneasiness feel uncomfortably like panic.

it isn't only locked doors that hide treasures.

Mr. Vinge wasn't exactly looking at them, but past them. Milo turned and saw only the stained-glass window and the snowy night beyond, tinged in shades of pale, pale greens: celery and celadon and tones like old bottle glass.

All his life, ever since he was really small, Milo had been very bothered by sudden changes of plan. More than bothered. Being surprised made him uneasy at the best of times.

The rain had not stopped for a week, and the roads that led to the inn were little better than rivers of muck. This, at least, is what Captain Frost said when he tramped indoors, coated in the yellow mud peculiar to that part of the city and hollering for his breakfast. The rest of the guests sighed. Perhaps today, they had thought. Perhaps today, their unnatural captivity would end. But the bellowing man calling for eggs and burnt toast meant that, for another day at least, fifteen people would remain prisoners of the river Skidwrack, and the new rivers that had once been roads, and the rain. No wonder Georgie had thought he might like it. Substitute snow for rain and subtract a few people and the author might’ve been writing about Greenglass House. In the book, however, one of the guests, a man named Phin, suggested that they pass the time by telling stories. “In more civilized places, when travelers find themselves sharing a fire and a bottle of wine, they sometimes choose to share something of themselves, too,” Phin told them. “And then, wonder of wonders—no strangers remain. Only companions, sharing a hearth and a bottle.” The wind and rain rattled the windowpanes as the folks gathered in the parlor looked from one to the next: the young girl in her embroidered silk stole; the twin gentlemen with the tattooed faces; the gaunt woman with her nervous gloved hands constantly moving; the other woman, gaunter still and hidden beneath two layers of voluminous shawls, whose red-brown skin showed in small flashes when her wraps did not quite move along with her. “If you will listen,” Phin said, swirling his glass, “I will tell the first tale. Then perhaps, if you find it worth the trade, you will give me one of yours. Listen.

You didn’t ask Promise? when you wanted truth. You asked it when you wanted comfort, and parents weren’t dumb enough to answer a comfort question with honesty.

…when travelers find themselves sharing a fire and a bottle of wine, they sometimes choose to share something of themselves, too,” Phin told them. “And then they, wonder of wonders – no strangers remain. Only companions, sharing a hearth and bottle.

The sweep swore.

Perhaps your greatest challenge will be finding a way to be at peace with yourself. As your mother, I could wish you did not have to face that trial. But I would not have you face the agony of denying who you are, either.

But even the miraculous can fade into the background and become invisible when you can’t look past something that seems closer and more menacing.

Life makes you believe in certain things, a certain order. A certain reality. The world is not simple. The world is not one place. It's the sum of an impossible number of incomprehensible things, and if you start out on any road in the world and follow it for any distance at all, sooner or later you enter into strange country. So, the world is not simple, but it would be much, much better for us if it was. And we can sense that, even if we do not understand or perceive the full complexity of things. So we look for order.

Like most boys he knew, he'd spent his entire life trying to avoid doing anything--or at least, getting caught at anything--that might get him in trouble. Why would anyone want to be told that they deserved to be chased by some invisible, murderous being? It was Jin who answered. "I think it's much worse to think awful things just happen without any good reason," she said quietly, worrying the single green bangle around her wrist. "If you . . . if you can believe you deserve to be hurt, then there's always the possibility that you can figure out what you did to deserve it, and you can stop doing that, and then . . . " She swallowed. "And then you can imagine that things might get better." Tom Guyot patted Jin's hand, rigid and motionless as stone on her knee. "You know that isn't the world we live in, darlin'," he said softly. "Would make life all sorts of easier, but things aren't that way.

If you are what I think you are, it will come to make sense. It makes perfect sense to me, but I can promise you that what I understand is entirely different from what you do." Now both Sam and Jin stared at him. "But . . . " Jin shook her head. "Then I'm wrong, aren't I? I really thought . . . but . . . " "You think just because you and I understand two different things, one of us has to be wrong?" Burns asked. "Well . . . yes. If it's a book of instructions--well, there has to be a right way and a wrong way to read it." Jin turned to Sam. "That's only logical, isn't it?" "If there was only one was to read a book," Burns said with a little smile, "any book in the world--if there was only one way to read and understand it, what would be the point of reading that book?

The Sneaksby Gambit,

Peanut butter and coffee is . . .” He kissed the tips of his fingers.

back in the days before he learned that monsters lived in houses just like everyone else.

It was a very hard thing to do, but not doing it would've been worse

H.

The black-eyed man leaned on the rail watching, listening, and acclimating while he inhaled the brew of sea air and coal smoke. There was something else in the air, too; a deep note, buried far below the scents and sounds that stirred on the summer breeze. It would’ve been nearly impossible for anyone else to detect. Humans were notoriously blind to the simmer of violence—which always amused him, considering how like a drug it was to them. The freckled and black-eyed man, not being human, could smell it as sharply as cologne. It was pervasive here, just like it was everyplace else he’d been in this country in the last twenty years, at least. Maybe more. It was easy to lose track of the passing time. He was far older than the flashy young fellow he appeared to be.

They each shot one last crabby look at the other; then Mrs.

He glanced that way, and a small hand waving a book appeared over the top of a garment rack. "Time of Unutterable Algorithms." The hand disappeared, then reappeared. It looked empty at first, but then, as Meddy moved her wrist, Milo caught a slight flash from one knuckle. "Ring of Wildest Abandon." Then Meddy's head and shoulders appeared as she climbed up and leaned over the top of the rack. With her other arm, she brandished a carved walking stick. "Eglantine's Patent Blackthorn Wishing Stick, guaranteed to offer considered advice before granting requests. What about you?" Milo laughed. He held up the red case. " Slywhisker's Crimson Casket of Relics, including the Ocher Pages of Invisible Wards, the Ever-Sharp Inscriber of Rose-colored Destinies, and the Flask of Winds and Voids" Meddy whistled. "You don't mess around." "I learned from the best.

Georgie's eyelids lowers dangerously. "The thing about meditation is that it works best if people don't tell you you're doing it wrong.

That thing is good luck?" Emmet asked darkly. Nobody had to wonder what he meant by 'that thing

Okay, look, I know you're not supposed to share information about your guests. But do you happen to know if..." "If what?" Milo asked warily. If their criminals? If, say I happened to be a criminal too, might I be interested in what they're up to? If your parents woould flip out if I battled them over stolen goods after breakfast?

I'm on vacation," Milo said firmly. " And if I miss out on more bacon because of you, you'll be sorry.

I want that T-shirt" Sirin muttered. " I should have that T-shirt.

He broke my coffee maker. This person is not just tricky, he's evil. Who messes with someone's coffeepot? That's hitting below the belt.

Don't stay out long or whatever a responsible adult would say. Wear a hat and what not." "Yeah, I'll tie my shoes and everything.

Marzana loved games of strategy. And as extended social interactions went, they were surprisingly less painful than most. People didn't expect you to make small talk, and games tended to provide clues to help you work out the necessary conversation, which made it much less stressful.

too dark later. Plus I told Mr. Vinge I was going to, and it’ll seem weird if I don’t. You want to come?” “No, and I wish you wouldn’t waste your time with it either. We have real clues to follow.” The scholiast took the Eyes of True and Aching Clarity out of her pocket and perched them on her nose. “But don’t mind me.” Negret slid off the loveseat. “I’ll be right

the flakes of your cereal with your spoon to make one in your breakfast bowl;

Sounds like you found a way to be together.” Even Milo didn’t have any trouble interpreting the look he gave Clem. “Looks like people can find a way, huh?

Whalebone fan Spherical chalkboard Locks (11) Keys (“a handful”) Reflecting circle Deck of cards

The Road is the greatest trickster of all, winding and forking and vanishing and reappearing across the wide country, making a mockery of maps and carrying even those who know it best into the unfamiliar.

I started grasping at moments that weren't misery. Slowly, slowly, I found them.

mechanism calculates the point at which the passage of time—chronos—intersects with kairos, the ideal moment for accomplishing a thing.

archaic term for a conflagrationeer is a salamander

Lucy thought wistfully of the tiny cabin, shaped like a wedge cut from a short, fat cake, that had been her quarters aboard the Fate for seven of her twelve years.

It could be toast and instant noodle soup and I'd be perfectly content," Emmett assured her. "I'm a simple fellow at heart. And in a pinch, some of my colored pencils are kind of tasty —not that I've tried them or anything.