Strange The Dreamer Quotes

You’re a storyteller. Dream up something wild and improbable," she pleaded. "Something beautiful and full of monsters." “Beautiful and full of monsters?" “All the best stories are.

It was impossible, of course. But when did that ever stop any dreamer from dreaming.

I think you’re a fairy tale. I think you’re magical, and brave, and exquisite. And I hope you'll let me be in your story.

I turned my nightmares into fireflies and caught them in a jar.

And that's how you go on. You lay laughter over the dark parts. The more dark parts, the more you have to laugh. With defiance, with abandon, with hysteria, any way you can.

He read while he walked. He read while he ate. The other librarians suspected he somehow read while he slept, or perhaps didn't sleep at all.

Without his books, his room felt like a body with its hearts cut out.

You think good people can't hate?" she asked. "You think good people don't kill?"[...}"Good people do all the things bad people do, Lazlo. It's just that when they do them, they call it justice.

Once upon a time there was a silence that dreamed of becoming a song, and then I found you, and now everything is music.

Life won't just happen to you boy, he said. You have to happen to it.

The dream chooses the dreamer, not the other way around

There is strange comfort in knowing that no matter what happens today, the Sun will rise again tomorrow.

There was a man who loved the moon, but whenever he tried to embrace her, she broke into a thousand pieces and left him drenched, with empty arms.

The library knows its own mind,” old Master Hyrrokkin told him, leading him back up the secret stairs. “When it steals a boy, we let it keep him.

Wishes don’t just come true. They’re only the target you paint around what you want. You still have to hit the bull’s-eye yourself.

Like nightmares, dreams were insidious things, and didn't like being locked away.

What's the point of being old if you can't beleaguer the young with your vast stores of wisdom? And what's the point of being young if you can't ignore all advice?

Sometimes a moment is so remarkable that it carves out a space in time and spins there, while the world rushes on around it. This was one such.

As for fairy tales, he understood that they were reflections of the people who had spun them, and were flecked with little truths - intrusions of reality into fantasy, like toast crumbs on a wizard's beard.

If you're afraid of your own dreams, you're welcome here in mine.

There comes a certain point with a hope or a dream, when you either give it up or give up everything else. And if you choose the dream, if you keep on going, then you can never quit, because it's all you are.

He looked him right in the eyes and saw a man who was great and good and human, who had done extraordinary things and terrible things and been broken and reassembled as a shell, only then to do the bravest thing of all: He had kept on living, though there are easier paths to take.

On the occasions that he did look up from the page, he would seem as though he were awakening from a dream.

He believed in magic, like a child, and in ghosts, like a peasant.

It’s the mind. It’s the most complex and astonishing thing there is, that there’s a world inside each of us that no one else can ever know or see or visit.

He wasn't an alchemist, or a hero. He was a librarian, and a dreamer. He was a reader, and the unsung expert on a long-lost city no one cared a thing about.

Good people do all the things bad people do, Lazlo. It's just that when they do them, they call it justice.

I would have chosen you, if they had let me choose.

He had loved the library, and had felt, as a boy, as though it had a kind of sentience, and perhaps loved him back. But even if it was just walls and a roof with papers inside, it had bewitched him, and drawn him in, and given him everything he needed to become himself.

Once upon a time, a sister made a vow she didn't know how to break, and it broke her instead. Once upon a time, a girl did the impossible, but she did it just a little too late.

People are our safe places. I have one: a person who’s a home and a world to me.

What's a horizon?' Lazlo asked, straight-faced. 'Is it like the end of an aisle of books?

It was a different life out here, but make no mistake: Lazlo was every bit the dreamer he had always been, if not more. He might have left his books, but he carried all his stories with him.

It was cruel. Like opening a birdcage to let the bird fly out, whilst all the while it's tethered by the leg, and freedom is only an illusion.

We're all on the same side. Even her. You can be on the same side and have different ideas.

He drifted about with his head full of myths, always at least half lost in some otherland of story. Demons and wingsmiths, seraphim and spirits, he love it all.

Can we leave the past behind us?" Could they? The question was everything. "That's an excellent place for the past," said Suheyla. "If you don't leave it there, it clutters everything up and you just keep tripping over it.

The ones who know can't tell us, and the ones who tell us don't know.

And they gazed at themselves in it, side by side and hand in hand, and they beheld neither gods nor monsters. They were so nearly unchanged, and yet that one thing - the color of their skin - would, in the real world, change everything.

shrestha (SHRES·thuh) noun When a dream comes true—but not for the dreamer. Archaic;

He dreamed of deserts and great empty cities and imagined he could feel the minutes and hours of his life running through him, as though he were nothing but an hourglass of flesh and bone.

She was young and lovely and surprised and dead. She was also blue. Blue as opals, pale blue. Blue as cornflowers, or dragonfly wings, or a spring - not summer - sky.

Many a choice is made this way: By pretending it makes itself.

Here is a great man, and also a good one, though few men are ever both.

There comes a certain point with a hope or a dream, when you either give it up or give up everything else.

Skathis might have been an artist, but he'd been a vile one. Strange the dreamer was an artist, too, and he was the antidote to vile.

He had, in his hearts, declared war on the dark child, but Lazlo was no warrior, and his hearts had no talent for hate.

It turned out that sometimes it's enough to start doing things differently now.

She had inherited a story that was strewn with corpses and clotted with enmity, and was only trying to stay alive in it.

The world was carnage. You either suffered it or inflicted it.

Get out of doors, Strange. Breathe air, see things. A man should have squint lines from looking at the horizon, not just from reading in dim light.

Good little girls don't stab their nurses and drag toddlers over their corpses in order to save their lives. Good little girls don't kill. They die. And Minya was not a good little girl.

The moon on a bracelet and the sun in a jar,” said Sarai. “We really wreak havoc on the heavens, don’t we?” Lazlo’s voice sank deeper in his throat. Smokier. Hungrier. “I expect the heavens will survive,” he said, and then he kissed her.

For an instant, at least, they seemed one and the same, as though all anguish exists in the same deep well, no matter what loss or misfortune leads us to it. We might be at odds, hate each other, and desired each others destruction, but in our despair, we are lost in the same darkness, breathing the same air as we choke on our grief.

This twenty-year-old boy was distinguished from childhood by strange qualities, a dreamer and an eccentric. A girl fell in love with him, and he went and sold her to a brothel...

It was no small thing to shed a lifetime of nonbeing and suddenly be seen.

Vengeance ought to be spoken through gritted teeth, spittle flying, the cords of one's soul so entangled in it that you can't let it go, even if you try. If you feel it--if you really feel it--then you speak it like it's a still-beating heart clenched in your fist and there's blood running down your arm, dripping off your elbow, and you can't let go.

She asked in a hesitant whisper, "Do you still think i'm a... A singularly unhorrible demon?" "No," he said smiling. "I think you're magical, and brave, and exquisite. And..." His voice grew bashful. Only in a dream could he be so bold and speak such words. "I hope you'll let me be in your story.

Lazlo. You have to wake up now, my love. And he did.

The way he looked at her, she felt like some kind of miracle, as though his dreamer’s eyes cast her in their glow of wonder.

And so Grief and Shame abided in adjoining rooms with the door shut between them, holding their pain in their arms instead of each other.

It might have been brief, but so much of a kiss - a first kiss especially - is the moment before your lips touch, and before your eyes close, when you're filled with the sight of each other, and with the compulsion, the pull, and it's like...it's like...finding a book inside another book. A small treasure of a book hidden inside a big common one - like...spells printed on dragonfly wings, discovered tucked inside a cookery book, right between the recipes for cabbages and corn. That's what a kiss is like, he thought, no matter how brief: It's a tiny, magical story, and a miraculous interruption of the mundane.

I was always a dreamer, in childhood especially. People thought I was a little strange.

She gave the words back to him, murmuring, and kept them, too. You could do that: Give them back and keep them. "I love you" is generous that way.

...but one can't be irredeemable who shows reverence for books.

You needn't trouble yourself. He's only a librarian.

It was the hate of the used and tormented, who are the children of the used and tormented, and whose own children will be used and tormented.

he collected the stories like treasure.

Hate could do that, too - live off nothing but itself - but not forever.

He'd sooner die trying to hold the world on his shoulders than running away. Better always to run toward. And so he did.

All empires fail. They overreach, spread too thin, collect one enemy too many. They’re gnawed at from within by corruption, greed, betrayal.

Weep slept. Dreamers dreamed. A grand moon drifted, and, and the wings of the citadel cut the sky in two: light above, dark below.

There was a word from a myth: sathaz . It was the desire to possess that which can never be yours. It meant senseless, hopeless yearning, the way a gutter child might dream of being king, and it came from the tale of the man who loved the moon.

There is unique pleasure in introducing the bizarre and inconceivable to others.

Once upon a time, there had been gods. Now there were only children going about in their dead parents' undergarments.

You don’t know yet what you’re capable of, but I’m willing to bet it’s extraordinary.

-Dream up something wild and improbable. Something beautiful and full of monsters. -Beautiful and full of monsters? -All the best stories are.

None of us became monks to be nursemaids.” To which the child Lazlo replied, with fire in his soul, “And none of us became children to be orphans.” But

We might be at odds, hate each other, and desire each other’s destruction, but in our despair, we are lost in the same darkness, breathing the same air as we choke on our grief.

For what was a person but the sum of all the scraps of their memory and experience: a finite set of components with an infinite array of expressions

It's never too soon to worry. Worry spurs preparation.

This is Weep. You can’t expect things to make sense here.” Thyon didn’t agree. “I expect they make perfect sense,” he said. “Just under a different set of rules.” It was a matter of learning the rules, like learning a new language.

There was only the quiet that came after all those things. There was only the quiet that came when you were the only one left. Only the quiet that came when you were something strange enough to outsurvive the things that killed or drove away everyone you loved.

I think you’re a fairy tale. I think you’re magical, and brave, and exquisite. And . . .” His voice grew bashful. Only in a dream could he be so bold and speak such words. “I hope you’ll let me be in your story.

Life won’t just happen to you, boy,” he said. “You have to happen to it. Remember: The spirit grows sluggish when you neglect the passions.

the circle of women coming together to celebrate being alive—and being a woman, which is a magic all its own.

The function of hate, as Sarai saw it, was to stamp out compassion—to close a door in one's own self and forget it was ever there. If you had hate, then you could see suffering—and cause it—and feel nothing except perhaps a sordid vindication.

The mind is good at hiding things, but there's something it cannot do: It can't erase. It can only conceal, and concealed things are not gone. They rot. They fester, they leak poisons. They ache and stink. They hiss like serpents in tall grass.

I’ve thought things were impossible before, and so far, none of them actually were.

Many a choice is made in this way: by pretending it makes itself. And many a fate is decided by those who cannot decide.

It wasn’t even an alternate version of his life. He hadn’t gone back in time and done everything differently to get to this place. It turned out that sometimes it’s enough to start doing things differently now.

There were no books to hide behind, and no shadows—only Lazlo Strange in his worn gray robes, with his nose that had been broken by fairy tales, looking like the hero of no story ever told. Or. No story yet told.

Her voice would die before she ran out of rage. She could scream a hole in her throat and come unraveled, fall to pieces like moth-chewed silk, and still, from the leftover shreds of her, the little pile of tatters, would pour forth this unending scream.

Love that sets forth the soul like springtime and ripens it like summer. Love as rarely exists in reality, as if a master alchemist has taken it and distilled out all the impurities, every petty disenchantment, every unworthy thought, into a perfect elixir, sweet and deep and all-consuming.

You should have seen them, Thyon said. "It was surreal." As an afterthought, he added, "Though I can't believe none of them rode the dragon." "I know!" said Ruza. "What was Azareen's thinking, choosing a winged horse when she could have a dragon?" "I don't think she was really focused on which creature was best," said Tzara. "You shouldn't have to focus on it," said Ruza. "It's instinctive. Dragons are always best.

Don't look at me like that," said Ruza. "Like what?" "Like I'm a beautiful book you're about to open and plunder with your greedy mad eyes." Lazlo laughed. "Greedy mad eyes? Plunder? Are you afraid of me, Ruza?" Ruza looked suddenly steely. "Do you know, Strange, that to ask a Tizerkane if he fears you is to challenge him to single comabt?" "Well then," said Lazlo, who knew better than to believe anything Ruza said. "I'm glad I only said it to you and not one of the fearsome warriors like Azareen or Tzara." "Unkind," said Ruza, wounded. His face crumpled. He pretended to weep. "I am fearsome," he insisted "I am." "There, there," consoled Lazlo. "You're a very fierce warrior. Don't cry. You're terrifying." "Really?" asked Ruza in a pitiful little hopeful voice. "You're not just saying that?" "You two idiots," said Azareen, and Lazlo felt a curious twinge of pride, to be called an idiot by her, with what might have been the tiniest edge of fondness.

There came to that room wild streams of violet midnight glittering with dust of gold, vortices of dust and fire, swirling out of the ultimate spaces and heavy perfumes from beyond the worlds. Opiate oceans poured there, litten by suns that the eye may never behold and having in their whirlpools strange dolphins and sea-nymphs of unrememberable depths. Noiseless infinity eddied around the dreamer and wafted him away without touching the body that leaned stiffly from the lonely window; and for days not counted in men's calandars the tides of far spheres that bore him gently to join the course of other cycles that tenderly left him sleeping on a green sunrise shore, a green shore fragrant with lotus blossums and starred by red camalates...

You might come up with a solution to the problem that doesn't involve destruction." Drave scoffed. "Doesn't involve destruction? That's like me asking you not to be a mealy-mouthed poltroon." Lazlo's eyebrows shot up. "Poltroon?" "Look it up," snapped Drave. Lazlo turned to Ruza. "Do you think I'm a poltroon?" he asked, the way a young girl might ask whether her dress was unflattering. "I don't know what that is." "I think it's a kind of mushroom," said Lazlo, who knew very well was poltroon meant. Really, he was surprised that Drave did. "You are absolutely a mushroom," said Ruza. "It means 'coward,'" said Drave. "Oh." Lazlo turned to Ruza. "Do you think I'm a coward?" Ruza considered the matter. "More of a mushroom," he decided. To Drave: "I think you were closer the first time." "I never said he was a mushroom." "Then I'm confused.

You’re the good kind of faranji, I suppose.” “Oh yes,” she said. “Very good. I even taste good, or so I’m told.” He was focused on not falling to his death, and so he missed the mischief in her voice. “Taste,” he scoffed. “I suppose they’re cannibals. Who’s calling them barbarians now?” Calixte laughed with delighted disbelief, and it was only then, too late, that Thyon took her meaning. Oh gods. Taste. He flung back his head to look up at her, nearly losing his balance in the process. She laughed harder at the shock on his face. “Cannibals!” she repeated. “That’s good. I’m going to start calling Tzara that. My sweet cannibal. Can I tell you a secret?” She whispered the rest, wide-eyed and zestful: “I’m a cannibal, too.

I just wanted to know what it was like," she said, "in case it was my last chance. I never wanted to take him away from you." "You didn't. It's not like you tied him down and forced him." Sparrow paused, considering. "You didn't, did you?" "Practically. But he didn't scream for help, so..." Sparrow launched the plum. It was close range, and hit Ruby on her collarbone. She said, "Ow!" though it hadn't really hurt. Rubbing at the place of impact, she glared at Sparrow. "Is that it, then? Have you spent your wrath?" "Yes," said Sparrow, dusting off her palms. "It was one-plum wrath." "How sad for Feral. He was only worth one plum. Won't he mope when we tell him.