Wayward Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Wayward. Here they are! All 100 of them:

It gives me strength to have somebody to fight for; I can never fight for myself, but, for others, I can kill.
Emilie Autumn (The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls)
A gambler, a convict, a wayward son, a lost Grisha, a Suli girl who had become a killer, a boy from the Barrel who had become something worse.
Leigh Bardugo (Six of Crows (Six of Crows, #1))
You," he said, "are a terribly real thing in a terribly false world, and that, I believe, is why you are in so much pain.
Emilie Autumn (The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls)
I only sleep with people I love, which is why I have insomnia.
Emilie Autumn (The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls)
Nothing in my life has ever made me want to commit suicide more than people's reaction to my trying to commit suicide.
Emilie Autumn (The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls)
It is not seen as insane when a fighter, under an attack that will inevitable lead to his death, chooses to take his own life first. In fact, this act has been encouraged for centuries, and is accepted even now as an honorable reason to do the deed. How is it any different when you are under attack by your own mind?
Emilie Autumn (The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls)
Perfume was first created to mask the stench of foul and offensive odors... Spices and bold flavorings were created to mask the taste of putrid and rotting meat... What then was music created for? Was it to drown out the voices of others, or the voices within ourselves? I think I know.
Emilie Autumn (The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls)
I am my heart’s undertaker. Daily I go and retrieve its tattered remains, place them delicately into its little coffin, and bury it in the depths of my memory, only to have to do it all again tomorrow.
Emilie Autumn (The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls)
We notice the silence of men. We depend upon the silence of women.
Seanan McGuire (Every Heart a Doorway (Wayward Children, #1))
What's the big fucking deal? Lots of amazing people have committed suicide, and they turned out alright.
Emilie Autumn (The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls)
You’re nobody’s doorway but your own, and the only one who gets to tell you how your story ends is you.
Seanan McGuire (Every Heart a Doorway (Wayward Children, #1))
Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don't drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor's yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper.
Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird)
I cut myself because you wouldn't let me cry. I cried because you wouldn't let me speak. I spoke because you wouldn't let me shine. I shone because I thought you loved me...
Emilie Autumn (The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls)
Some are born mad, some achieve madness, and some have madness thrust upon 'em.
Emilie Autumn (The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls)
She was a story, not an epilogue.
Seanan McGuire (Every Heart a Doorway (Wayward Children, #1))
He said that if culture is a house, then language was the key to the front door; to all the rooms inside. Without it, he said, you ended up wayward, without a proper home or a legitimate identity.
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
You're nobody's rainbow. You're nobody's princess. You're nobody's doorway but your own, and the only one who gets to tell you how your story ends is you.
Seanan McGuire (Every Heart a Doorway (Wayward Children, #1))
Some adventures require nothing more than a willing heart and the ability to trip over the cracks in the world.
Seanan McGuire (Down Among the Sticks and Bones (Wayward Children, #2))
I had such plans for this evening. The pursuit of blind drunkenness and wayward women was my goal. But alas, it was not to be. No sooner had I consumed my third drink in the Devil than I was accosted by a delightful small flower selling child who asked me for twopence for a daisy. The price seemed steep, so I refused. When I told the girl as much, she proceeded to rob me.” “A little girl robbed you?” Tessa said. “Actually, she wasn’t a little girl at all, as it turns out, but a midget in a dress with a penchant for violence, who goes by the name of Six-Fingered Nigel.
Cassandra Clare (Clockwork Angel (The Infernal Devices, #1))
Their love wanted to fix her, and refused to see that she wasn't broken.
Seanan McGuire (Every Heart a Doorway (Wayward Children, #1))
I myself am not afraid of ghosts; I am afraid of people.
Emilie Autumn (The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls)
I'd give him all that I am. I'd give him all that I was. I'd open up a vein. I'd tie our hearts together, chamber by chamber.
Rainbow Rowell (Wayward Son (Simon Snow, #2))
History written in pencil is easily erased, but crayon is forever.
Emilie Autumn (The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls)
Fancies are like shadows...you can't cage them, they're such wayward, dancing things.
L.M. Montgomery (Anne of Avonlea (Anne of Green Gables, #2))
I'm not stupid. I know exactly what's going on, and I'm not fighting it. If I have to go through this, I will glean from it any small benefit I can receive. I will not fight this. Bring it on. Bring on the cure. Bring on the fucking happy. I'm committed.
Emilie Autumn (The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls)
This world is unforgiving and cruel to those it judges as even the slightest bit outside the norm.
Seanan McGuire (Every Heart a Doorway (Wayward Children, #1))
If leeches ate peaches instead of my blood, then I would be free to drink tea in the mud!
Emilie Autumn (The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls)
It gets better. It never gets easy, but it does start to hurt a little less.
Seanan McGuire (Every Heart a Doorway (Wayward Children, #1))
But it was a mistake thinking of that as an end. There is no end. Bad things happen, and then they stop, but they keep on wreaking havoc inside of people.
Rainbow Rowell (Wayward Son (Simon Snow, #2))
Simon Snow, it hurts to look at you when you’re this happy. And it hurts to look at you when you’re depressed. There’s no safe time for me to see you, nothing about you that doesn’t tear my heart from my chest and leave it breakable outside my body.
Rainbow Rowell (Wayward Son (Simon Snow, #2))
If you want to help her, you need to help yourself first. No one serves their friends by grinding themselves into dust on the altar of compassion.
Seanan McGuire (In an Absent Dream (Wayward Children, #4))
And, what's more, this 'precious' body, the very same that is hooted and honked at, demeaned both in daily life as well as in ever existing form of media, harrassed, molested, raped, and, if all that wasn't enough, is forever poked and prodded and weighed and constantly wrong for eating too much, eating too little, a million details which all point to the solitary girl, to EVERY solitary girl, and say: Destroy yourself.
Emilie Autumn (The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls)
When we lose the pieces of the wayward mechanism of our life and can’t walk our own walk anymore, we can’t but turn back the clock for a while and detect the hitch, to find out where things went wrong. ( “Wonder what went wrong “ )
Erik Pevernagie
For us, places we went were home. We didn't care if they were good or evil or neutral or what. We cared about the fact that for the first time, we didn't have to pretend to be something we weren't. We just got to be. That made all the difference in the world.
Seanan McGuire (Every Heart a Doorway (Wayward Children, #1))
Go ahead and shoot me. This isn't my favourite shirt.
Rainbow Rowell (Wayward Son (Simon Snow, #2))
Jem grinned. “Where have you been? The Blue Dragon? The Mermaid?” “The Devil Tavern if you must know.” Will sighed and leaned against one of the posts of the bed. “I had such plans for the evening. The pursuit of blind drunkenness and wayward women was my goal. But alas, it was not to be. No sooner had I consumed my third drink in the Devil than I was accosted by a delightful small flower-selling child who asked me for two-pence for a daisy. The price seemed steep, so I refused. When I told the girl as much, she proceeded to rob me.” “A little girl robbed you?” Tessa said. “Actually, she wasn’t a little girl at all, as it turns out, but a midget in a dress who goes by the name of Six-Fingered Nigel.” “Easy mistake to make,” Jem said.
Cassandra Clare (Clockwork Angel (The Infernal Devices, #1))
Simply put, if you are a Wayward Victorian Girl, I'll find you.
Emilie Autumn
Can I?” he asks. Can you what, Simon? Kiss me? Kill me? Break my heart? I touch him like he’s made of butterfly wings. “You don’t have to ask.” I say it loud enough that he’ll hear me, over everything.
Rainbow Rowell (Wayward Son (Simon Snow, #2))
Sometimes Simon kisses me like it’s the end of the world, and I worry he might believe that it is.
Rainbow Rowell (Wayward Son (Simon Snow, #2))
I would have hoped you would have learned by now. No matter, a man who refuses to face his destiny offers himself to the GOD of chance—and chance is a wayward bitch.
J.B. Lion (The Seventh Spark: Volume One – Knights of the Trinity)
Because hope is a knife that can cut through the foundations of the world.
Seanan McGuire (Every Heart a Doorway (Wayward Children, #1))
Now I know that if you open the right door at the right time, you might finally find a place where you belong.
Seanan McGuire (Every Heart a Doorway (Wayward Children, #1))
There is kindness in the world, if we know how to look for it. If we never start denying it the door.
Seanan McGuire (Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children, #3))
The seas did not forgive, and they did not welcome their wayward children home.
Mira Grant (Into the Drowning Deep (Rolling in the Deep, #1))
What eats you?” He raises an eyebrow, giving me a taste of my own medicine. “Existential despair.
Rainbow Rowell (Wayward Son (Simon Snow, #2))
Ha! Does Agatha know we're coming?" "It'll be a surprise!" Penny says. "Surprise!" Baz singsongs. "It's your ex-boyfriend and his boyfriend and that girl you never liked very much!"
Rainbow Rowell (Wayward Son (Simon Snow, #2))
A single revelation does not change a life. It is a start.
Seanan McGuire (Down Among the Sticks and Bones (Wayward Children, #2))
Every choice feeds every choice that comes after, whether we want those choices or no.
Seanan McGuire (Down Among the Sticks and Bones (Wayward Children, #2))
Well, niece, I hope to see you one day fitted with a husband. BEATRICE Not till God make men of some other metal than earth. Would it not grieve a woman to be overmastered with a pierce of valiant dust? to make an account of her life to a clod of wayward marl? No, uncle, I'll none: Adam's sons are my brethren; and, truly, I hold it a sin to match in my kindred.
William Shakespeare (Much Ado About Nothing)
I've loved him through worse. I've loved him hopelessly... So what's a little less hope?
Rainbow Rowell (Wayward Son (Simon Snow, #2))
A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man. They are sluggish, yet more wayward, and never without a melancholy tinge. Sights and impressions which others brush aside with a glance, a light comment, a smile, occupy him more than their due; they sink silently in, they take on meaning, they become experience, emotion, adventure. Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
Thomas Mann (Death in Venice and Other Tales)
If you can't trust people with nose rings to be open-minded, who's left?
Rainbow Rowell (Wayward Son (Simon Snow, #2))
She had tried to make sure they knew that there were a hundred, a thousand, a million different ways to be a girl, and that all of them were valid, and that neither of them was doing anything wrong.
Seanan McGuire (Down Among the Sticks and Bones (Wayward Children, #2))
His contempt for humanity grew fiercer, and at last he came to realize that the world is made up mostly of fools and scoundrels. It became perfectly clear to him that he could entertain no hope of finding in someone else the same aspirations and antipathies; no hope of linking up with a mind which, like his own, took pleasure in a life of studious decrepitude; no hope of associating an intelligence as sharp and wayward as his own with any author or scholar.
Joris-Karl Huysmans (Against Nature)
That's why people shouldn't get too hung up on labels. Sometimes I think that's part of what we do wrong. We try to make things make sense, even when they're never going to.
Seanan McGuire (Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children, #3))
I wish we lived in a world where actions were measured by the intentions behind them. But the truth is, they’re measured by their consequences.
Blake Crouch (The Last Town (Wayward Pines, #3))
Cats were often familiars to workers of magic because to anyone used to wrestling with self-willed, wayward, devious magic—which was what all magic was—it was rather soothing to have all the same qualities wrapped up in a small, furry, generally attractive bundle that looked more or less the same from day to day and might, if it were in a good mood, sit on your knee and purr. Magic never sat on anybody’s knee and purred.
Robin McKinley (Spindle's End)
Hope means you keep on holding to things that won't ever be so again, and so you bleed an inch at a time until there's nothing left.
Seanan McGuire (Every Heart a Doorway (Wayward Children, #1))
Sometimes that’s all you can do. Just keep getting through until you don’t have to do it anymore, however much time that takes, however difficult it is.
Seanan McGuire (Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children, #3))
She was a woman with something to protect. That made her more dangerous than they could ever have suspected.
Seanan McGuire (Every Heart a Doorway (Wayward Children, #1))
You want to go back, and so you hold on to the habits you learned while you were traveling, because it's better than admitting the journey's over.
Seanan McGuire (Every Heart a Doorway (Wayward Children, #1))
A relationship isn't about the end. It's about being together every step of the way.
Rainbow Rowell (Wayward Son (Simon Snow, #2))
Because ‘boys will be boys’ is a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Lundy. “They’re too loud, on the whole, to be easily misplaced or overlooked; when they disappear from the home, parents send search parties to dredge them out of swamps and drag them away from frog ponds. It’s not innate. It’s learned. But it protects them from the doors, keeps them safe at home. Call it irony, if you like, but we spend so much time waiting for our boys to stray that they never have the opportunity. We notice the silence of men. We depend upon the silence of women.
Seanan McGuire (Every Heart a Doorway (Wayward Children, #1))
Enjoy yourself. There are many good things in the world, and each of them happens for the first time only once, and never again.
Seanan McGuire (In an Absent Dream (Wayward Children, #4))
I can explain myself: If you want to be safe, walk in the middle of the street. I’m not joking. You’ve been told to look both ways before crossing the street, and the sidewalk is your friend, right? Wrong. I’ve spent years walking sidewalks at night. I’ve looked around me when it was dark, when there were men following me, creeping out of alleyways, attempting to goad me into speaking to them and shouting obscenities at me when I wouldn’t, and I suddenly realised that the only place left to go was the middle of street. But why would I risk it? Because the odds are in my favour. In the States, someone is killed in a car accident on average every 12.5 minutes, while someone is raped on average every 2.5 minutes. Even when factoring in that, one, I am generously including ALL car-related accidents and not just those involving accidents, and two, that the vast majorities of rapes still go unreported […] And, thus, this is now the way I live my life: out in the open, in the middle of everything, because the middle of the street is actually the safest place to walk.
Emilie Autumn (The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls)
Real' is a four-letter word, and I'll thank you to use it as little as possible while you live under my roof.
Seanan McGuire (Every Heart a Doorway (Wayward Children, #1))
Fighting doesn’t feel good anymore. It feels like breaking something because you don’t know how to fix it.
Rainbow Rowell (Wayward Son (Simon Snow, #2))
I knew Dad was concerned about my past associations. I was from the Trash Alley. It was my community. I hung out with thugs from the Frog Bottom, the Burns Bottoms, the Red Line, the S-Curve, the Sandfield, the Morning Side, and a bunch of other places that shall remain nameless. I knew all of the “Legends of the Hood”: Sin Man, Swap, Boo Boo, Emp-Man, Cookie Man, Shank, Polar Bear, Bae Willy, Bae Bruh, Skullhead Ned, Pimp, Crunch, and Goat Turd (just to name a few). I thought maybe Dad had summoned me as a “show and tell” for the kids in his neighborhood—the hardliner to scare those wayward suburban brats back into reality.
Harold Phifer (Surviving Chaos: How I Found Peace at A Beach Bar)
How have I lived through so many happy endings without ever learning how to save the day?
Rainbow Rowell (Wayward Son (Simon Snow, #2))
Never assume you know where someone else is coming from.
Blake Crouch (Wayward (Wayward Pines, #2))
The wind is blowing Simon’s hair straight, and he’s squinting—from the sun and from all the smiling. “What!” he shouts at me again. “You’re so beautiful!” I shout back. He turns the radio down, so now there’s just the wind and the engine noise to shout over. “What’d you say?!” “Nothing!
Rainbow Rowell (Wayward Son (Simon Snow, #2))
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair. I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness--that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what--at last--I have found. With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved. Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer. This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.
Bertrand Russell
She was ordinary. She was remarkable. Of such commonplace contradictions are weapons made.
Seanan McGuire (In an Absent Dream (Wayward Children, #4))
Crowley, if this is what it takes to keep Simon in my arms—gunshots and Quiet Zones and high-speed chases—I’m here for it. I’ll swear to it. I’ve found my vocation.
Rainbow Rowell (Wayward Son (Simon Snow, #2))
There are worlds built on rainbows and worlds built on rain. There are worlds of pure mathematics, where every number chimes like crystal as it rolls into reality. There are worlds of light and worlds of darkness, worlds of rhyme and worlds of reason, and worlds where the only thing that matters is the goodness in a hero's heart.
Seanan McGuire (Down Among the Sticks and Bones (Wayward Children, #2))
He’s coming into himself. And I’m coming apart.
Rainbow Rowell (Wayward Son (Simon Snow, #2))
He's lovely. A bit of a sad mess. Dull and pale and rough around the edges. But still so lovely.
Rainbow Rowell (Wayward Son (Simon Snow, #2))
We don't teach you how to dwell. We also don't teach you how to forget. We teach you how to move on.
Seanan McGuire (Every Heart a Doorway (Wayward Children, #1))
The mountain was as powerful as the tide, just...in a different way.
Seanan McGuire (Every Heart a Doorway (Wayward Children, #1))
Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.
Blake Crouch (Pines (Wayward Pines, #1))
Someone with sharp enough eyes might see the instant where one wounded heart begins to rot while the other starts to heal.
Seanan McGuire (Down Among the Sticks and Bones (Wayward Children, #2))
The Moors exist in eternal twilight, in the pause between the lightning strike and the resurrection. They are a place of endless scientific experimentation, of monstrous beauty, and of terrible consequences.
Seanan McGuire (Down Among the Sticks and Bones (Wayward Children, #2))
Where did you find the whipped cream?” he asked. “You had milk, I had science,” said Jack. “It’s amazing how much of culinary achievement can be summarized by that sentence. Cheese making, for example. The perfect intersection of milk, science, and foolish disregard for the laws of nature.
Seanan McGuire (Every Heart a Doorway (Wayward Children, #1))
My favorite part of kissing Simon when he's cold is the way he goes warm in my hands. Like I'm the living campfire. Like I'm the one who lives. I warm him in my arms, and then he warms me in his. He gives it all back to me.
Rainbow Rowell (Wayward Son (Simon Snow, #2))
I'd say..." Petra crossed her legs, tucked a wayward strand of hair behind her ear. "I'd say, I am too fucking fabulous for one gender. Oh, and can we please get rid of the cheesy dance numbers? It's like torture step-ball-change." "I'd say I am not a race. I am an individual," Nicole said. Sosie moved her fingers gracefully, but no one understood. She waited for a moment. "I would say, learn to hear me in my own voice. I'm hearing impaired, not invisible.
Libba Bray (Beauty Queens)
Because hope is a knife that can cut through the foundations of the world," said Sumi. Her voice was suddenly crystalline and clear, with none of her prior whimsy. She looked at Nancy with calm, steady eyes. "Hope hurts. That's what you need to learn, and fast, if you don't want it to cut you open from the inside out. Hope is bad. Hope means you keep on holding to things that won't ever be so again, and so you bleed an inch at a time until there's nothing left. Ely-Eleanor is always saying 'don't use this word' and 'don't use that word,' but she never bans the ones that really bad. She never bans hope.
Seanan McGuire (Every Heart a Doorway (Wayward Children, #1))
asexual” and “aromantic” were different things. She liked holding hands and trading kisses. She’d had several boyfriends in elementary school, just like most of the other girls, and she had always found those practice relationships completely satisfying. It wasn’t until puberty had come along and changed the rules that she’d started pulling away in confusion and disinterest.
Seanan McGuire (Every Heart a Doorway (Wayward Children, #1))
There was still something unfinished around her eyes; she wasn’t done yet. She was a story, not an epilogue. And if she chose to narrate her own life one word at a time as she descended the stairs to meet her newest arrival, that wasn’t hurting anyone. Narration was a hard habit to break, after all. Sometimes it was all a body had.
Seanan McGuire (Every Heart a Doorway (Wayward Children, #1))
The moon is the friendliest of the celestial bodies, after all, glowing warm and white and welcoming, like a friend who wants only to know that all of us are safe in our narrow worlds, our narrow yards, our narrow, well-considered lives. The moon worries. We may not know how we know that, but we know it all the same: that the moon watches, and the moon worries, and the moon will always love us, no matter what.
Seanan McGuire (Down Among the Sticks and Bones (Wayward Children, #2))
Let me guess - you're Grumpy?' He let out a humpf. ' And you would be too, if you'd just spent the last hour searching the forest for your wayward charge.' He walked even faster. 'We tell you to stay inside, we tell you not to talk to strangers. But oh no, you must be out singing to the animals as if the birds didn't do a fine enough job of it. And this after Queen Neferia has already tried to kill you thrice. [...] Which is why you are not to go shopping anymore, no matter how pretty the wares, remember?' Oh, right.' [...] when you looked at it that way, Snow White had to be pretty idiotic to keep falling for the same trick.
Janette Rallison (My Fair Godmother (My Fair Godmother, #1))
Beware of any work for God that causes or allows you to avoid concentrating on Him. A great number of Christian workers worship their work. The only concern of Christian workers should be their concentration on God. This will mean that all the other boundaries of life, whether they are mental, moral, or spiritual limits, are completely free with the freedom God gives His child; that is, a worshiping child, not a wayward one. A worker who lacks this serious controlling emphasis of concentration on God is apt to become overly burdened by his work. He is a slave to his own limits, having no freedom of his body, mind, or spirit. Consequently, he becomes burned out and defeated. There is no freedom and no delight in life at all. His nerves, mind, and heart are so overwhelmed that God’s blessing cannot rest on him.
Oswald Chambers (My Utmost for His Highest)
Children are capable of grasping complex ideas long before most people give them credit for, wrapping them in a soothing layer of nonsense and illogical logic. To be a child is to be a visitor from another world muddling your way through the strange rules of this one, where up is always up, even when it would make more sense for it to be down, or backward, or sideways.
Seanan McGuire (In an Absent Dream (Wayward Children, #4))
don’t you dare, for one minute, believe that my kindness makes me anything but insurmountable. i did not unzip my chest to every kind of hurt, and stagger back, wounded and alive, just to hear you call me weak for trying. i opened my door to heartache— i gave her the fucking key. my softness for wayward strangers has made me nothing less than a halfway house for aching soles. so when you open your mouth and call me ‘baby’ understand that i am not your next victim in a laundry list of broken girls. you think i don’t know you? people like you? people with mouths for hands. i’ve got skin like topsoil and your teeth could never take root. so when you go looking to make a plaything of a sunburst, you better look for someone with less fire than me. because softness or no, i will eat you alive before i let you make a meal of me.
Ashe Vernon
I feel as though, if I were to extend my hand just a little toward the pool where the ideas ferment, I could grab at the idea and pull it out of the pool and onto the floor where ideas must stand before the jury of the brain. There, it must present itself, still from the pool, and a bit shivery because new ideas are not given a towel to dry off with, towels being reserved for proven theories; new ideas are simply pulled and stood up, and asked to explain themselves - not a very pleasant thing really, which is why so many people go into the room where the pool is. The exercise is exhausting not to mention a bit difficult to watch, if you are at all a sympathetic creature. What was my idea, anyways?
Emilie Autumn (The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls)
She discovered the pure joy of reading for pleasure, and was rarely - if ever - seen without a book in her hand. Even in slumber, she was often to be found clutching a volume with one slender hand, her fingers wrapped right around its spine, as if she feared to wake into a world where all books had been forgotten and removed, and this book might become the last she had to linger over.
Seanan McGuire (In an Absent Dream (Wayward Children, #4))
Some adventures begin easily. It is not hard, after all, to be sucked up by a tornado or pushed through a particularly porous mirror; there is no skill involved in being swept away by a great wave or pulled down a rabbit hole. Some adventures require nothing more than a willing heart and the ability to trip over the cracks in the world. Other adventures must be committed to before they have even properly begun. How else will they know the worthy from the unworthy, if they do not require a certain amount of effort on the part of the ones who would undertake them? Some adventures are cruel, because it is the only way they know to be kind.
Seanan McGuire (Down Among the Sticks and Bones (Wayward Children, #2))
I didn't tell him, I never told him. Not in a way that he believed. Not in a way that he could let in and hold on to. Everything he was to me. That he was everything. Simon, Simon . . . You were the sun, and I was crashing into you. I'd wake up every morning and tell myself . . . I'd tell myself . . . "You live in fear! In denial!" Simon is on the ground. His wing is bent the wrong way. His blood is red and abundant. It smells like brown butter. His hair is a mess, his face is in the sand. He doesn't know how much I love him. He's never really heard it. I'd wake up every morning and tell myself . . . "Simon . . . love . . . get up. We still have to save Agatha." Simon is on the ground. This will end in flames.
Rainbow Rowell (Wayward Son (Simon Snow, #2))
I was born free, and that I might live in freedom I chose the solitude of the fields; in the trees of the mountains I find society, the clear waters of the brooks are my mirrors, and to the trees and waters I make known my thoughts and charms. I am a fire afar off, a sword laid aside. Those whom I have inspired with love by letting them see me, I have by words undeceived, and if their longings live on hope—and I have given none to Chrysostom or to any other—it cannot justly be said that the death of any is my doing, for it was rather his own obstinacy than my cruelty that killed him; and if it be made a charge against me that his wishes were honourable, and that therefore I was bound to yield to them, I answer that when on this very spot where now his grave is made he declared to me his purity of purpose, I told him that mine was to live in perpetual solitude, and that the earth alone should enjoy the fruits of my retirement and the spoils of my beauty; and if, after this open avowal, he chose to persist against hope and steer against the wind, what wonder is it that he should sink in the depths of his infatuation? If I had encouraged him, I should be false; if I had gratified him, I should have acted against my own better resolution and purpose. He was persistent in spite of warning, he despaired without being hated. Bethink you now if it be reasonable that his suffering should be laid to my charge. Let him who has been deceived complain, let him give way to despair whose encouraged hopes have proved vain, let him flatter himself whom I shall entice, let him boast whom I shall receive; but let not him call me cruel or homicide to whom I make no promise, upon whom I practise no deception, whom I neither entice nor receive. It has not been so far the will of Heaven that I should love by fate, and to expect me to love by choice is idle. Let this general declaration serve for each of my suitors on his own account, and let it be understood from this time forth that if anyone dies for me it is not of jealousy or misery he dies, for she who loves no one can give no cause for jealousy to any, and candour is not to be confounded with scorn. Let him who calls me wild beast and basilisk, leave me alone as something noxious and evil; let him who calls me ungrateful, withhold his service; who calls me wayward, seek not my acquaintance; who calls me cruel, pursue me not; for this wild beast, this basilisk, this ungrateful, cruel, wayward being has no kind of desire to seek, serve, know, or follow them. If Chrysostom's impatience and violent passion killed him, why should my modest behaviour and circumspection be blamed? If I preserve my purity in the society of the trees, why should he who would have me preserve it among men, seek to rob me of it? I have, as you know, wealth of my own, and I covet not that of others; my taste is for freedom, and I have no relish for constraint; I neither love nor hate anyone; I do not deceive this one or court that, or trifle with one or play with another. The modest converse of the shepherd girls of these hamlets and the care of my goats are my recreations; my desires are bounded by these mountains, and if they ever wander hence it is to contemplate the beauty of the heavens, steps by which the soul travels to its primeval abode.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Don Quixote)
Children have always tumbled down rabbit holes, fallen through mirrors, been swept away by unseasonal floods or carried off by tornadoes. Children have always traveled, and because they are young and bright and full of contradictions, they haven’t always restricted their travel to the possible. Adulthood brings limitations like gravity and linear space and the idea that bedtime is a real thing, and not an artificially imposed curfew. Adults can still tumble down rabbit holes and into enchanted wardrobes, but it happens less and less with every year they live. Maybe this is a natural consequence of living in a world where being careful is a necessary survival trait, where logic wears away the potential for something bigger and better than the obvious. Childhood melts, and flights of fancy are replaced by rules. Tornados kill people: they don’t carry them off to magical worlds. Talking foxes are a sign of fever, not guides sent to start some grand adventure. But children, ah, children. Children follow the foxes, and open the wardrobes, and peek beneath the bridge. Children climb the walls and fall down the wells and run the razor’s edge of possibility until sometimes, just sometimes, the possible surrenders and shows them the way to go home.
Seanan McGuire (Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children, #3))
Something is very wrong with Bunce. She's collapsed in the back seat like a dead rabbit. But I can't really focus on it because of the sun and also the wind and because I'm very busy making a list. Things I hate, a list: 1. The sun. 2. The wind. 3. Penelope Bunce, when she hasn't got a plan. 4. American sandwiches. 5. America. 6. The band, America. Which I didn't know about an hour ago. 7. Kansas, also a band I've recently become acquainted with. 8. Kansas, the state. Which isn't that far from Illinois, so it must be wretched. 9. The State of Illinois, for fucking certain. 10. The sun. In my eyes. 11. The wind in my hair. 12. Convertible automobiles. 13. Myself, most of all. 14. My soft heart. 15. My foolish optimism. 16. The words "road" and "trip" when said together with any enthusiasm. 17. Being a vampire, if we're being honest. 18. Being a vampire in a fucking convertible. 19. A deliriously thirsty vampire in a convertible at midday. In Illinois, which is apparently the brightest place on the planet. 20. The sun. Which hangs miles closer to Minooka, Illinois, than it does over London blessed England. 21. Minooka, Illinois. Which seems dreadful. 22. These sunglasses. Rubbish. 23. The fucking sun! We get it - you're very fucking bright! 24. Penelope Bunce, who came up with this idea. An idea not accompanied by a plan. Because all she cared about was seeing her rubbish boyfriend, who clearly cocked it all up. Which we all should have expected from someone from Illinois, land of the damned - a place that manages to be both hot and humid at the same time. You might well expect hell to be hot, but you don't expect it to also be humid. That's what makes it hell, the surprise twist! The devil is clever!
Rainbow Rowell (Wayward Son (Simon Snow, #2))