Kathleen Baldwin · 352 pages
Rating: (3K votes)
“And I learned all those many years ago to stop listening to what people said, and listen instead to what they mean. Some people speak with honey and intend to serve us poison. You, my lord, speak with thorns but yearn for cake.”
― Kathleen Baldwin, quote from A School for Unusual Girls
“Joy means so much more when shared with you.”
― Kathleen Baldwin, quote from A School for Unusual Girls
“"You're here because you're odd. Exceptional Unrelenting, Jane followed me to the edge of the circle. "You're unusual, Georgiana. And that is far more dangerous than any fire." ”
― Kathleen Baldwin, quote from A School for Unusual Girls
“Why must people always assume we moderns knew more than any of the previous cultures? It simply isn't true, evidence proves otherwise.”
― Kathleen Baldwin, quote from A School for Unusual Girls
“I wasn’t certain Sebastian’s teasing was the same. It felt different somehow. Sera clarified, “That’s the way men are.” Jane”
― Kathleen Baldwin, quote from A School for Unusual Girls
“I picked up a small square shortbread biscuit and stared at it, noting the uneven angles, wishing it were a perfect square, but it was, after all, merely a baked good, and baked goods did not ordinarily form perfect squares.”
― Kathleen Baldwin, quote from A School for Unusual Girls
“The Sultan tapped his tented fingers, staring into the distance. Suddenly, he lunged toward me, took hold of my wrist, and pulled me roughly down to sit on the cushion beside him. “This . . . mermaid,” he said through clenched teeth, leaning in so close to me that I could smell the mint on his breath. “The one who sang to the king at night.” His voice was fierce, but quiet. I couldn’t tell if anyone but me could hear. “How . . .” he began. “How did she think of the king . . . in her heart?”
I glanced quickly up at his face and saw there a look that took me by surprise. An oddly soft, vulnerable, hurting look. The look of a man who might cry out in his sleep at night, like a child. But then the stony mask slid back.
“Did she despise him,” the Sultan asked, “for making her sing for her life each night? Did she only pretend affection to save her own skin? Did she . . . loathe him for what he had done before, to his other wives? For his . . . sins?”
“No, my lord,” I said softly. “She loved him.”
“Do you swear it?” He gripped my wrist harder, until it hurt.
“Yes, my lord. She told me—” I stopped, corrected myself. “She told the mermaid with the broken fin. She said the king—the merman king, my lord—she said that he had a deep hurting inside him. She said that she wanted to soothe him. And when the mermaid with the broken fin . . . questioned how the queen could love him—because of the things you just said, my lord—the queen said, ‘I’m not ashamed of loving him. There’s nothing wrong with loving someone. It’s hating—that’s what’s wrong.”
― Susan Fletcher, quote from Shadow Spinner
“...that the holocaust is so big, the scale of it is so gigantic, so enormous that it becomes easy to think of it as something mechanical. Anonymous. But everything that happened, happened because someone made a decision to pull a trigger, to flip a switch, to close a cattle door, to hide, to betray.”
― Daniel Mendelsohn, quote from The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million
“Gonna be fun today,” he said. “You boys, you sure know how get the women all spooled up.” “Save it. Want me to help you get the bird ready?” “Yeah, we should do that. Then we make brunch.” “I’m good with brunch,” he said. “Did you notice Brie is here?” “I noticed that,” Sam said. “And I noticed that so far, two of the five married women in this family did not spend the night in bed with their husbands.” “Okay, save it. Since I’m going to get it later, I don’t need your two cents.” “Whatever you say, son,” he said. “If you get in really deep, maybe you can take her back to my office and show her all your medals, tell her how you’ve barely escaped death a dozen times and she just doesn’t scare you.” Jack glared at his father. Sam laughed, having far too much fun with this.”
― Robyn Carr, quote from Shelter Mountain
“I smile thinly, to make it clear that this will happen when hell turns into a family friendly summer resort.”
― Lauren Beukes, quote from Zoo City
“For all the things we say to our children for their own good, very little good ever comes of it.”
― Robin Oliveira, quote from My Name is Mary Sutter
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