“She still remembered sitting for hours as a little girl and pretending to be a hassock. A foot stool. Because if she could just stay very small, and very quiet, her mother would forget she was there, and then she wouldn't scream about people and places and things that had gone wrong.”
― Eloisa James, quote from An Affair Before Christmas
“Then he just blurted it out, with no preparation. 'The truth of it is that whether your mother arranged our marriage, or whether it was all an illusion, I must be horribly obtuse, because I can't talk myself out of being in love with you.”
― Eloisa James, quote from An Affair Before Christmas
“I miss talking to you.'
'I can't imagine why. We haven't talked about anything particularly interesting in years.'
'I thought it was interesting. Perhaps I like talking about boring things with you.”
― Eloisa James, quote from An Affair Before Christmas
“A number of visitors called this morning,' Finchley announced with some pride. He took a tray from a waiting footman and displayed it as if it were a baby. Sure enough there was a little heap of cardboard bits, embossed with the names of nobility, acquaintances, friends and the purely curious.”
― Eloisa James, quote from An Affair Before Christmas
“She found a small picture made entirely of feathers and was trying to decide whether it depicted a monkey climbing up the back of a man—or possibly a person climbing a flight of stairs or perhaps a cow next to a tree, when she saw a chess piece, sitting by itself on a small pedestal.
It was the white queen, carved from ivory. She stood with a regal frown, her body shadowed by the enormous crown that bloomed on her head. The crown was a hollow sphere, exquisitely carved with open work, and when Jemma peered inside she saw inside another sphere, also open, and inside that, yet another.”
― Eloisa James, quote from An Affair Before Christmas
“He walked until his heart was as dreary as the sky, until some sort of truth came to him.”
― Eloisa James, quote from An Affair Before Christmas
“Fletch took his wife’s arm. 'We aren’t going to turn anyone out into the cold and dark, are we, Poppy?'
She looked up at him and said, 'Absolutely, we are. If you pay them double, Fletch, they’ll probably be quite grateful.'
He always knew that women were the crueler sex. But there was something slightly unnerved in her voice that he found interesting. “Unkind wench. I don’t turn people out into the dark. It’s coming on to snow.”
― Eloisa James, quote from An Affair Before Christmas
“Why don’t they complain?"
"They do sometimes. But usually there's nothing in particular to complain about. Take the case of Hardy's appointment: Who was to blame? Hardy himself? The men? It certainly wasn't the CO. But that's how it always is. Whenever one of us doesn't get an appointment or a promotion, there's always a mist of regulations that makes things unclear. On the surface everything in the army appears to be ruled by manuals, regulations, procedures: it seems very cut and dried. But actually, underneath there are all these murky shadows that you can never quite see: prejudice, distrust, suspicion.”
― Amitav Ghosh, quote from The Glass Palace
“Discipline is simply self-control. If a warrior can't control her feelings, she can't control her actions, and if she can't control her actions, she may blunder into a serious mistake.”
― Catherine M. Wilson, quote from The Warrior's Path
“No matter how far from the war we run, it always catches up with us.”
― Scott Westerfeld, quote from Goliath
“What in the name of Voldy’s pasty-white rear end was that?”
― G. Norman Lippert, quote from James Potter and the Hall of Elders' Crossing
“So maybe the difference isn't language. Maybe it's this: animals do neither good nor evil. They do as they must do. We may call what they do harmful or useful, but good and evil belong to us, who chose to choose what we do. The dragons are dangerous, yes. They can do harm, yes. But they're not evil. They're beneath our morality, if you will, like any animal. Or beyond it. They have nothing to do with it.
We must choose and choose again. The animals need only be and do. We're yoked, and they're free. So to be with an animal is to know a little freedom...”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, quote from The Other Wind
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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