“When she cried, he would say, "there is nothing wrong with crying. Your feelings tell you who are. They tell what is important. Don't ever be ashamed of them.”
― Terry Brooks, quote from Armageddon's Children
“What they didn't want to believe, what they tried repeatedly to dismiss, was that whatever good and evil existed in the world came from within themselves and not from some abstract source.”
― Terry Brooks, quote from Armageddon's Children
“Not everything we do in this world is about us, Panther. Sometimes we have do things for other reasons. Sometimes we've got to forget about ourselves and help others. If not, what's the point?”
― Terry Brooks, quote from Armageddon's Children
“This is what dying is like, he thinks. You do it alone. You are debased by it. You are exposed to your own weaknesses and to the harsh reality of what it means.”
― Terry Brooks, quote from Armageddon's Children
“What they didn’t want to believe, what they tried repeatedly to dismiss, was that whatever good and evil existed in the world came from within themselves and not from some abstract source.”
― Terry Brooks, quote from Armageddon's Children
“The only time you seem honest is when you’re insulting someone!”
“The only honest things I can say to you are insults.”
― Brandon Sanderson, quote from Words of Radiance
“We'll know we've got it right when they choose for themselves," he used to say.
That doesn't make sense.
'That's what I thought too. I asked him what he meant, but he just shrugged. I don't think he knew himself. But I keep thinking maybe that stray is making exactly the kind of choice he talked about. We're talking about an adult dog, a dog that's been out in the woods for a long time, trying to decide whether or not we can be trusted. Whether this is his place. And it matters to him - he'd rather starve than make the wrong decision.”
― David Wroblewski, quote from The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
“At the end of the vacation, I took a steamer alone from Wuhan back up through the Yangtze Gorges. The journey took three days. One morning, as I was leaning over the side, a gust of wind blew my hair loose and my hairpin fell into the river. A passenger with whom I had been chatting pointed to a tributary which joined the Yangtze just where we were passing, and told me a story.In 33 B.C., the emperor of China, in an attempt to appease the country's powerful northern neighbors, the Huns, decided to send a woman to marry the barbarian king. He made his selection from the portraits of the 3,000 concubines in his court, many of whom he had never seen. As she was for a barbarian, he selected the ugliest portrait, but on the day of her departure he discovered that the woman was in fact extremely beautiful. Her portrait was ugly because she had refused to bribe the court painter.
The emperor ordered the artist to be executed, while the lady wept, sitting by a river, at having to leave her country to live among the barbarians. The wind carried away her hairpin and dropped it into the river as though it wanted to keep something of hers in her homeland. Later on, she killed herself.
Legend had it that where her hairpin dropped, the river turned crystal clear, and became known as the Crystal River. My fellow passenger told me this was the tributary we were passing. With a grin, he declared: "Ah, bad omen!
You might end up living in a foreign land and marrying a barbarian!" I smiled faintly at the traditional Chinese obsession about other races being 'barbarians," and wondered whether this lady of antiquity might not actually have been better off marrying the 'barbarian' king. She would at least be in daily contact with the grassland, the horses, and nature. With the Chinese emperor, she was living in a luxurious prison, without even a proper tree, which might enable the concubines to climb a wall and escape. I thought how we were like the frogs at the bottom of the well in the Chinese legend, who claimed that the sky was only as big as the round opening at the top of their well. I felt an intense and urgent desire to see the world.
At the time I had never spoken with a foreigner, even though I was twenty-three, and had been an English language student for nearly two years. The only foreigners I had ever even set eyes on had been in Peking in 1972.
A foreigner, one of the few 'friends of China," had come to my university once. It was a hot summer day and I was having a nap when a fellow student burst into our room and woke us all by shrieking: "A foreigner is here! Let's go and look at the foreigner!" Some of the others went, but I decided to stay and continue my snooze. I found the whole idea of gazing, zombie like rather ridiculous. Anyway, what was the point of staring if we were forbidden to open our mouths to him, even though he was a 'friend of China'?
I had never even heard a foreigner speaking, except on one single Linguaphone record. When I started learning the language, I had borrowed the record and a phonograph, and listened to it at home in Meteorite Street. Some neighbors gathered in the courtyard, and said with their eyes wide open and their heads shaking, "What funny sounds!"
They asked me to play the record over and over again.”
― Jung Chang, quote from Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
“Winter is coming, Elena," he said, and his voice was clear and chilling even over the howling of the wind, "An unforgiving season. Before it comes, you'll have learned what I can and can't do. Before winter is here, you'll have joined me. You'll be mine.”
― L.J. Smith, quote from The Awakening / The Struggle
“We were never innocent, Kiera. How naive are you? (Kellan)”
― S.C. Stephens, quote from Thoughtless
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