“A woman's beauty is in her strength and her passion.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, quote from Avery
“I wouldn't pick you as the kind of man who'd care to die nicely."
He leant forward, lacing his hands together. "How do you think I'd like to die?"
"In a blaze of ice and fury." He was from Pirenti, after all.
The corner of his mouth hitched up at that, but it was a humourless expression, one filled with chipped edges and painted regrets. "And you?" he asked. " How would you like to die, Avery of Kaya?"
I picked up the oars and started to row.
"I'm already dead, Ambrose.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, quote from Avery
“He smiled. And as I looked at the naked beauty of the expression, I fell in love with him.
It was that simple, that complicated.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, quote from Avery
“It's simple, being hurt. But it's complicated, loving someone.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, quote from Avery
“Who has ever loved as boldly as he does?”
― Charlotte McConaghy, quote from Avery
“She was abstractly beautiful, as I had always wished to be, but I now found her ugly, understanding as I did now that real beauty simply came from happiness.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, quote from Avery
“And then I stopped thinking about Prince Ambrose of Pirenti, because he was destroying me.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, quote from Avery
“I keep asking myself why this happened," I told him softly. "How you and I could have possibly ended up here, together. I think I'm supposed to help you realise."
"Realise what?"
"The man you will be.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, quote from Avery
“And that was when I realised I wasn't the strongest man in the world after all. I was the weakest.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, quote from Avery
“Forget dying. I suddenly wanted to inflict pain. My anger was a living, breathing thing controlling my body, making me shake. It was funny what a person with only half a soul could feel: no joy, no pleasure, no amusement, no longing or desire or fear – but they could feel anger, more keenly than if they were whole. Sharper than they ever had before they were destroyed – anger like it kept you alive, anger like air. I’d thought, many times, that it might have been only this anger that allowed me to survive at all.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, quote from Avery
“At a time which seemed to him as far distant as the dim and distant past of his ancestors, his father, Okumana, the man who could make better spear tips than anyone else, had explained to him that there was always a way out of any situation, as long as one was alive. Death was the last hiding place. That was something to keep in reserve until there was no other way of avoiding an apparently insuperable threat. There were always escape routes that were not immediately obvious, and that was why humans, unlike animals, had a brain. In order to look inward, not outward. Inward, toward the secret places where the spirits of one’s ancestors were waiting to act as a man’s guide through life. Who am I? he thought. A human being who has lost his identity is no longer a human being. He is an animal. That’s what has happened to me. I started to kill people because I myself was dead. When I was a child and saw the signs, the accursed signs telling the blacks where they were allowed to go and what existed exclusively for the whites, I started to be diminished even then. A child should grow, grow bigger; but in my country a black child had to learn how to grow smaller and smaller. I saw my parents succumb to their own invisibility, their own accumulated bitterness. I was an obedient child and learned to be a nobody among nobodies. Apartheid was my real father. I learned what no one should need to learn. To live with falsehood, contempt, a lie elevated to the only truth in my country. A lie enforced by the police and laws, but above all by a flood of white water, a torrent of words about the natural differences between white and black, the superiority of white civilization. That superiority turned me into a murderer, songoma. And I can believe this is the ultimate consequence of learning to grow smaller and smaller as a child. For what has this apartheid, this falsified white superiority been but a systematic plundering of our souls? When our despair exploded in furious”
― Henning Mankell, quote from The White Lioness
“God has protected his anointed. And the wrath of Purgatory is certainly coming for those who run and are in need of its cleansing fire. You can run, but you can't hide. ~Father Abraham”
― Lucian Bane, quote from No Mercy
“I plan to write three words on my arm before entering the Box, hoping that its simple message will plant seed in the Gladers who see it. To remind them, even subconsciously, what it is we fight for. It's a phrase I saw on a cold, dark night long ago, the Crank pits seething behind me. It's a phrase that I believe with all my heart, despite the horrors.
I think you know what it is.”
― James Dashner, quote from The Fever Code
“This boy did not take steps. He glided like a shark through the water. And like the sea, the members of the Black Clan parted around him”
― Renee Ahdieh, quote from Flame in the Mist
“travel [is] flight and pursuit in equal parts.”
― Paul Theroux, quote from The Great Railway Bazaar
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