“The trouble with words is that no matter how much sense they make in theory, they can’t change what you feel inside.”
― Rebecca James, quote from Beautiful Malice
“And when I look into his eyes there’s a feeling of something I can only describe as familiarity, a sense of safety. Like coming home.”
― Rebecca James, quote from Beautiful Malice
“Katherine:Anyway, if you're not bad, you can't be good.
Robbie:What? You have to be bad to be good? That's stupid. It doesn't make any sense at all.
Katherine:No. It doesn't, does it? What I mean was that if you see the bad in yourself, and dislike it, and try not to feel it, then that's good. Nobody's really good through and through. At least I don't think so. Trying to be good, or at least trying not to be bad, is probably as close as we can get.
Robbie:Maybe you're right.
Katherine:Maybe I am...”
― Rebecca James, quote from Beautiful Malice
“True. But your're sad."
I sit up. "Am I?"
"I don't know. Are you?"
"I don't know. Are you?"
He laughs. "I am if you are. I'm not if you're not.”
― Rebecca James, quote from Beautiful Malice
“Nadie es completamente bueno de pies a cabeza. Al menos yo no lo creo. Intentar ser bueno, o al menos intentar no ser malo, es lo más parecido a ser buenos.”
― Rebecca James, quote from Beautiful Malice
“Truth or Dare?" she asks. I hesitate. "Truth," I say finally. "I can imagine one of your dares, and I don’t fancy running down Oxford Street naked tonight."
"Truth," Alice says slowly, drawing out the vowel sound as if she’s savouring the word. "Are you sure? Are you sure you can be completely honest?"
"I think so. Try me."
"Okay" And then she looks at me curiously. "So. Were you glad, deep down? Were you glad to be rid of her? Your perfect sister? Were you secretly glad when she died?"
Katherine has moved away from her shattered family to start afresh in Sydney. There she keeps her head down until she is befriended by the charismatic, party-loving Alice, who brings her out of her shell. But there is a dark side to Alice, something seductive yet threatening. And as Katherine learns the truth about Alice, their tangled destinies spiral to an explosive and devastating finale.”
― Rebecca James, quote from Beautiful Malice
“Katherine,” he says when we finish. We’re breathing each other’s air and lying side by side, our noses almost touching.
“Mick,” I say.
“I love your name. It suits you perfectly. Katherine. Katherine. Katherine and Mick.”
And when he says my name like that, right next to his, everything is different. I’ve never really liked being called Katherine—all this time, despite what I’ve said, I’ve desperately missed being called Katie. I’ve missed being Katie.
But I’m no longer Katie, I’m Katherine—and tonight, for the first time ever, I don’t want to be anyone else.”
― Rebecca James, quote from Beautiful Malice
Rebecca James
Born place: in Sydney, Australia
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“fear of death.” Our study of psychoneurotic disturbances points to a more comprehensive explanation, which includes that of Westermarck. When a wife loses her husband, or a daughter her mother, it not infrequently happens that the survivor is afflicted with tormenting scruples, called ‘obsessive reproaches’ which raises the question whether she herself has not been guilty through carelessness or neglect, of the death of the beloved person. No recalling of the care with which she nursed the invalid, or direct refutation of the asserted guilt can put an end to the torture, which is the pathological expression of mourning and which in time slowly subsides. Psychoanalytic investigation of such cases has made us acquainted with the secret mainsprings of this affliction. We have ascertained that these obsessive reproaches are in a certain sense justified and therefore are immune to refutation or objections. Not that the mourner has really been guilty of the death or that she has really been careless, as the obsessive reproach asserts; but still there was something in her, a wish of which she herself was unaware, which was not displeased with the fact that death came, and which would have brought it about sooner had it been strong enough. The reproach now reacts against this unconscious wish after the death of the beloved person. Such hostility, hidden in the unconscious behind tender love, exists in almost all cases of intensive emotional allegiance to a particular person, indeed it represents the classic case, the prototype of the ambivalence of human emotions. There is always more or less of this ambivalence in everybody’s disposition; normally it is not strong enough to give rise to the obsessive reproaches we have described. But where there is abundant predisposition for it, it manifests itself in the relation to those we love most, precisely where you would least expect it. The disposition to compulsion neurosis which we have so often taken for comparison with taboo problems, is distinguished by a particularly high degree of this original ambivalence of emotions.”
― Sigmund Freud, quote from Totem and Taboo
“So the question becomes, Daughter of the Dragon, what will you sacrifice? What will you let be taken away so that you, too, can have power?”
― Kiersten White, quote from And I Darken
“–Beatriz se llevó mi nariz, en un desliz.”
― James Dashner, quote from The Maze Runner Series
“The advantage of possessing a great empire is not to be able to do the evil that one desires, but to do all the good that one possibly can.”
― Andrew Lang, quote from The Blue Fairy Book
“The truth about life was that nothing ever ended until you died, and even then you just left a whole bunch of unresolved narratives behind you.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from Juliet, Naked
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