“Mama used to say, you have to know someone a thousand days before you can glimpse her soul.”
― Shannon Hale, quote from Book of a Thousand Days
“You're better than seven years of food. You're better than windows. You're even better than the sky.”
― Shannon Hale, quote from Book of a Thousand Days
“I do like the world quite a lot.”
― Shannon Hale, quote from Book of a Thousand Days
“I let my head fall back, and I gazed into the Eternal Blue Sky. It was morning. Some of the sky was yellow, some the softest blue. One small cloud scuttled along. Strange how everything below can be such death and chaos and pain while above the sky is peace, sweet blue gentleness. I heard a shaman say once, the Ancestors want our souls to be like the blue sky.”
― Shannon Hale, quote from Book of a Thousand Days
“My mama used to say, 'Are you sad? Then just wait a minute.”
― Shannon Hale, quote from Book of a Thousand Days
“Sometimes my fancy gets to floating inside me, threatening to carry me away like a leaf on a wind. Better to be a stone.”
― Shannon Hale, quote from Book of a Thousand Days
“But the hoping, that's what really hurts.”
― Shannon Hale, quote from Book of a Thousand Days
“Careful with the accusations of insanity, oh my lady whose home is a tower with windows of brick, all for the sake of some skinny-ankled, laugh-prone boy of a khan.”
― Shannon Hale, quote from Book of a Thousand Days
“This morning, Tegus welcomed me again with an arm clasp and cheek touch. I wasn't startled this time, and I breathed in at his neck. How can I describe the scent of his skin? He smells something like cinnamon-- brown and dry and sweet and warm. Ancestors, is it wrong for me to imagine laying my head on his chest and closing my eyes and breathing in his smell?”
― Shannon Hale, quote from Book of a Thousand Days
“... and with my last thought I felt some real sympathy for those poor chickens.”
― Shannon Hale, quote from Book of a Thousand Days
“They weren't nice words he said. He could've lived a good life and died never having made a person feel rubbed down to bones and too sad to hold together. ”
― Shannon Hale, quote from Book of a Thousand Days
“There's nothing more aggravating in the world than the midnight sniffling of the person you've decided to hate.”
― Shannon Hale, quote from Book of a Thousand Days
“Smell is the voice of the soul...”
― Shannon Hale, quote from Book of a Thousand Days
“Time is a wind that keeps blowing in my face and mumbling words that don't make sense.”
― Shannon Hale, quote from Book of a Thousand Days
“I was thinking how you can't tell if a person's beautiful or not by her shadow...”
― Shannon Hale, quote from Book of a Thousand Days
“I always knew it was ill-fated, but he truly believed I would be his bride. I guess I'd never realized that before. He had taken my mucker hand and looked at my mottled face and believed we would wed. And he hadn't seemed sorry. In fact, he'd swooped me up in a corridor and kissed me.
That set me to crying.”
― Shannon Hale, quote from Book of a Thousand Days
“Tegus, I'm leaving this book behind for you, so you will know the why of it all, and maybe you'll forgive me, or maybe you'll think me false and reprehensible. You'd be justified. I couldn't stand the thought of your reading all my words unless I knew for certain that I'd never have to face you again, so please don't look for me. If you read the book in its entirety, you'll know for truth who is Lady Saren. And I guess you'll also know that I'm a silly girl who writes down every word you said to me.”
― Shannon Hale, quote from Book of a Thousand Days
“Khan Tegas never looked at me. I'm a mucker maid. I guess I needed to be reminded of that. So, good. Fine. Sometimes my fancy gets to floating inside me, threatening to carry me away like a leaf on a wind. Better to be a stone.”
― Shannon Hale, quote from Book of a Thousand Days
“I think sometimes just being silent and watching can change a person.”
― Shannon Hale, quote from Book of a Thousand Days
“A cat can make you feel well rested when you're tired or turn a rage into a calm just by sitting on your lap. His very nearness is a healing song.”
― Shannon Hale, quote from Book of a Thousand Days
“I held her head to my shoulder, rocking her, rubbing her back. Poor thing, I don't think she know where to put the whole world.”
― Shannon Hale, quote from Book of a Thousand Days
“Sometimes I think they're all ridiculous. There I was, a sensible person with thoughts in my head, offering a solution. And they wouldn't listen. What aggravation, to believe I can help and yet not be allowed. -Dashti”
― Shannon Hale, quote from Book of a Thousand Days
“I think sometimes, being silent and watching, can change a person.”
― Shannon Hale, quote from Book of a Thousand Days
“Maybe I got a few words wrong, but that's so near how the conversation went, I'm going to call it truth.”
― Shannon Hale, quote from Book of a Thousand Days
“Today I keep thinking of all the people who have left and never returned — my brothers, Khan Tegus, our guards, this entire city. What a strange, dark world that swallows people whole.”
― Shannon Hale, quote from Book of a Thousand Days
“Who am I to tell a man to live? Who am I to claim the powers of the Ancestors? I moved aside so the shawman could have more room to do his holy work. He's climbed the Scared Mountain and seen the face of the Ancestors. I have no place beside him. -Dashti”
― Shannon Hale, quote from Book of a Thousand Days
“You slew Khasar, you healed me, and you have perfect ankles. I really don't think this is a question we need to debate. -Khan Tegus”
― Shannon Hale, quote from Book of a Thousand Days
“Sometimes my fancy gets to floating inside me, threatening to carry me away like a leaf on a wind. Better to be a stone.”
― Shannon Hale, quote from Book of a Thousand Days
“I think it's lovely. I mean..." I returned my gaze to the fire, because it was easier to talk to him that way. "What I mean to say is, it's lovely to think of your mother holding her first baby, and looking at your fingers and toes, your eyes, your lips, and saying, 'Perfect. He's perfect. My Tegus.' -Dashti”
― Shannon Hale, quote from Book of a Thousand Days
Shannon Hale
Born place: in Salt Lake City, Utah, The United States
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“Her parents noticed, when Dominika turned five, that the little girl had a prodigious memory. She could recite lines from Pushkin, identify the concertos of Tchaikovsky. And when music was played, Dominika would dance barefoot around the Oriental carpet in the living room, perfectly in time with the notes, twirling and jumping, perfectly in balance, her eyes gleaming, her hands flashing. Vassily and Nina looked at each other, and her mother asked Dominika how she had learned all this. “I follow the colors,” said the little girl.
“What do you mean, ‘the colors’?” asked her mother. Dominika gravely explained that when the music played, or when her father read aloud to her, colors would fill the room. Different colors, some bright, some dark, sometimes they “jumped in the air” and all Dominika had to do was follow them. It was how she could remember so much. When she danced, she leapt over bars of bright blue, followed shimmering spots of red on the floor. The parents looked at each other again.
“I like red and blue and purple,” said Dominika. “When Batushka reads, or when Mamulya plays, they are beautiful.”
“And when Mama is cross with you?” asked Vassily.
“Yellow, I don’t like the yellow,” said the little girl, turning the pages of a book. “And the black cloud. I do not like that.”
― Jason Matthews, quote from Red Sparrow
“Sweet, handsome, and willing to help hide the bodies without asking a single question. He really was a keeper.”
― J.D. Horn, quote from The Void
“You were right. I'm going to make you want things you never knew you wanted.”
― Meredith Wild, quote from Hardwired
“The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was excited, filled with strength. The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?”
― James Salter, quote from Light Years
“Life isn't about merely surviving. It's about living.”
― D. Nichole King, quote from Love Always, Kate
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