Quotes from Chains

Laurie Halse Anderson ·  316 pages

Rating: (37.9K votes)


“A scar is a sign of strength. . .the sign of a survivor.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from Chains


“She cannot chain my soul. Yes, she could hurt me. She'd already done so...I would bleed, or not. Scar, or not. Live, or not. But she could not hurt my soul, not unless I gave it to her.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from Chains


“Didn't help to ponder things that were forever gone. It only made a body restless and fill up with bees, all wanting to sting something.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from Chains


“I wanted to pull down a book, open it proper, and gobble up page after page”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from Chains


“Melancholy held me hostage, and the bees built a hive of sadness in my soul.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from Chains



“This is not our fight', the old man said. 'British or American, that is not the choice. You must choose your own side, find your road through the valley of darkness that will lead you to the river Jordan. . . Look hard for your river Jordan, my child. You'll find it.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from Chains


“Momma said that ghosts couldn't move over water. That's why Africans got trapped in the Americas.. They kept moving us over the water, stealing us away from our ghosts and ancestors, who cried salty rivers into the sand. That's where Momma was now, wailing at the water's edge, while her girls were pulled out of sight under white sails that cracked in the wind.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from Chains


“It made me strong.I took a step back, near my whole self in the mirror.I pushed back my shoulders and raised my chin, my back straight as an arrow.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from Chains


“Gossip is the foul smell from the Devil's backside.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from Chains


“It was like looking at a knot, knowing it was a knot, but not knowing how to untie it. I had no map for this life.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from Chains



“The best time to talk to ghosts is just before the sun comes up. That's when they can hear us true.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from Chains


“If an entire nation could seek its freedom, why not a girl?”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from Chains


“Flames curled out of all the windows next door. The rooftop beyond that was a lake of fire. Every building in sight was burning. The air was filled with crackling and popping sounds, with shrieks and screams coming from the street below.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from Chains


“Has she received any letters from Lockton?'
The question hit me like a bucket of cold water. 'You asking me to spy again?'
'Listen,' he started, 'Our freedom-'
I did not let him continue. 'You are blind. They don't want us free. They just want liberty for themselves.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from Chains


“The world turns upside down every day.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from Chains



“This is not our fight,' the old man said. 'British or American, that is not the choice. You must choose your own side, find your road through the valley of darkness that will lead you to the river Jordan.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from Chains


“It would have eased her mind if I thanked her for wanting to buy me away from Madam. I tried to be grateful but could not. A body does not like being bought and sold like a basket of eggs, even if the person who cracks the shells is kind.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from Chains


“I thought of all the ancestors waiting at the water's edge for their stolen children to come home. Waiting and waiting and waiting . . .”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from Chains


“How could men who liked cats be bad?”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, quote from Chains


About the author

Laurie Halse Anderson
Born place: in Potsdam, New York, The United States
Born date October 23, 2018
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Popular quotes

“The Sun King had dinner each night alone. He chose from forty dishes, served on gold and silver plate. It took a staggering 498 people to prepare each meal. He was rich because he consumed the work of other people, mainly in the form of their services. He was rich because other people did things for him. At that time, the average French family would have prepared and consumed its own meals as well as paid tax to support his servants in the palace. So it is not hard to conclude that Louis XIV was rich because others were poor.

But what about today? Consider that you are an average person, say a woman of 35, living in, for the sake of argument, Paris and earning the median wage, with a working husband and two children. You are far from poor, but in relative terms, you are immeasurably poorer than Louis was. Where he was the richest of the rich in the world’s richest city, you have no servants, no palace, no carriage, no kingdom. As you toil home from work on the crowded Metro, stopping at the shop on the way to buy a ready meal for four, you might be thinking that Louis XIV’s dining arrangements were way beyond your reach. And yet consider this. The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella). You can buy a fresh, frozen, tinned, smoked or pre-prepared meal made with beef, chicken, pork, lamb, fish, prawns, scallops, eggs, potatoes, beans, carrots, cabbage, aubergine, kumquats, celeriac, okra, seven kinds of lettuce, cooked in olive, walnut, sunflower or peanut oil and flavoured with cilantro, turmeric, basil or rosemary … You may have no chefs, but you can decide on a whim to choose between scores of nearby bistros, or Italian, Chinese, Japanese or Indian restaurants, in each of which a team of skilled chefs is waiting to serve your family at less than an hour’s notice. Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals.

You employ no tailor, but you can browse the internet and instantly order from an almost infinite range of excellent, affordable clothes of cotton, silk, linen, wool and nylon made up for you in factories all over Asia. You have no carriage, but you can buy a ticket which will summon the services of a skilled pilot of a budget airline to fly you to one of hundreds of destinations that Louis never dreamed of seeing. You have no woodcutters to bring you logs for the fire, but the operators of gas rigs in Russia are clamouring to bring you clean central heating. You have no wick-trimming footman, but your light switch gives you the instant and brilliant produce of hardworking people at a grid of distant nuclear power stations. You have no runner to send messages, but even now a repairman is climbing a mobile-phone mast somewhere in the world to make sure it is working properly just in case you need to call that cell. You have no private apothecary, but your local pharmacy supplies you with the handiwork of many thousands of chemists, engineers and logistics experts. You have no government ministers, but diligent reporters are even now standing ready to tell you about a film star’s divorce if you will only switch to their channel or log on to their blogs.

My point is that you have far, far more than 498 servants at your immediate beck and call. Of course, unlike the Sun King’s servants, these people work for many other people too, but from your perspective what is the difference? That is the magic that exchange and specialisation have wrought for the human species.”
― Matt Ridley, quote from The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves


“The Cayce Readings spoke of God as a universal loving intelligence that does not discriminate against anyone—nor should we: “More wars, more bloodshed have been shed over the racial and religious differences than over any other problem. These, too, must go the way of all others; and man must learn . . . whether they be called of this or that sect or schism or ism or cult, the Lord is ONE.”20”
― David Wilcock, quote from The Source Field Investigations: The Hidden Science and Lost Civilizations Behind the 2012 Prophecies


“we could see manmade things. Colony things.”
― Hugh Howey, quote from Half Way Home


“If the borderline rage that had fueled me for so long was torn down and taken away, would there be anything left? Or would it take the life, the spirit, right out of me? I was daunted by the prospect of letting go without a clear idea of what would emerge in the old framework's place.”
― quote from Get Me Out of Here: My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder


“Justice is a relative concept in all ages. The fourteenth century is no exception.”
― Ian Mortimer, quote from The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century


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