“Darling," he said distractedly,"about the moon..."
"Yes?"
"I don't think it matters whether you want it or not."
"What are you talking about?"
"The moon. I think it's yours."
Victoria yawned, not bothering to open her eyes. "Fine. i'm glad to have it."
"But--" Robert shook his head. He was growing fanciful. the moon didn't belong to his wife. It didn't follow her, protect her. It certainly didn't wink at anybody.
But he stared out the window the rest of the way home, just in case”
― Julia Quinn, quote from Everything and the Moon
“She'd spent seven long years without so much as a hug, and she was starved for physical affection. She had known what it was like to be touched and kissed, and she had no idea how much she'd missed it until that very moment.”
― Julia Quinn, quote from Everything and the Moon
“It's too late," she whispered.
He whirled her around. "Don't say that! We are no better than animals if we cannot learn from our mistakes and move forward."
She lifted her chin. "It isn't that. I don't want to marry you anymore." And she didn't, she realized ...
He paled and whispered, "You're just saying that."
"I mean what I say, Robert. I don't want to marry you."
"You're angry," he reasoned. "You're angry, and you want to hurt me, and you have every right to feel that way."
"I'm not angry." She paused. "Well, yes, I am, but that's not why I'm refusing you."
He crossed his arms. "Why, then? Why won't you even listen to me?"
"Because I'm happy now! Is that so difficult for you to understand? I like my position and I love my independence.”
― Julia Quinn, quote from Everything and the Moon
“I did what I thought was best.'
"And so you kidnapped me,' she said bitterly.
'If you recall I offered you the option of residing with my relatives. You refused.'
'I want to be independent.'
'One doesn't have to be alone to be independent.'
Victoria couldn't think of a suitable rebuttal to that statement, so she remained silent.
'When I marry you,' Robert said softly, 'I want it to be a partnership in every sense of the word. I want to consult you on matters of land management and tenant care. I want us to decide together how to raise our children. I don't know why you are so certain that loving me means losing yourself.”
― Julia Quinn, quote from Everything and the Moon
“I just wasn't able to say it before now.'
He blinked. 'You needed to knee a man in the groin before you could tell me you loved me?'
'No!' Then she thought about his words. 'Well, yes, in a way. I've always been so fearful that you would run my life. But I've learned that having you with me doesn't mean that I can't take care of myself as well.'
'You certainly made short work of Eversleigh.'
Her chin lifted a notch and she allowed herself a satisfied smile. 'Yes, I did, didn't I? And do you know, but I think I couldn't have done it without you.'
'Victoria, you did this all on your own. I wasn't even present.'
'Yes, you were.' She picked up his hand and placed it over her heart.”
― Julia Quinn, quote from Everything and the Moon
“She won't know how to fulfill the duties of a noblewoman.'
'She is quite bright. And one could find no fault with her manners. She has received a gentle education. I am certain she will make an excellent countess.' Robert's expression softened. 'Her very nature will bring honor to our name.”
― Julia Quinn, quote from Everything and the Moon
“The way he had always tried to tell her he loved her when she least expected it.”
― Julia Quinn, quote from Everything and the Moon
“What I am in search of is not so much the gratification of a curiosity or a passion for worldly life, but something far less conditional. I do not wish to go out into the world with an insurance policy in my pocket guaranteeing my return in the event of a disappointment, like some cautious traveller who would be content with a brief glimpse of the world. On the contrary, I desire that there should be hazards, difficulties and dangers to face; I am hungry for reality, for tasks and deeds, and also for privation and suffering.”
― Hermann Hesse, quote from The Glass Bead Game
“Chiron had said once that nations were the most foolish of mortal inventions. “No man is worth more than another, wherever he is from.”
“But what if he is your friend?” Achilles had asked him, feet kicked up on the wall of the rose-quartz cave. “Or your brother? Should you treat him the same as a stranger?”
“You ask a question that philosophers argue over,” Chiron had said. “He is worth more to you, perhaps. But the stranger is someone else’s friend and brother. So which life is more important?”
We had been silent. We were fourteen, and these things were too hard for us. Now that we are twenty-seven, they still feel too hard.
He is half of my soul, as the poets say. He will be dead soon, and his honor is all that will remain. It is his child, his dearest self. Should I reproach him for it? I have saved Briseis. I cannot save them all.
I know, now, how I would answer Chiron. I would say: there is no answer. Whichever you choose, you are wrong.”
― Madeline Miller, quote from The Song of Achilles
“And sometimes you meet someone who doesn't see you any differently if you tell them. That is everything.”
― Melissa Marr, quote from Ink Exchange
“Weren’t all books ultimately related? After all, the same letters filled them, just arranged in a different order. Which meant that, in a certain way, every book was contained in every other!”
― Cornelia Funke, quote from Inkdeath
“Yet at least he had believed in the cars, maybe to excess: how could he not, seeing people poorer than him come in, Negro, Mexican, cracker, a parade seven days a week, bring with them the most godawful of trade-ins: motorized, metal extensions of themselves, of their families and what their whole lives must be like, out there so naked for anybody, a stranger like himself, to look at, frame cockeyed, rusty underneath, fender repainted in a shade just off enough to depress the value, if not Mucho himself, inside smelling hopeless of children, of supermarket booze, or two, sometimes three generations of cigarette smokers, or only of dust--and when the cars were swept out you had to look at the actual residue of these lives, and there was no way of telling what things had been truly refused (when so little he supposed came by that out of fear most of it had to be taken and kept) and what had simply (perhaps tragically) been lost: clipped coupons promising savings of 5 or 10¢, trading stamps, pink flyers advertising specials at the market, butts, tooth-shy combs, help-wanted ads, Yellow Pages torn from the phone book, rags of old underwear or dresses that already were period costumes, for wiping your own breath off the inside of a windshield with so you could see whatever it was, a movie, a woman or car you coveted, a cop who might pull you over just for drill, all the bits and pieces coated uniformly, like a salad of despair, in a grey dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust, body wastes--it nauseated him to look, but he had to look.”
― Thomas Pynchon, quote from The Crying of Lot 49
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