“You will never find me in trouble. You will find me in the library. If you can remember where that is.”
― Sarah Rees Brennan, quote from In Other Lands
“Oh no,” Elliot moaned, and sat down heavily on his bunk bed. “This is magic Sparta.”
― Sarah Rees Brennan, quote from In Other Lands
“One of the boringly human pair of boys, the obvious leader, was tall and broad-shouldered, with golden hair, as if Nature has said, 'No worries, buddy, I gotcha, no nasty tiring thinking will ever be necessary, also have a crown.”
― Sarah Rees Brennan, quote from In Other Lands
“I am not winning any arguments because I know how to hurt someone. How does that prove that you're right? How does being stronger or more vicious prove anything, except that all this talk about honor is stupid? Where's the honor in being better at hurting somebody? Telling me I have to do this is insulting, as if I can't win any other way. As if I can't win in a better way.”
― Sarah Rees Brennan, quote from In Other Lands
“Elliot was trying to teach himself trollish via a two-hundred-year-old book by a man who’d had a traumatic break-up with a troll. This meant a lot of commentary along the lines of “This is how trolls say I love you. FOOTNOTE: BUT THEY DON’T MEAN IT!”
― Sarah Rees Brennan, quote from In Other Lands
“If you must know, she is the one soul destined for my own, and we are going to be together forever,” he declared loftily. “That’s weird,” Luke told him. “We’re thirteen.”
― Sarah Rees Brennan, quote from In Other Lands
“You should wear whatever clothing you feel most comfortable in. Being comfortable in yourself is the best way to be attractive to others.”
― Sarah Rees Brennan, quote from In Other Lands
“Violence was like that, Elliot had noticed. One move toward it and all at once everything was allowed: anyone could be hurt, out of a mix of pride and anger and stupid disregard for the fact that you could be hurt as easily as someone else.”
― Sarah Rees Brennan, quote from In Other Lands
“Two harpies, one stone,” he added, and then saw the way Serene was looking at him. “A diplomatic stone! A diplomatic stone.”
― Sarah Rees Brennan, quote from In Other Lands
“Fourteen wasn't horrible, but it was more complicated, and sometimes that felt like the same thing.”
― Sarah Rees Brennan, quote from In Other Lands
“The most annoying thing, perhaps, was that the elven troop were obviously good people and were being kind to them, and yet Elliot felt subtly wrong-footed at every turn. He wondered if this was how Serene felt all the time, and he promised himself to bear it as well as she did.”
― Sarah Rees Brennan, quote from In Other Lands
“I do not know if you are not interested, or protecting yourself, but you cannot guard yourself against the whole world. You only succeed in placing a barrier between yourself from the world." He hesitated. "I know that from personal experience.”
― Sarah Rees Brennan, quote from In Other Lands
“What's your name?'
'Serene.'
'Serene?' Elliot asked.
'Serene-Heart-in-the-Chaos-of-Battle.'
Elliot's mouth fell open. 'That is badass.”
― Sarah Rees Brennan, quote from In Other Lands
“I'm not saying this to upset you. I'm trying to tell you what you absolutely have to do. What if we were both dead?' asked Luke.
Elliot looked at his pudding and was very sad about his life and his choices. How had he wound up here, in a place where all he had was pudding - Elliot would have sold his soul for a chocolate bar - and awful people who at the age of thirteen asked questions like 'What if we were both dead.”
― Sarah Rees Brennan, quote from In Other Lands
“Elliot was left to trail behind. As he did, he thought about Luke talking about literary tropes—the fearless hero, the valiant heroine, and where did it all leave him? Sidekick: a horrible indignity, Elliot refused to accept it. And the other idea was some sort of lurking, jealous figure: an Iago, a pathetic pseudo-villain waiting in the wings to plot and bring the hero down. He wasn’t going to plot against Luke, who had dumb daffodil hair and said “tropez,” for God’s sake.”
― Sarah Rees Brennan, quote from In Other Lands
“There isn’t any kind of relationship that’s all problem-free delightful unicorns. You can’t have a relationship without issues and prejudices. The way to be equals is if both people agree to be equals, and treat themselves and each other as equals, despite all that.”
― Sarah Rees Brennan, quote from In Other Lands
“All over the gray facade of his father's house in scarlet letters he wrote: ELLIOT SCHAFER. He almost added: "was here" but did not, partly because it was a little too cliched vandal for him, and partly because it did not encompass all he wanted to say: was here, is no longer here, is somewhere almost unimaginably different, is all right.”
― Sarah Rees Brennan, quote from In Other Lands
“So far magic school was total rubbish.”
― Sarah Rees Brennan, quote from In Other Lands
“Keeping everything very cool and professional, I see, Cadet,” remarked Commander Woodsinger as he went by. Elliot did not know why the two most important women in his life had to be deadpan snarkers.”
― Sarah Rees Brennan, quote from In Other Lands
“I don’t need you to explain to me the concept of a magical land filled with fantastic creatures that only certain special children can enter. I am acquainted with the last several centuries of popular culture. There are books. And cartoons, for the illiterate.”
― Sarah Rees Brennan, quote from In Other Lands
“Magic lands in books had always seemed close to nature, but in a nice way, without all the unpleasant details.”
― Sarah Rees Brennan, quote from In Other Lands
“You should want to have gifted students who may excel in both courses, and you should be encouraging students when they show interest in their studies. Do you not want warriors who are brilliant, and diplomats who are brave?”
― Sarah Rees Brennan, quote from In Other Lands
“Elliot finished his book in bed and pondered going to get another one. He only had so much time left, and he had so many books to get through.”
― Sarah Rees Brennan, quote from In Other Lands
“There had been talk of cutting Luke from Trigon, but then everyone on Luke’s team had wept and had nervous breakdowns at the idea of cutting Luke from Trigon, so nobody talked about it anymore.”
― Sarah Rees Brennan, quote from In Other Lands
“It wasn't her fault if Elliot had expressed his feelings wrong. He always did that, as if life were a dance where everybody else knew the moves but Elliot was constantly and fatally out of step.”
― Sarah Rees Brennan, quote from In Other Lands
“It’s better this way,” said Elliot. “And if I came back—you’re probably both going to die. I’d be stranded and you’d be dead.” They were soldiers. This way, Elliot would never know if they died. He put the photo down. “I didn’t mean that,” he said. “You’re not going to die. I don’t know why I said that.”
― Sarah Rees Brennan, quote from In Other Lands
“Age but shows the marks of character being displayed and life being lived.”
― Sarah Rees Brennan, quote from In Other Lands
“Books rose to the ceiling, which rose to a point, with ladders that leaned against the walls.”
― Sarah Rees Brennan, quote from In Other Lands
“Why is language in the Borderlands so weird? Some of it’s modern, and some of it’s medieval, and I guess that makes sense with the influx of a certain amount of new blood to the training camp every year, but how do some words and phrases transfer, while others don’t? Why do you know the word ‘jerk’ and not the word ‘bisexual’?”
“I guess people say the first word more,” said Luke.”
― Sarah Rees Brennan, quote from In Other Lands
Sarah Rees Brennan
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“Kyle had to give her credit; it took skill—plus no
heart and a serious abuse of the English language—
to break up with someone in fewer than 140
characters.”
― Julie James, quote from About That Night
“kind, sad eyes that seemed to carry with them the secret wisdom of the earth.”
― Christopher Scotton, quote from The Secret Wisdom of the Earth
“Now you might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.”
― J.K. Rowling, quote from Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination
“I almost blushed, he was that good-looking. No one should be that good-looking.”
― Samantha Young, quote from Moonlight on Nightingale Way
“Maria, lonely prostitute on a street of pain,
You, at least, hail me and speak to me
While a thousand others ignore my face.
You offer me an hour of love,
And your fees are not as costly as most.
You are the madonna of the lonely,
The first-born daughter in a world of pain.
You do not turn fat men aside,
Or trample on the stuttering, shy ones,
You are the meadow where desperate men
Can find a moment's comfort.
Men have paid more to their wives
To know a bit of peace
And could not walk away without the guilt
That masquerades as love.
You do not bind them, lovely Maria, you comfort them
And bid them return.
Your body is more Christian than the Bishop's
Whose gloved hand cannot feel the dropping of my blood.
Your passion is as genuine as most,
Your caring as real!
But you, Maria, sacred whore on the endless pavement of pain,
You, whose virginity each man may make his own
Without paying ought but your fee,
You who know nothing of virgin births and immaculate conceptions,
You who touch man's flesh and caress a stranger,
Who warm his bed to bring his aching skin alive,
You make more sense than stock markets and football games
Where sad men beg for virility.
You offer yourself for a fee--and who offers himself for less?
At times you are cruel and demanding--harsh and insensitive,
At times you are shrewd and deceptive--grasping and hollow.
The wonder is that at times you are gentle and concerned,
Warm and loving.
You deserve more respect than nuns who hide their sex for eternal love;
Your fees are not so high, nor your prejudice so virtuous.
You deserve more laurels than the self-pitying mother of many children,
And your fee is not as costly as most.
Man comes to you when his bed is filled with brass and emptiness,
When liquor has dulled his sense enough
To know his need of you.
He will come in fantasy and despair, Maria,
And leave without apologies.
He will come in loneliness--and perhaps
Leave in loneliness as well.
But you give him more than soldiers who win medals and pensions,
More than priests who offer absolution
And sweet-smelling ritual,
More than friends who anticipate his death
Or challenge his life,
And your fee is not as costly as most.
You admit that your love is for a fee,
Few women can be as honest.
There are monuments to statesmen who gave nothing to anyone
Except their hungry ego,
Monuments to mothers who turned their children
Into starving, anxious bodies,
Monuments to Lady Liberty who makes poor men prisoners.
I would erect a monument for you--
who give more than most--
And for a meager fee.
Among the lonely, you are perhaps the loneliest of all,
You come so close to love
But it eludes you
While proper women march to church and fantasize
In the silence of their rooms,
While lonely women take their husbands' arms
To hold them on life's surface,
While chattering women fill their closets with clothes and
Their lips with lies,
You offer love for a fee--which is not as costly as most--
And remain a lonely prostitute on a street of pain.
You are not immoral, little Maria, only tired and afraid,
But you are not as hollow as the police who pursue you,
The politicians who jail you, the pharisees who scorn you.
You give what you promise--take your paltry fee--and
Wander on the endless, aching pavements of pain.
You know more of universal love than the nations who thrive on war,
More than the churches whose dogmas are private vendettas made sacred,
More than the tall buildings and sprawling factories
Where men wear chains.
You are a lonely prostitute who speaks to me as I pass,
And I smile at you because I am a lonely man.”
― James Kavanaugh, quote from There Are Men Too Gentle to Live Among Wolves
Pride Mates
House
Branded
Train to Pakistan
Dangerous Girls
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