“—Shush sweet baby, I said, so tired, and mixed her gripe water with whiskey and dill weed, but it did no good, so I seen now why lullabies was all about cradles falling from trees, oh dear, when the wind blows, down will come baby, whoops too bad, but at least it’s quiet.”
― Kate Manning, quote from My Notorious Life
“Lust was a weed, a nightshade vine, a nettle, impossible to uproot as the mugwort I pulled in the fields of Illinois, so while in the daylight I was a flower of virtuous resolution, at night I was motherless in a cold kitchen, starved for the warm arms of a sweetheart and pretty words of approval.”
― Kate Manning, quote from My Notorious Life
“who dwells in the past robs the present,”
― Kate Manning, quote from My Notorious Life
“In this time, I learned for myself as my teacher predicted, how it is these two extremes - that we are transported by love and jailed by it - that are ever impossible for mothers to reconcile.”
― Kate Manning, quote from My Notorious Life
“You could eat the air in the place, so thick with bread and warmth that it stang our cheeks.”
― Kate Manning, quote from My Notorious Life
“The newspapers next day wrote that "with much hesitation the witness proceeded to recount the treatment she received from Madame DeBeausacq, the details of which are so extremely disgusting and filthy we forbear to give publicity to them." Let me say right now the papers was wrong on them details. The details are of Human Kindness. These judges, these police, these reporters, are squeamish low bloodworms, half of them, consorting with cancan girls. How I know this is because them girls come to me. So do their society mistresses. Also, their wives. I know them, daughters of Judges, sisters of Prosecutors. But these robes of the law did not wish to hear the filthy details of their own sex's duplicity, or dwell on the disgusting filthy things they did THEMSELVES, nor see the fair face of the ones they punish for their own masculine debauchery.”
― Kate Manning, quote from My Notorious Life
“It wasn't badass. I don't really do badass.”
― Claudia Gray, quote from Stargazer
“THAT crazed girl improvising her music.
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,
Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling She knew not where,
Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,
Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Heroically lost, heroically found.
No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound,
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and the baskets lay
No common intelligible sound
But sang, 'O sea-starved, hungry sea”
― W.B. Yeats, quote from The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
“I don’t need to tell you not to fuck my buddy. Right.”
The surgeon looked around his little-glass-bottle-and-needle routine. “I’m not thinking of sex at the moment, thank you very much. But if I was, it sure as shit wouldn’t be with him. So instead of worrying about who I’m tapping, how’d you like to do us all a favor and have a shower. You stink.”
― J.R. Ward, quote from Lover Unleashed
“The only reason I get out of bed at all on weekends is because eventually I can't stand the taste of my own breath any more.”
― Jeff Kinney, quote from Diary of a Wimpy Kid
“I hadn't fully realized just how powerful words could be before this. Whoever came up with the saying 'sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me' was talking out of his or her armpit.”
― Malorie Blackman, quote from Noughts & Crosses
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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