Quotes from Northern Lights

Nora Roberts ·  637 pages

Rating: (35.4K votes)


“I don't kick a man when he's down, unless I'm the one who put him down in the first place. I don't put him down unless he deserves it. And I don't break my word if I give it. So I'll give you my word.”
― Nora Roberts, quote from Northern Lights


“What are these?”
Meg looked at the rings of keys in Nate’s hand, deliberately furrowed her brow. “Those would be keys.”
“Why do you need so many keys?”
“Because there are so many locks? Is this a quiz?”
He jingled them in his palm while she continued to give him a sunny, innocent smile. “Meg, you don’t even lock your doors half the time. What are all these keys about?”
“Well… There are times a person needs to get into a place, and hey, that place is locked. Then she would need a key.”
“And this place that, hey, is locked, wouldn’t be the property of that person. Would that be correct?”
“Techincally. But no man is an island, and it takes a village, and so on. We’re all one in the Zen universe.”
“So these would be Zen keys?”
“Exactly. Give them back.”
“I don’t think so.” He closed his fist around them. “You see, even in the Zen universe I’d hate to arrest my wife for unlawful entry.”
“I’m not your wife yet, buddy. Did you have a search warrant for those?”
“They were in plain sight. No warrant necessary.”
“Gestapo.”
“Delinquent.”
― Nora Roberts, quote from Northern Lights


“Heroism's just doing more than you want to do or think you can. Sometimes it's just doing the crappy things, the unhappy things other people won't do....It's not just jumping out of a plane onto a glacier ten thousand feet up because there's nobody else there to do it. It's getting out of bed in the morning when it seems like too much trouble.”
― Nora Roberts, quote from Northern Lights


“Don't say hit and mountain in the same sentence.”
― Nora Roberts, quote from Northern Lights


“He looked around when he heard a window-rattling roar. "Earthquake? Volcano? Nuclear war?"
"Beaver," Peter told him.
"I don't care if it is Alaska, you don't have beavers big enough to sound like that.”
― Nora Roberts, quote from Northern Lights



“Is staying quiet an interrogation technique?"
"It can be. It can be also called listening.”
― Nora Roberts, quote from Northern Lights


“but those mostly tourists or crazies. Man called Teek got himself stupid drunk”
― Nora Roberts, quote from Northern Lights


“even high,” she said with a roll”
― Nora Roberts, quote from Northern Lights


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About the author

Nora Roberts
Born place: in Silver Spring, Maryland, The United States
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Popular quotes

“The Beautiful Mystery Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #8:
"Do you know why our emblem is two wolves intertwined?" Gamache shook his head.
..."One of the (native) elders told him that when he was a boy his grandfather came to him and told him he had two wolves fighting inside him. One was grey, the other black. The grey one wanted his grandfather to be courageous, and patient, and kind. The other, the black one, wanted his grandfather to be fearful and cruel. This upset the boy, and he thought about it for a few days and returned to his grandfather. He asked, 'Grandfather, which of the wolves will win?' Do you know what his grandfather said?" Gamache shook his head. There was such a look of sadness on the Chief Inspector's face, it almost broke the abbot's heart. "The one I feed.”
― Louise Penny, quote from The Beautiful Mystery


“the existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, quote from The Birth of Tragedy/The Case of Wagner


“There was an irony and a paradox here: Franco thought of Pontito constantly, saw it in fantasy, depicted it, as infinitely desirable – and yet he had a profound reluctance to return. But it is precisely such a paradox that lies at the heart of nostalgia – for nostalgia is about a fantasy that never takes place, one that maintains itself by not being fulfilled. And yet such fantasies are not just idle daydreams or fancies; they press toward some fulfillment, but an indirect one - the fulfillment of art. These, at least, are the terms that D. Geahchan, the French psychoanalyst, has used. With reference in particular to the greatest of nostalgies, Proust, the psychoanalyst David Werman speaks of an 'aesthetic crystallization of nostalgia' - nostalgia raised to the level of art and myth.”
― Oliver Sacks, quote from An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales


“Certainly the European overlords did little enough to prepare Africa for self-government but Democracy would find it hard in any case to put down roots in a tribalist and patrimonial culture that long before the west invaded Africa had sacralized the personal authority of chieftains and ordained the submission of the rest. What the west would call corruption is regarded through much of Africa as no more than the prerogative of power.”
― Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., quote from The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society


“لا يمكن أن يتهرب المرء من ذاته . يمكنه تجاهلها ولكن لا يمكن التهربّ ابدًا”
― Jodee Blanco, quote from Please Stop Laughing at Me... One Woman's Inspirational Story


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