“And how do you undo damage that’s been built into the foundations? With houses, it’s easier to pull the whole thing down and start again. You can’t do that with people.”
― Nicci French, quote from Secret Smile
“it was like glass sandpaper being rubbed on my skin.”
― Nicci French, quote from Secret Smile
“Better to start too slowly and build up,” said a piece of text in italics, “than start too quickly and give up.”
― Nicci French, quote from Secret Smile
“If you call the day after, you’re maybe a bit desperate because, since the first day is out of the question, the second day is really the first day, so you’re calling on the first day. If they’re going to call, people call on the third day.”
― Nicci French, quote from Secret Smile
“Within families, you’re stuck with the character they think you are, whatever you do. You become a war hero and all that your parents ever talk about is something supposedly funny you used to do when you were in nursery school.”
― Nicci French, quote from Secret Smile
Nicci French
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“Why is it that everyone else can look like they’re part of a zombie hunting party, but I still have to worry about fashion?”
He won’t stop snickering. “You look like a leopard-spotted Shar-Pei.”
I think those are the little pug-like dogs drowning in massive folds of skin. “You’re scarring me, you know. It could haunt me for the rest of my life to be called a wrinkly little dog at the tender age of seventeen.”
“Yup. A sensitive girl. That just defines you, Penryn.”
― Susan Ee, quote from World After
“Let's face it, she can't have simply disappeared...can she?"
Horace shrugged. "That's what I keep telling myself," he said morosley. "But somehow it looks as if she has.”
― John Flanagan, quote from The Battle for Skandia
“The father’s job is to teach his children how to be warriors, to give them the confidence to get on the horse to ride into battle when it’s necessary to do so. If you don’t get that from your father, you have to teach yourself.”
― Cheryl Strayed, quote from Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
“There are the two curses of Spain, the bulls and the priests.”
― Ernest Hemingway, quote from The Complete Short Stories
“If you have read this far in the chronicle of the Baudelaire orphans - and I certainly hope you have not - then you know we have reached the thirteenth chapter of the thirteenth volume in this sad history, and so you know the end is near, even though this chapter is so lengthy that you might never reach the end of it. But perhaps you do not yet know what the end really means. "The end" is a phrase which refers to the completion of a story, or the final moment of some accomplishment, such as a secret errand, or a great deal of research, and indeed this thirteenth volume marks the completion of my investigation into the Baudelaire case, which required much research, a great many secret errands, and the accomplishments of a number of my comrades, from a trolley driver to a botanical hybridization expert, with many, many typewriter repairpeople in between. But it cannot be said that The End contains the end of the Baudelaires' story, any more than The Bad Beginning contained its beginning. The children's story began long before that terrible day on Briny Beach, but there would have to be another volume to chronicle when the Baudelaires were born, and when their parents married, and who was playing the violin in the candlelit restaurant when the Baudelaire parents first laid eyes on one another, and what was hidden inside that violin, and the childhood of the man who orphaned the girl who put it there, and even then it could not be said that the Baudelaires' story had not begun, because you would still need to know about a certain tea party held in a penthouse suite, and the baker who made the scones served at the tea party, and the baker's assistant who smuggled the secret ingredient into the scone batter through a very narrow drainpipe, and how a crafty volunteer created the illusion of a fire in the kitchen simply by wearing a certain dress and jumping around, and even then the beginning of the story would be as far away as the shipwreck that leftthe Baudelaire parents as castaways on the coastal shelf is far away from the outrigger on which the islanders would depart. One could say, in fact, that no story really has a beginning, and that no story really has an end, as all of the world's stories are as jumbled as the items in the arboretum, with their details and secrets all heaped together so that the whole story, from beginning to end, depends on how you look at it. We might even say that the world is always in medias res - a Latin phrase which means "in the midst of things" or "in the middle of a narrative" - and that it is impossible to solve any mystery, or find the root of any trouble, and so The End is really the middle of the story, as many people in this history will live long past the close of Chapter Thirteen, or even the beginning of the story, as a new child arrives in the world at the chapter's close. But one cannot sit in the midst of things forever. Eventually one must face that the end is near, and the end of The End is quite near indeed, so if I were you I would not read the end of The End, as it contains the end of a notorious villain but also the end of a brave and noble sibling, and the end of the colonists' stay on the island, as they sail off the end of the coastal shelf. The end of The End contains all these ends, and that does not depend on how you look at it, so it might be best for you to stop looking at The End before the end of The End arrives, and to stop reading The End before you read the end, as the stories that end in The End that began in The Bad Beginning are beginning to end now.”
― Lemony Snicket, quote from The End
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