“We were all monsters and bastards, and we were all beautiful.”
― Rachel Hartman, quote from Seraphina
“Sometimes the truth has difficulty breaching the city walls of our beliefs. A lie, dressed in the correct livery, passes through more easily.”
― Rachel Hartman, quote from Seraphina
“The world inside myself is vaster and richer than this paltry plane, peopled with mere galaxies and gods.”
― Rachel Hartman, quote from Seraphina
“That’s the secret to performance: conviction. The right note played tentatively still misses its mark, but play boldly and no one will question you. If one believes there is truth in art – and I do – then it’s troubling how similar the skill of performing is to lying. Maybe lying is itself a kind of art. I think about that more than I should.”
― Rachel Hartman, quote from Seraphina
“I cannot perch among those who think that I am broken.”
― Rachel Hartman, quote from Seraphina
“He did not know the truth of me, yet he had perceived something true about me that no one else had ever noticed. And in spite of that—or perhaps because of it—he believed me good, believed me worth taking seriously, and his belief, for one vertigi-nous moment, made me want to be better than I was.”
― Rachel Hartman, quote from Seraphina
“For future reference: do not underestimate the seductive power of math.”
― Rachel Hartman, quote from Seraphina
“Who will kiss you? Who will rock you to sleep?" His voice was slow, drowsy.
"You never did," I said, trying to tease him. "You were more father to me than my father, but you never did that."
"Someone should. Someone should love you. I will bite him if he will not.”
― Rachel Hartman, quote from Seraphina
“I’m attracting small children,” Orma muttered, twisting his hat in his hands. “Shoo it away, will you?”
― Rachel Hartman, quote from Seraphina
“I mistook you for a metaphor.”
― Rachel Hartman, quote from Seraphina
“Your lies didn't stop me loving you; your truth hasn't stopped me either.”
― Rachel Hartman, quote from Seraphina
“I became the very air; I was full of stars. I was the soaring spaces between the spires of the cathedral, the solemn breath of chimneys, a whispered prayer upon the winter wind. I was silence,and I was music, one clear transcendent chord rising toward Heaven. I believed, then, that I would have risen bodily into the sky but for the anchor of his hand in my hair and his round soft perfect mouth.”
― Rachel Hartman, quote from Seraphina
“I was drawn to his aloofness, the way cats gravitate toward people who’d rather avoid them.”
― Rachel Hartman, quote from Seraphina
“He was laughing, silently, and then we were both laughing, and then something changed. It was as if I had been watching the world through oiled parchment or smoked glass, which was yanked abruptly away. Everything grew very clear and bright; the music burst forth in majesty; we stood still and the room turned around us; and there was Kiggs, right in the middle of all of it, laughing.”
― Rachel Hartman, quote from Seraphina
“Love is not a disease...I cannot let them cut you out of me, nor her either. I will cling to my sickness, if it is a sickness. I will hold it close to me like the sun.”
― Rachel Hartman, quote from Seraphina
“He looked up at the reddening sky and said with a self-deprecating laugh, "You put me to shame, Seraphina. Your bravery always has."
"It's not bravery; it's bullheaded bumbling."
He shook his head, staring off into the middle distance. "I know courage when I see it, and when I lack it.”
― Rachel Hartman, quote from Seraphina
“I barely noticed loneliness anymore; it was my normal condition, by necessity if not by nature.”
― Rachel Hartman, quote from Seraphina
“How dare the world be beautiful when I was so horrifying?”
― Rachel Hartman, quote from Seraphina
“The borderlands of madness used to have much sterner signage around them than they do now.”
― Rachel Hartman, quote from Seraphina
“I scrupulously hide every legitimate reason for people to hate me, and it turns out they don’t need legitimate reasons. Heaven has fashioned a knife of irony to stab me with.”
― Rachel Hartman, quote from Seraphina
“Music is only work when someone else makes you do it.”
― Rachel Hartman, quote from Seraphina
“Peaches and Cheese”:
The vagabond sun winks down through the trees,
While lilacs, like memories, waft on the breeze,
My friend, I was born for days such as these,
To inhale perfume,
And cut through the gloom,
And feast like a king upon peaches and cheese!
I’ll travel this wide world and go where I please,
Can’t stop my wand’ring, it’s like a disease.
My only regret as I cross the high seas:
What I leave behind,
Though I hope to find,
My own golden city of peaches and cheese!”
― Rachel Hartman, quote from Seraphina
“The truth may not be told. Here is an acceptable lie.”
― Rachel Hartman, quote from Seraphina
“Please, Orma, I’ve already gotten you in so much trouble—”
“That I can’t possibly get into more. Take it.” He wouldn’t stop glaring at me until I’d put the earring back on its cord. “You are all that’s left of Linn. Her own people won’t even say her name. I—I value your continued existence.”
I could not speak; he had pierced me to my very heart.”
― Rachel Hartman, quote from Seraphina
“I was half lawyer; I always noticed the loopholes.”
― Rachel Hartman, quote from Seraphina
“My own survival required me to counterbalance interesting with invisible.”
― Rachel Hartman, quote from Seraphina
“I felt lighter when I had finished, and for once emptiness was a sweet relief and a condition to be treasured.”
― Rachel Hartman, quote from Seraphina
“He looked at me again and his eyes shone in the lamplight, or with the inner light of delighted anticipation.
His enthusiasm made him beautiful.”
― Rachel Hartman, quote from Seraphina
“A feeling rose in me, and I just let it, because what harm could it do? It only had another thirty-two adagio bars of life in this world. Twenty-four. Sixteen. Eight more bars in which I love you. Three. Two. One.”
― Rachel Hartman, quote from Seraphina
“Always I hev my fists and my war pipes!”
― Rachel Hartman, quote from Seraphina
Rachel Hartman
Born place: in Lexington, KY
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“I lapsed into my pathetic cut-off period. Often with humans, both good and bad, my senses simply shut off, they get tired, I give up. I am polite. I nod. I pretend to understand because I don’t want anybody to be hurt. That is the one weakness that has lead me into the most trouble. Trying to be kind to others I often get my soul shredded into a kind of spiritual pasta.
No matter. My brain shuts off. I listen. I respond. And they are too dumb to know that I am not there.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from Hollywood
“Change is inevitable and life changes as swiftly as the wind blows. It’s which direction that you let the wind blow you that matters.”
― Quinn Loftis, quote from Elfin
“My mother taught me to believe in silver, to believe in things, but I think it's more important to believe in me.”
― Elizabeth Scott, quote from Stealing Heaven
“He gained height, grew thin, the hair on his temples had begun to grey, but, now as then, he had none of that useful sense of proportion, nor could he ever develop anything of the sort, which might have helped him distinguish between the continuous flux of the universe of which he constituted a part (though a necessarily fleeting part) and the passage of time, the perception of which might have led to an intuitive and wise acceptance of fate. Despite vain efforts to understand and experience what precisely his 'dear friends' wanted from each other, he confronted the slow tide of human affairs with a sad incomprehension, dispassionately and without any sense of personal involvement, for the greater part of his consciousness, the part entirely given over to wonder, had left no room for more mundane matters, and (to his mother's inordinate shame and the extreme amusement of the locals) had ever since then trapped him in a bubble of time, in one eternal, impenetrable and transparent moment. He walked, he trudged, he flitted - as his great friend once said, not entirely without point - 'blindly and tirelessly... with the incurable beauty of his personal cosmos' in his soul [...]”
― László Krasznahorkai, quote from The Melancholy of Resistance
“Oh fuck. ‘The wait’s over then,’ he said in that provisional tone a demolition expert would use when saying, If it’s not the red wire, it’s been nice.”
― C.C. Gibbs, quote from All He Desires
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Smoke and Mirrors: S...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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