“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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“Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, quote from El segundo sexo
“A bird foraging for food in the swamps and marshes sinks rapidly if it doesn't move. It has to keep pulling its feet out of the mire to move on, regardless of whether it has caught something or not. And the same applies to us and to our love. We have to move on, we can't stay where we are, because we'll sink.”
― Milorad Pavić, quote from Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words
“There was somewhere, if you knew where to find it, some place where money could be made like drawing water from a well, some Big Rock Candy Mountain where life was effortless and rich and unrestricted and full of adventure and action, where something could be had for nothing.”
― Wallace Stegner, quote from The Big Rock Candy Mountain (Contemporary American Fiction)
“Cognitive dissonance doesn’t leave a paper trail. There are no documents that can be pointed to when we reframe inconvenient truths. There is no violence perpetrated by the state or anyone else. It is a process of self-deception. And this can have devastating effects, not least on those who were the subject of chapter 4: the wrongly convicted.”
― quote from Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do
“He who never makes a mistake, never makes anything.”
― Joseph Delaney, quote from The Spook's Apprentice
The End of Alice
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Dina's BookBookQuoters 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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