“What if I mess up?"
"Oh, you will. You'll mess up, you'll make mistakes, you'll break things. Some you'll be able to piece together, and others you'll lose. That's all a given. But there's only one thing you have to do for me."
"What's that?"
"Stay alive long enough to mess up again.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“Lying is easy. But it's lonely."
"What do you mean?"
"When you lie to everyone about everything, what's left? What's true?"
"Nothing," I say.
"Exactly.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“It takes at least three assassination attempts to scare me off. And even then, if there are baked goods involved, I might come back.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“I’ve been thinking.”
“A dangerous pursuit.”
“Indeed.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“You're trying to block out every bit of noise. But people are made of noise, Mac. The world is full of noise. And finding quiet isn't about pushing everything out. It's just about pulling yourself in.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“His gaze settles on the discarded book. He leans, reaching until his fingertips graze Dante's Inferno, still on its bed of folded sheets. "What have we here?" he asks.
"Required reading," I say.
"It's a shame they do that," he says, thumbing through the pages. "Requirement ruins even the best of books.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“Because the only way to truly record a person is not in words, not in still frames, but in bone and skin and memory.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“Curiosity is a gateway drug to sympathy.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“Free caffeine and sugar, a recipe for making friends.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“Lying is easy. But it’s lonely.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“Everything is valuable, in its own way. Everything is full of history.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“He fought the men and he slayed the monsters and he bested the gods, and at last the hero, having conquered all, earned the thing that he wanted most. To go home.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“I am a horrible hollow kind of tired; all I want is quiet and rest.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“Ignorance may be bliss, but only if it outweighs curiosity. Curiosity is a gateway drug to sympathy.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“You know,” he says, “for someone who doesn’t like touching people, you keep finding ways to put your hands on me.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“It becomes a game, whispered and breathless.
"I hide who I am."
"I fight with the dead."
"I lie to the living."
"I am alone.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“The silliest things shatter you. A T-shirt discovered behind the washing machine. A toy that rolled under a cabinet in the garage, forgotten until someone drops something and goes to fetch it, and suddenly they’re on the concrete floor sobbing into a dusty baseball mitt.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“And then I get why Wes can’t stop smiling, even though it looks silly with his eyeliner and jet-black hair and hard jaw and scars. I am not alone. The words dance in my mind and in his eyes and against our rings and our keys, and now I smile too.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“We protect the past. And the way I see it, that means we need to understand it.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“He manages a sad smile. “An omission is not the same thing as a lie, Miss Bishop. It’s a manipulation.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“What do schools do that for?” he grumbles. “What’s the point of summer if they give you homework?”
“Exactly!”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“We make a good team, Mackenzie Bishop.”
“We do.” We do, and that is the thing that tempers the heat beneath my skin, checks the flutter of girlish nerves. This is Wesley. My friend. My partner. Maybe one day my Crew. The fear of losing that keeps me in check.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“Things only hurt more when you can see them.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“What a mess. Truths are messy and lies are messy, and I don’t care what Da said, it’s impossible to cut a person into pielike pieces, neat and tidy.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“Everything about Wesley Ayers is messy. My three worlds are kept apart by walls and doors and locks, and yet here he is, tracking the Archive into my life like mud. I know what Da would say, I know, I know, I know. But the strange new overlap is scary and messy and welcome. I can be careful.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“More of a cookie person, myself. No offense to the other baked goods. I just like cookies.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“A death is traumatic. Vivid enough to mark any surface, to burn in like light on photo paper.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“The Archive makes us monsters. And then it breaks the ones who get too strong, and buries the ones who know too much.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“But once you know, you can’t go back. Not really. You can carve out someone’s memories, but they won’t be who they were before. They’ll just be full of holes. Given the choice, I’d rather learn to live with what I know.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
“I am still frozen when he reaches out and brushes a finger over the three lines etched into the surface of my ring, then twists one of his own rings to reveal a cleaner but identical set of lines. The Archive’s insignia. When I don’t react—because no fluid lie came to me and now it’s too late—he closes the gap between us, close enough that I can almost hear the bass again, radiating off his skin. His thumb hooks under the cord around my throat and guides my key out from under my shirt. It glints in the twilight. Then he fetches the key from around his own neck.
“There,” he says cheerfully. “Now we’re on the same page.”
― Victoria Schwab, quote from The Archived
Victoria Schwab
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“A friend argues that Americans battle between the “historical self” and the “self self.” By this she means you mostly interact as friends with mutual interest and, for the most part, compatible personalities; however, sometimes your historical selves, her white self and your black self, or your white self and her black self, arrive with the full force of your American positioning. Then you are standing face-to-face in seconds that wipe the affable smiles right from your mouths. What did you say? Instantaneously your attachment seems fragile, tenuous, subject to any transgression of your historical self. And though your joined personal histories are supposed to save you from misunderstandings, they usually cause you to understand all too well what is meant.”
― Claudia Rankine, quote from Citizen: An American Lyric
“Visionary fiction” is a term we developed to distinguish science fiction that has relevance toward building new, freer worlds from the mainstream strain of science fiction, which most often reinforces dominant narratives of power. Visionary fiction encompasses all of the fantastic, with the arc always bending toward justice. We believe this space is vital for any process of decolonization, because the decolonization of the imagination is the most dangerous and subversive form there is: for it is where all other forms of decolonization are born. Once the imagination is unshackled, liberation is limitless.”
― quote from Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements
“The church is God saying: 'I'm throwing a banquet, and all these mismatched, messed-up people are invited. Here, have some wine.”
― Rachel Held Evans, quote from Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church
“Играеше игра с малки залози, знаеше го. Само един живот. Просто нейният живот.”
― Stephenie Meyer, quote from The Chemist
“And then one day you will look for you in the mirror and you’ll no longer be able to identify yourself—you’ll only see everyone else. You’ll know that you did what they wanted you to do. You will have assimilated. And you will hate yourself for it, because it will be too late.”
― Matthew Quick, quote from Every Exquisite Thing
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The Karma ClubBookQuoters 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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