Quotes from The Goblin Wood

Hilari Bell ·  384 pages

Rating: (3.8K votes)


“As if she had summoned them, a flurry of stones flew out of the darkness, striking his mail, pinging off his helm. One hit his unprotected leg and he yelped and clutched it. That was a mistake. The second barrage was entirely directed at his legs.”
― Hilari Bell, quote from The Goblin Wood


“Cogswhallop glanced skeptically at the complex runes. "Are you sure this'll work, gen'ral?"
"Of course I'm sure-"
Ping. The silvery note echoed in the cramped room. Makenna felt her face turn scarlet.”
― Hilari Bell, quote from The Goblin Wood


“Did the priest you mentioned tell you about them? Or did he send you out to blunder along on your own?They're an odd lot. Half of them are soldiers, or priests in disgui- Ah.Is your priest with them?"
"No!" He snapped.
Ping. He jumped. He'd forgotten the bell.
"I mean, I don't know". Ping. "There is no particular priest."Ping. He bit his lip and fell silent.”
― Hilari Bell, quote from The Goblin Wood


“The lingering laughter fled from his eyes as he realized that he'd given himself away. "Where's Fiddle now?"
"Safe and cared for. Safer than you'll be if you don't answer my questions."
Ping.
He managed not to laugh, but it looked like a hard fight.
"Dung," Makenna muttered. the knight's expression changed to startled disapproval. A prig, as he? Maybe she could use that.
"I said you should let me handle this," Cogswhallop told her. "I'd have meant it.”
― Hilari Bell, quote from The Goblin Wood


“...You think I lead these people for my own whim? I lead these people, honorable knight, because they have no one but me. Because they came to me when the humans slaughtered their families and drove them out. And I'll keep this place safe for them no matter how much spying and lying and killing it takes. You've never been a commander, lordling, or you'd know that it's easy to prate about honor when you're not responsible for others' lives. But let me tell you a bit of truth--sometimes honor doesn't get it done.”
― Hilari Bell, quote from The Goblin Wood



About the author

Hilari Bell
Born place: in Denver, The United States
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“The stale coffee is boiling up but he catches it before it goes over the side, pours it into a stained cup and blows on the black liquid, lets a panel of the dream slide forward. If he does not force his attention on it, it might stoke the day, rewarm that old, cold time on the mountain when they owned the world and nothing seemed wrong.”
― Annie Proulx, quote from Close Range


“the pope's being infallible was an impossibility, and the pope arrogantly laid claim to what could belong to God only, as a perfect being.”
― John Foxe, quote from Foxe's Book of Martyrs


“She and Peter had been through counseling, and they understood that parents can only do so much to protect their children and that ultimately they belong to God first.”
― Karen Kingsbury, quote from Fame


“My parents used to say faith wasn't something you could pretend about. It wasn't real unless it looked like faith and acted like faith.”
― Karen Kingsbury, quote from Oceans Apart


“We have seen that imagining an act engages the same motor and sensory programs that are involved in doing it. We have long viewed our imaginative life with a kind of sacred awe: as noble, pure, immaterial, and ethereal, cut off from our material brain. Now we cannot be so sure about where to draw the line between them. Everything your “immaterial” mind imagines leaves material traces. Each thought alters the physical state of your brain synapses at a microscopic level. Each time you imagine moving your fingers across the keys to play the piano, you alter the tendrils in your living brain. These experiments are not only delightful and intriguing, they also overturn the centuries of confusion that have grown out of the work of the French philosopher René Descartes, who argued that mind and brain are made of different substances and are governed by different laws. The brain, he claimed, was a physical, material thing, existing in space and obeying the laws of physics. The mind (or the soul, as Descartes called it) was immaterial, a thinking thing that did not take up space or obey physical laws. Thoughts, he argued, were governed by the rules of reasoning, judgment, and desires, not by the physical laws of cause and effect. Human beings consisted of this duality, this marriage of immaterial mind and material brain. But Descartes—whose mind/body division has dominated science for four hundred years—could never credibly explain how the immaterial mind could influence the material brain. As a result, people began to doubt that an immaterial thought, or mere imagining, might change the structure of the material brain. Descartes’s view seemed to open an unbridgeable gap between mind and brain. His noble attempt to rescue the brain from the mysticism that surrounded it in his time, by making it mechanical, failed. Instead the brain came to be seen as an inert, inanimate machine that could be moved to action only by the immaterial, ghostlike soul Descartes placed within it, which came to be called “the ghost in the machine.” By depicting a mechanistic brain, Descartes drained the life out of it and slowed the acceptance of brain plasticity more than any other thinker. Any plasticity—any ability to change that we had—existed in the mind, with its changing thoughts, not in the brain. But now we can see that our “immaterial” thoughts too have a physical signature, and we cannot be so sure that thought won’t someday be explained in physical terms. While we have yet to understand exactly how thoughts actually change brain structure, it is now clear that they do, and the firm line that Descartes drew between mind and brain is increasingly a dotted line.”
― Norman Doidge, quote from The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science


Interesting books

Magic Shifts
(23.5K)
Magic Shifts
by Ilona Andrews
Boy Meets Girl: Say Hello to Courtship
(14.8K)
Boy Meets Girl: Say...
by Joshua Harris
Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me
(2.5K)
Been Down So Long it...
by Richard Fariña
Ali and Nino: A Love Story
(4.4K)
Ali and Nino: A Love...
by Kurban Said
Fledgling
(14.3K)
Fledgling
by Octavia E. Butler
Burning Chrome
(30.3K)
Burning Chrome
by William Gibson

About BookQuoters

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.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.