Chris Wooding · 292 pages
Rating: (3.5K votes)
“Devil-boy Jack: "A higher power than ours directs us against the wych-kin. There is no turning back."
Thaniel Fox: "There is no higher power, Devil-boy! And I am no-one's pawn, neither man nor wych nor whatever entity you speak of."
Devil-boy Jack: "I do not speak of entities. I speak of the force that created the physics of the universe, the force that makes time flow forward and not allow everything to happen at once, the force that sets the patterns to which the planets turn. Its weapons are coincidence, unlikelihood, happenstance. It is there when a man stops suddenly to pick up a coin dropped by another man ten days before, and the woman who is to be his wife bumps into him, and five hundred years hence their offspring rules half the world. It is there when a chance comment causes a scientist to think, What if...? and ten years later a great plague is cured. It is so vast that what we call chaos is simply another part of its order, with a shape too big to see. It has no name, nor will it ever have, though man may hint darkly at fate and destiny. It is what it is... the pattern. We may choose our own paths, but the pattern is always ahead of us. It is a way. It is the way.”
― Chris Wooding, quote from The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray
“This was London, and you either held on, or fell by the walkside like that fellow had.”
― Chris Wooding, quote from The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray
“She was quite maniac when I met her. I scared her, maybe.”
― Chris Wooding, quote from The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray
“Mad she may be, or possessed; or maybe only scared out of her wits.”
― Chris Wooding, quote from The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray
“She felt like a proper lady, she did.”
― Chris Wooding, quote from The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray
“I want ... something other than what I know. She is so strange to me, you see? I think that her life must have been very different from mine (...) I want to know what that is like.”
― Chris Wooding, quote from The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray
“Suddenly it was if she was merely a brain, being transported inside the skull of some hideous fleshy machine, a piece of living cargo in someone else's body.”
― Chris Wooding, quote from The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray
“He let the smoke drift around the inside of his mouth, trying to relax, but nothing could so easily dispel the unquiet that he felt.”
― Chris Wooding, quote from The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray
“A strange irony, Crott reflected, that the most base and lowly of London folk were the most honour-bound of all, and that the value of honour diminished in direct proportion to the heights of society a man climbed to.”
― Chris Wooding, quote from The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray
“Darkness, terrible cold darkness, the salty depths of the deepest oceans where no light warmed the rocks and the weight of the black water would crush a man like a grape.”
― Chris Wooding, quote from The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray
“They would erect great temples, and cities built of bone and sinew, and their foulness would spread like a cancer until finally, a hundred years from now, Mother Earth would be theirs.”
― Chris Wooding, quote from The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray
“Was it possible that he liked the world the way it was?”
― Chris Wooding, quote from The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray
“I know that even now, having watched enough television, you probably won't even refer to them as lepers so as to spare their feelings. You probably call them 'parts-dropping-off challenged' or something.”
― Christopher Moore, quote from Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal
“Intelligence requires first the gift of curiosity. Without curiosity, who would ask questions? Second, intelligence is the ability to synthesize. Facts alone signify little. Neither are they to be trusted. Intelligence is the subtle arrangement of that which might or might not be true, the intuitive selection and the weaving of such selections into a pleasing whole that makes for meaning. Third, intelligence has need of laughter. Without laughter so much that is bitter and dark is allowed into being. That which is bitter and dark may be clever, it may even be cunning, but it is never intelligent. As for wisdom, wisdom is simple. The wise are able to recognize, and to accept, that not only is one never intelligent enough, but that when all is said and done, one knows exactly nothing.”
― Ki Longfellow, quote from Flow Down Like Silver: Hypatia of Alexandria
“It is only people who are lacking, or bad, or inferior, who have to be good at things. You have always been full and perfect, so you had nothing to make up for.”
― T.H. White, quote from The Once and Future King
“What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.”
― John Green, quote from Paper Towns
“At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence.”
― Jon Krakauer, quote from Into the Wild
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