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
“Blue must be worn for protection. Moonstones were useful in connecting with the living, topaz to contact the dead. Copper, sacred to Venus, will call a man to you, and black tourmaline will eliminate jealousy. When it came to love, you must always be careful. If you dropped something belonging to the man you loved into a candle flame, then added pine needles and marigold flowers, he would arrive on your doorstep by morning, so you would do well to be certain you wanted him there. The most basic and reliable love potion was made from anise, rosemary, honey, and cloves boiled for nine hours on the back burner of the old stove. It had always cost $9.99 and was therefore called Love Potion Number Nine, which worked best on the ninth hour of the ninth day of the ninth month.”
― Alice Hoffman, quote from The Rules of Magic
“We can either make our choices deliberately or allow other people’s agendas to control our lives.”
― Greg McKeown, quote from Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
“Whenever he was asked what somebody had died of he'd reply (with immense gravity), "Lack of breath.”
― Aminatta Forna, quote from The Hired Man
“I know it is a bad thing to break a promise, but I think now that it is a worse thing to let a promise break you.”
― Jennifer Donnelly, quote from A Gathering Light
“Together with an elderly artist (I regret that I don't remember his name) he occupied a separate room in the barracks. And there Yuri painted for nothing schmaltzy pictures such as Nero's Feast and the Chorus of Elves and the like for the German officers on the commandant's staff. In return, he was given food. The slops for which the POW officers stood in line with their mess tins from 6 a.m. on, while the Ordners beat them with sticks and the cooks with ladles, were not enough to sustain life. At evening, Yuri could see from the windows of their room the one and only picture for which his artistic talent had been given him: the evening mist hovering above a swampy meadow encircled by barbed wire; a multitude of bonfires; and, around the bonfires, beings who had once been Russian officers but had now become beastlike creatures who gnawed the bones of dead horses, who baked patties from potato rinds, who smoked manure and were all swarming with lice. Not all those two-legged creatures had died as yet. Not all of them had yet lost the capacity for intelligible speech, and one could see in the crimson reflections of the bonfires how a belated understanding was dawning on those faces which were descending to the Neanderthal.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, quote from The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Volume 1
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