“She talked like a woman who knew more books than people.”
― Melissa Albert, quote from The Hazel Wood
“Look until the leaves turn red, sew the worlds up with thread. If your journey's left undone, fear the rising of the sun.”
― Melissa Albert, quote from The Hazel Wood
“Everyone is supposed to be a combination of nature and nurture, their true selves shaped by years of friends and fights and parents and dreams and things you did too young and things you overheard that you shouldn’t have and secrets you kept or couldn’t and regrets and victories and quiet prides, all the packed-together detritus that becomes what you call your life.”
― Melissa Albert, quote from The Hazel Wood
“We were each our own island, gathered together into one messed-up archipelago.”
― Melissa Albert, quote from The Hazel Wood
“I walked a block on rubbery knees, feeling the way I did the time a van clipped my bike and sent me reeling into a line of parked cars. Ella had dropped her cigarette and jumped on the fallen bike, screaming at the top of her lungs as she sped after the car. Bleeding in three places, I watched her go, glad she knew I'd rather have retribution than comfort.”
― Melissa Albert, quote from The Hazel Wood
“And while they're being told, stories create the energy that makes this world go. They keep our stars in place. They make our grass grow.”
― Melissa Albert, quote from The Hazel Wood
“I remembered less from my own life than I did from the books I read.”
― Melissa Albert, quote from The Hazel Wood
“I avoided my eyes while brushing my teeth, then climbed into bed with a copy of _The Blind Assassin_, because if you're not with the book you want, you might as well want the book you're with.
--Melissa Albert, _The Hazel Wood_”
― Melissa Albert, quote from The Hazel Wood
“Life was a big thing to live without a map.”
― Melissa Albert, quote from The Hazel Wood
“Life never turns out how you imagine it will when you’re young. Everything is smaller than you think, or too big. It all smells a little funny and fits like somebody else’s shirt.”
― Melissa Albert, quote from The Hazel Wood
“There are no lessons in it. There's just this harsh, horrible world touched with beautiful magic, where shity things happen. And they don't happen for a reason, or in threes, or in a way that looks like justice. They're set in a place that has no rules and doesn't want any. And the author's voice - - your grandmother's voice - - is perfectly pitiless. She's like a war reporter who doesn't give a fuck.”
― Melissa Albert, quote from The Hazel Wood
“My love he wooed me
My love he slew me
My love he buried my bones
His love he married
His love I buried
My love now wanders alone ”
― Melissa Albert, quote from The Hazel Wood
“So my name, my full name, is Ellery Oliver Djan-Nelson-Abrams-Finch."
"Does that fit on a Scantron?"
"A what?"
"Nevermind.”
― Melissa Albert, quote from The Hazel Wood
“Some bitch? She was my girlfriend for eight months. It's so ugly when girls call each other that word."
"Oh, my god, Finch, go get a liberal arts degree.”
― Melissa Albert, quote from The Hazel Wood
“Usually when I looked at people too long I started seeing them as component parts: Bony noses. Eyeballs in sockets. Odd cartilage curve of ears and fingers so strange and overevolved and makeup floating just over the skin and what the hell was with pants, and knees, and how did we walk around like all of this was normal?”
― Melissa Albert, quote from The Hazel Wood
“Every time we left a place, I felt the things that happened there being wiped clean, till all that was left was Ella, our fights and our talks and our winding roads. I wrote down dates and places in the corners of my books, and lost them along the way.”
― Melissa Albert, quote from The Hazel Wood
“We were checked in by a man who looked exactly how the guy checking you in at a cheap motel in the middle of the night is supposed to.”
― Melissa Albert, quote from The Hazel Wood
“When in doubt, the answer is always Death. With a capital D.”
― Melissa Albert, quote from The Hazel Wood
“Lana left, and a guy named Norm came in to replace her. He spent the next three hours talking about a hangout he had with Lana that may or may not have been a date, not that he was worried about it, but what did I think and had Lana mentioned him?
I gave him non-committal answers until I finally cracked. " Jesus Christ, Norm. This is the 'move on with your life' dance." I did a dance like I was imitating a train. "There, did that work? Lana's literally never said your name in my presence."
The injured look on his face gave me a flush of dark satisfaction. "Damn, Alice, that's cold." He took off his hat, folded the brim to make it more pretentious, and re-perched it on his head.”
― Melissa Albert, quote from The Hazel Wood
“Breathe in the light, Alice. Breathe out the anger.”
― Melissa Albert, quote from The Hazel Wood
“You might think you have a really good reason, but nothing could be worth this. Nothing could be worth feeling this way. I feel like a changeling wearing someone else's skin. I can't remember what I liked, or what I wanted, why I worked or left the house or did anything. It's all gone... I think whatever I used to be, it dropped through the binding. I wish the rest of me had gone with it.”
― Melissa Albert, quote from The Hazel Wood
“You might think it’s strange, but you get used to those karmic moments in the book business. Books want to be read, and by the right people. There’s nothing surprising in it, not to me.”
― Melissa Albert, quote from The Hazel Wood
“The quickest way to end this is to begin it, and that's no way to start, is it?”
― Melissa Albert, quote from The Hazel Wood
“I hated Tennessee Williams's Laura. She reminded me too much of a fairy-tale character. Not the ones my grandmother wrote, allegedly-- those women drew blood. No, she was the worst type of Grimm Brothers beauty: isolated, soft-spoken, waiting for a man to save her. She probably look like me.”
― Melissa Albert, quote from The Hazel Wood
“Hell is caring about other people.”
― Melissa Albert, quote from The Hazel Wood
“if you’re not with the book you want, you might as well want the book you’re with.”
― Melissa Albert, quote from The Hazel Wood
“I wanted my mom, in a way you maybe can’t ever want anyone else. It was primal and sharp and it made me feel like a needle in the haystack of a cold and terrible world. I wanted my mom.”
― Melissa Albert, quote from The Hazel Wood
“Bleeding in three places, I watched her go, glad she knew I’d rather have retribution than comfort.”
― Melissa Albert, quote from The Hazel Wood
Melissa Albert
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“THE TEARS ... streamed down, and I let them flow as freely as they would, making of them a pillow for my heart. On them it rested."
-AUGUSTINE,
Confessions IX, i z”
― Nicholas Wolterstorff, quote from Lament for a Son
“Like too many men, Trahearne and I didn't know how to deal with a woman like [the girl], caught as we were between our own random lusts and a desire for faithful women so primitive and fierce that it must have been innate, atavistic, as uncontrollable as a bodily function. That was when I stopped being angry at the old man.”
― James Crumley, quote from The Last Good Kiss
“Die christliche Sitte, träge aufrecht dazusitzen wie bei einer Unterhaltungsveranstaltung, deutet darauf hin, dass Gott als Unterhaltungskünstler gilt, der von der Bühne entfernt und durch eine andere Nummer ersetzt werden kann, wenn er nicht mehr unterhält.”
― John Updike, quote from Terrorist
“Beauty's only skin deep.
Everybody has ugly days.
We're all made of the same stuff underneath.
Acting right is better than looking right.
Realize what make you special beyond looks.
Evil can look pretty on the outside.”
― Shannon Delany, quote from 13 to Life
“Purity, a concept that recalled flowers, the piquant mint taste of a mouthwash, a child clinging to its mother’s gentle breast, was something that joined all these directly to the concept of blood, the concept of swords cutting down iniquitous men, the concept of blades slashing down through the shoulder to spray the air with blood. And to the concept of seppuku. The moment that a samurai “fell like the cherry blossoms,” his blood-smeared corpse became at once like fragrant cherry blossoms. The concept of purity, then, could alter to the contrary with arbitrary swiftness. And so purity was the stuff of poetry. For Isao, to die purely seemed easy. But what about laughing purely? How to be pure in all respects was a problem that disturbed him. No matter how tight a rein he kept upon his emotions, there were times when some trivial thing would arise to make him laugh. Once, for example, he had laughed at a puppy frolicking at the side of the road, with a woman’s high-heeled shoe, of all things, in its mouth. It was the kind of laugh that he preferred others not to see.”
― Yukio Mishima, quote from Runaway Horses
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Frost Like NightBookQuoters 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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