Quotes from The Iron-Jawed Boy

Nikolas Lee ·  274 pages

Rating: (339 votes)


“Sometimes what we don't want is actually what we need.”
― Nikolas Lee, quote from The Iron-Jawed Boy


“No one is only one thing, my dear.”
― Nikolas Lee, quote from The Iron-Jawed Boy


“Your jaw makes you different, Ionikus Reaves, and more often than not, it is our differences that make us stronger.”
― Nikolas Lee, quote from The Iron-Jawed Boy


“The Balance, my boy, is the war that has been waged since before time was time, the battle within ourselves to do what is good and reject what is bad. It is a delicate line we all walk, a constant struggle of push and pull.”
― Nikolas Lee, quote from The Iron-Jawed Boy


“When he wasn’t busy chasing unseen mice around the academy, Ion spent hours in the Borean Study, searching through dusty books for anything that had to do with the banshee or the Shroud. But finding this anything proved to be difficult as well, especially when the books you’re reading have everything to do with something, but certainly nothing to do with your anything. And in trying to find this anything, Ion forgot about a very important, specific thing, which would quickly ruin his Wednesday.”
― Nikolas Lee, quote from The Iron-Jawed Boy



About the author

Nikolas Lee
Born place: in Evansville, IN, The United States
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Popular quotes

“Days and months are travellers of eternity. So are the years that pass by. Those who steer a boat across the sea, or drive a horse over the earth till they succumb to the weight of years, spend every minute of their lives travelling. There are a great number of ancients, too, who died on the road. I myself have been tempted for a long time by the cloud-moving wind - filled with a strong desire to wander.”
― Matsuo Bashō, quote from Backroads to Far Towns: Basho's Travel Journal


“As for the myths, take anyone's life and deny that most of it is deliberate self-delusion - an aggrandizement - a mixture of lies and truth, of what was wanted and what was had, producing the necessary justification for having been granted life in the first place. I was struck like a match, Lily wrote. I had no option but to burn.
You can put a period after that. Lily did. It was the story of her life.”
― Timothy Findley, quote from The Piano Man's Daughter


“Nature had once produced an Englishman whose domed head had been a hive of words; a man who had only to breathe on any particle of his stupendous vocabulary to have that particle live and expand and throw out tremulous tentacles until it became a complex image with a pulsing brain and correlated limbs. Three centuries later, another man, in another country, was trying to render these rhythms and metaphors in a different tongue. This process entailed a prodigious amount of labour, for the necessity of which no real reason could be given. It was as if someone, having seen a certain oak tree (further called Individual T) growing in a certain land and casting its own unique shadow on the green and brown ground, had proceeded to erect in his garden a prodigiously intricate piece of machinery which in itself was as unlike that or any other tree as the translator's inspiration and language were unlike those of the original author, but which, by means of ingenious combination of parts, light effects, breeze-engendering engines, would, when completed, cast a shadow exactly similar to that of Individual T - the same outline, changing in the same manner, with the same double and single spots of sun rippling in the same position, at the same hour of the day. From a practical point of view, such a waste of time and material (those headaches, those midnight triumphs that turn out to be disasters in the sober light of morning!) was almost criminally absurd, since the greatest masterpiece of imitation presupposed a voluntary limitation of thought, in submission to another man's genius.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, quote from Bend Sinister


“He stopped. “You're upset. I'll shut up and leave you”
― Iris Johansen, quote from The Killing Game


“Whaddaya mean 'old maids,' ha? The term is 'unclaimed treasure,' buddy, 'unclaimed treasure!”
― Laurie Notaro, quote from Autobiography of a Fat Bride: True Tales of a Pretend Adulthood


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