Launa > Launa's Quotes

“Can we not simply be people, each of us with cogs in our brains that turn slightly differently, and some that need oiling and alignment and upkeep more than others?”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“In pure science, you can be pretty sure that nothing fundamental is ever discovered by anyone who's actually looking for it -- that's half the fun of the game”
― Arthur C. Clarke, Tales from the White Hart

“I want to stop picking at life like it's a meal I don't want to eat, because I want to. I want to taste it all. I want life to be a feast, even if I have to eat it raw and bloody and burned some days. I will pick bones from my teeth. I will let the juice drip down my chin.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“Why do people assume I know more than I do? I’m an idiot about most things.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“Anyone who says they enjoy my writing is clearly either lying or has terrible taste.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“I want to sleep, I think. I want to stop struggling and give in. I want to let the water take me and never have to be in my own company again. I want to stop dragging myself around, stop feeling the weight of every thought like they're stones pulling me farther and farther under, the seafloor and surface both out of sight. I want to stop feeling weak just because some days, I can hardly carry my heavy heart.

...

I want to belong to myself. I want to stop feeling worthless and pointless and hopeless and less, less, less than everyone else around me. I want to live, not just survive, and fill myself up with all the people who have loved me into this moment and this man. I want to believe I am good and kind and clever and worthy with as much conviction as I have believed the opposites. I want to stop picking at life like it's a meal I don't want to eat, because I want to. I want to taste it all. I want life to be a feast, even if I have to eat it raw and bloody and burned some days. I will pick bones from my teeth. I will let the juice drip down my chin.

...

I want to sleep, I think as the sea rocks me, my name on its breath and my body suspended in its gentle embrace.

But what I say is, "I want to wake up.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“Someone told me once," Monty continues, "there is life after you survive."

"What does that mean?" I ask.

"It means the feeling that you're not so much living your life as just trying to push through it won't last forever. Someday you'll be able to breathe. I don't know what your mind tells you, and I know that no matter what I say you likely won't believe it—can't believe it—but I still want you to hear it. You are so young, and you are so brilliant, and you are so good, Adrian. You're so much more of everything that you think you are.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“Walking into hell is always the easiest part. It’s coming back that takes work.”
“But she found a way. We always do, don’t we?”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“fumbling introduction to my supposedly dead pirate doctor sister”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“I understand what it's like to feel you'll never see the sun again. But you can learn to see in the dark. Or, if not, you trust that night doesn't last forever”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“The world of academic research is strange!”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Nobleman's Guide to Scandal and Shipwrecks

“A small but noteworthy note. I've seen so many young men over the years who think they're running at other young men. They are not. They are running at me.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“You can't eat books, sweetheart.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“It’s a small story really, about, among other things:

* A girl
* Some words
* An accordionist
* Some fanatical Germans
* A Jewish fist fighter
* And quite a lot of thievery”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race - that rarely do I even simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant...I AM HAUNTED BY HUMANS.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“When you really want love, you will find it waiting for you.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“I believe I am to have enough to live on for about eighteen months at any
rate, so that if I may not write beautiful books, I may at least read beautiful
books; and what joy can be greater?”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“God made the world just as much for me as for any one else.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“This, I say. This and this. The way his hair looked in summer sun. His face when he ran. His eyes, solemn as an owl at lessons. This and this and this. So many moments of happiness, crowding forward.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“Varian sat silent for a moment, his hands between his knees. "All my life I've enjoyed perfect privilege," he said. "American, rich, Protestant, Harvard-educated. I could walk down the street anywhere and feel, God help me, like a master.”
― Julie Orringer, The Flight Portfolio

“There are moments when the filament of time bends, loops, blurs. The present becomes permeable; the past leaps forward and insists itself upon us without warning. The orderly progression of our days reveals itself to be a lie, and the sense making brain flounders. What was he supposed to call this impossibility that insisted itself before him as reality? A hallucination? Deja vu, that cheap cinematic trick of the mind?”
― Julie Orringer, The Flight Portfolio

“If we could pin down the moments when our lives bifurcate into before and after-if we could pause the progression of milliseconds, catch ourselves at the point before we slip over the precipice-if we could choose to remain suspended on time-amber, our lives intact, our hearts unbroken, our foreheads unlined, our nights full of undisturbed sleep-would we slip, or would we choose the amber?”
― Julie Orringer, The Flight Portfolio

“When he [Christ] says 'Forgive your enemies', it is not for the sake of the enemy but for one's own sake that he says so, and because Love is more beautiful than Hate.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis