Sarah Monette Quotes

'So what happens next?'
'Everybody dies, and the people who don't get married.'
'Like any other story, then.'

What makes a story a story is that something changes. Internal, external, small or large, trivial or of earth-shattering importance. Doesn't matter.

Well fuck me sideways 'til I cry

I miss my fox-headed brother. Keeper

It occurred to me that it said something very unpleasant about both of us that we saw concern and kindness as attacks.

I am a huge fan of world-building. I love doing it in my own books, and I love reading it done well.

Sacred bleeding fuck, I said, because, I mean its one thing to know your crazy hocus brother sees ghosts, and a whole different thing when you find out they're telling him bedtime stories.

It is a rose planted in your heart, and as it's thorns tear you, so does it thrive and flower

Beyond the window, snow fell like frozen drops of poison.

Consider the stars. Among them are no passions, no wars. They know neither love nor hatred. Did man but emulate the stars, would not his soul become clear and radiant as they are? But man's spirit draws him like a moth to the ephemera of this world, and in their heat he is consumed entire.

I have mild albinism, which means I am very sensitive to light, so the animal representation of my spirit would have to be a mole. I am particularly fond of that most Lovecraftian of mammals, the star-nosed mole, and tend to choose it for online icons and avatars.

Was you born this fucking dumb, Milly-Fox, or do you practice every Dixieme?

I'm a cat burglar.

I catch a flash of red-gold beneath the surface of the water, and realize that there are koi in the pond, massive, serene, and I wonder: are they dreams of fish, or fish who dream?

If I was really, really lucky, Felix might throw a fireball at me, and I'd get out of the rest of this freakshow.

It is said in those districts that not all the trains which run on the city's tracks are listed in Metropolitan Transit's compendious schedule. The residents will tell you that after midnight, on some nights, there will be other trains, trains whose cry is different, the bellow of some great beast fighting for its life. And if you watch those trains go past, behind those bright flickering windows you will see passengers unlike any passengers you have seen when riding the trains yourself: men with wings, women with horns, beast-headed children, fauns and dryads and green-skinned people more beautiful than words can describe. In 1893, a schoolteacher swore that she saw a unicorn; in 1934, a murderer turned himself into the police, weeping, saying that he saw his victims staring at him from a train as it howled past the station platform on which he stood.
These are the seraphic trains. The stories say they run to Heaven, Hell, and Faërie. They are omens, but no one can agree on what they portend. And although you will never meet anyone who has seen or experienced it, there are persistent rumors, unkillable rumors, that sometimes, maybe once a century, maybe twice, a seraphic train will stop in its baying progress and open its doors for a mortal.
Those who know the story of Thomas the Rhymer - and even some who don't - insist that all these people, blest or damned as they may be, must be poets.

The fountain of youth is like the monkey's paw in the W. W. Jacobs story. It never ends well.

And killed a trellsow, one of the ones he'd learned to recognize as a smith. And thought of Thorlot, who might be a better blacksmith than her father or brother or dead husband, or more than her son would be, but who would never be anything more than wife, sister, daughter, mother. At least she was honored, he thought, wrenching his axe free of the trellsmith's ribs. He didn't mean Thorlot, and he did not know whether he was angry at his own kind for their blindness or angry at the trolls for making him see how blind they were.

And besides, the thing about committing yourself to a lie is that mostly you end up in twice the trouble, 'cause truth is like a whirlwind and you can't keep it in a box.

'You like jealousy. You like knowing people want you.'
He wasn't talking about sex, and my heart slowed a little. 'Is it not natural to want to be liked?'
'That ain't what you want. It's like you got to have everybody's heart, and if they don't give it, you rip it out and watch it bleed.'

The rats we met the size of small dogs and they watched us go by like they'd figured out that what People were for was feeding rats.

The dead person is not truly dead until the last person who rememebers them dies.

I gave up on cussing - I'd run out of words filthy enough - and just started praying.

I would love with all my heart to be able to speak Greek, classical or modern or both. It is a beautiful language, both aurally and in terms of the intricacy of its construction. I took four semesters of Ancient Greek in college, but it's all rusted away now - and I never learned to speak it anyway.

The river runs through the heart of the city, and braiding around and over and under the river, the city's rail system is a welter of tarnished silver ribbons.

He fell away into the column before Isolfr could blink the thought of thanking him into his bleary mind, and Isolfr looked up at Frithulf in supplication. "What was that about?"
"Stay pretty," Frithulf advised, through a mouthful of meat.
Isolfr would have kicked him if he hadn't been out of reach on the horse.

Although Mar would be quite pleased to be consort, Skjaldwulf didn't want to be wolfjarl.
He wanted Isolfr, and he would take the damned job that went with it, if he could win it, if that was what it took.