Alix Quotes

Freedom isn't worth a single solitary shit if it isn't shared. ~ Alix E. Harrow

Zarina stood. "You know, Alix, men suck. Really. They are the worst. Come with me. I need an estrogen fix before their chromosomal defects contaminate me any further." Still ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

Now I sat in my room, face swollen and eyes dry, teetering on the edge of a pain so vast I couldn't see its edges. It would swallow me whole, if I let it. ~ Alix E. Harrow

His cup of tea did not include the dregs, though the dregs are the tea. His brew was nothing but vapor. ~ Alix Kates Shulman

No one can make you feel low unless you allow them to. You're not stupid, Alix. And you're very beautiful. I just thought you should know that. (Devyn) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

Once we have agreed that true love exists, we may consider its nature. It is not, as many misguided poets would have you believe an event in and of itself; it is not something that happens, but something that simply is and always has been. One does not fall in love; one discovers it. ~ Alix E. Harrow

Sometimes I feel there are doors lurking in the creases of every sentence, with periods for knobs and verbs for hinges. ~ Alix E. Harrow

friends, and, of course," - he glanced toward their sleeping daughter - "the love of a father and mother for their child. All these taken together, with all the joy and pain that they confer - that can save us, surely. Love of life, Alix. You have it. And since I've found you, so do I. ~ Linda Barlow

You know, Vik, you're amazingly human at times. (Alix)
I know. But I wonder if the feelings I have are real or just electrical stimulations in my cortex that simulate human emotion. I wish I knew if they were real or imagined. (Vik)
And that makes you completely human, sweetie. We all have those doubts. (Alix) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

The world is abundant with food for us, and with everything we need, if only we just open our eyes. There's so much food that gets thrown out or never harvested. ~ Alix Kates Shulman

As soon as I saw him again I could forget all this existed; I would be calm. Was that a definition of love: a force that can drug you with calm and help you forget all the sandpaper realities of the world? ~ Alix Ohlin

I wish I was like them," I told Tuck as we watched Alix and Rashida sharpen their swords. Their bodies moved in rhythm, one girl beginning a motion that the other completed. "Women who are lovers aren't looked at with revulsion."
"Women are seen as less than men. That's why they're permitted indulgences - they're pretty pets. Is that so much better? ~ Elliot Wake

To my surprise, Nick reached under his shirt and pulled out the half-heart pendant. With his gaze fixed on mine, he slid the chain over my head. "No one should have to go through life with only half a heart," he whispered. ~ Katherine Allred

The movement for women's liberation was about an emotional transformation, an explosion, a feeling all over the country that things must be different, and ideas about how they should be. I think fiction can capture that kind of thing better than other genres because in fiction you can explore the feelings of your characters - the before and the after. ~ Alix Kates Shulman

When you witness the end of a life up close day by day, you begin to understand time and mortality in profound ways. You see time's relativity, death's necessity. ~ Alix Kates Shulman

Because I took an oath to help people. To protect them from The League and any corrupt government. (Devyn)
Yeah, and I know people better than to believe that for even an instant. Altruism is dead. People use and they take until you're nothing but a bleeding corpse on the ground at their feet. (Alix) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

I was abruptly, entirely sick of it - of secrets and lies and almost-truths, things I half knew and half-suspected, patched-together stories that were never told in order from beginning to end. It seemed to be an unspoken agreement in the world that young girls without money or means were simply too insignificant to be told everything. Even my own father had waited until the very last moment to tell me his whole truth. ~ Alix E. Harrow

For me, the world is a stage, and we are all playing the character we have chosen to play on that stage. It is the job of the photographer to capture the drama of the performance. ~ Alix Smith

Her face was plastered with layers of powder and looked like a face of stone. And with her noble profile, she seemed, on the triangular, moss-covered pedestal hidden by her cape, like a crumbling goddess in a park. ~ Marcel Proust

I love you, baby. And I want you to stay with me. Always. (Devyn)
Believe me, there's no place else I'd rather be. (Alix)
Me, either, but I would rather we be naked. (Devyn) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

Every story is a love story if you catch it at the right moment ~ Alix E. Harrow

In my books, my idea is always to explore social context and social forces. ~ Alix Kates Shulman

Sometimes pain is too unavoidable, too necessary to feel. ~ Alix E. Harrow

I hope you will find the cracks in the world and wedge them wider, so the light of other suns shines through; I hope you will keep the world unruly, messy, full of strange magics; I hope you will run through every open Door and tell stories when you return. ~ Alix E. Harrow

Mothers. Can't live with them, can't hit them over the head with a board. ~ Katherine Allred

The easiest thing is to say no. What's not so easy is telling yourself to stop. ~ Alix

Worlds were never meant to be prisons, locked and suffocating and safe. Worlds were supposed to be great rambling houses with all the windows thrown open and the wind and summer rain rushing through them, with magic passages in their closets and secret treasure chests in their attics. ~ Alix E. Harrow

Alix literally felt like the only piece of meat at a kennel as a team of women descended on her to trim her hair, tweeze her brows - something that had to have been invented by a sadist - and make her face over. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

Those of you who are more than casually familiar with books -- those of you who spend your free afternoons in fusty bookshops, who offer furtive, kindly strokes along the spines of familiar titles -- understand that page riffling is an essential element in the process of introducing oneself to a new book. It isn't about reading the words; it's about reading the smell, which wafts from the pages in a cloud of dust and wood pulp. It might smell expensive and well bound, or it might smell of tissue-thin paper and blurred two-colour prints, or of fifty years unread in the home of a tobacco-smoking old man. Books can smell of cheap thrills or painstaking scholarship, or literary weight or unsolved mysteries. ~ Alix E. Harrow

Lies and half-truths hurt not only the liar, but the people they love most. ~ Katherine Allred

Nick? Have you ever ... "
"No." He lifted his head again, studied me. "I've thought about it, but it never seemed right."
The idea of him making love to anyone else sent a shaft of pain straight through my middle. "You better wait on me, damn it."
"I don't think I have much choice." He brushed my hair back. "You're the only one I've ever wanted, Alix, the only one I'll ever want. That's a promise. ~ Katherine Allred

There's only one way to run away from your own story, and that's to sneak into someone else's. I unwedged the leatherbound book from beneath my mattress and breathed in the ink-and-adventure smell of it. I walked through it into another world. ~ Alix E. Harrow

Word-magic comes at a cost, you see, as power always does. Words draw their vitality from their writers, and thus the strength of a word is limited by the strength of its human vessel. ~ Alix E. Harrow

Thanks for outing me. (Alix)
Anytime, cupcake. Now I'm taking my psychic ass to bed. That door spanked me. (Nero) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

While there was a playfulness to their caustic bards, there was also an aura of "I'll kick your ass back to the Steel Age if you so much as breathe my air the wrong way."' (Alix) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

Let this ignoble origin story stand as an invaluable lesson to you that a person's beginnings do not often herald their endings. ~ Alix E. Harrow

I'm telling you right now I could make him pop an aneurysm and no one would know. (Nero)
Doesn't that kind of murder bother you at all? (Alix)
Given everything people have done to me in my life, little girl, especially in my childhood when I was helpless against them, humanity is lucky I'm not on a perpetual killing spree. As for the Merjacks ... I owe them a debt that no amount of violence on my part will settle. So, no. Nothing about killing him would bother me. (Nero) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

I wanted to run away and keep running until I was out of this sad, ugly fairy tale. There's only one way to run away from your own story, and that's to sneak into someone else's. ~ Alix E. Harrow

I'm not a natural rule-follower. I roll through stop signs, I swear in public, I lie on online personality tests so I get the answers I want (Hermione, Arya Stark, Jo March). ~ Alix E. Harrow

But don't you find the concept of love unusual? (Alix)
Not at all. Love I understand completely. It's hatred that puzzles me. I don't comprehend finding pleasure in cruelty. (Vik) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

I have to try. I can't leave him there. You don't understand, Vik. I love him, and I can't let him pay for something I did. I don't care what it takes, we have to save him. (Alix)
Those words, little girl, just saved your life. (Shahara) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

there was daunting poverty, and there was haunting wealth and the narrator warned her to keep to herself ~ Alix Olson

The point is that I was scared and hurt and alone sometimes but in the end I won. I'm free. And if that's the price for being free, I'll pay it. ~ Alix E. Harrow

When one enters a door, one must be brave enough to see the other side. ~ Alix E. Harrow

Alix bore the blow without flinching. A block of marble. Her gaze was piercing and blank, her nose nobly arched. But one cheek was flaking. A hint of strange green and pink vegetation was invading her chin. Another winter perhaps would lay her low. ~ Marcel Proust

You don't really know how fragile and fleeting your own voice is, until you watch a rich man take it away as easily as signing a bank loan. ~ Alix E. Harrow

Words and their meanings have weight in the world of matter, shaping and reshaping realities through a most ancient alchemy. ~ Alix E. Harrow

No worries. They don't scare me. (Devyn) All right, but if my brain matter ends up smeared against a wall, I'll never forgive you. (Alix) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

I love you, Devyn Wade Kell, with everything inside me. But it's okay if you don't feel the same. I know I'm just a piece of trash in your world, and I don't expect you to share my feelings. (Alix)
Don't you ever say that to me again. Trash is something people throw away, Alix. I intend to keep you for the rest of my life. (Devyn) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

If you are wondering why other worlds seem so brimful of magic compared to your own dreary Earth, consider how magical this world seems from another perspective. To a world of sea people, your ability to breathe air is stunning; to a world of spear throwers, your machines are demons harnessed to work tirelessly in your service; to a world of glaciers and clouds, summer itself is a miracle. ~ Alix E. Harrow

I am not a psychological novelist, and I try very hard not to allow the reader to see the plight or circumstances of the characters as individual psychological plights. That's my preference; still, a lot of people do read my novels as psychological studies, and they're right to read them that way too, if that's what they mean to them. ~ Alix Kates Shulman

It's the same bargain we've been making for centuries, one way or another: give up your life in order to keep living. Give him your saltwater skin; give him your voice; give him your thousand stories. Give up your body and live forever rooted to the bank of the Big Sandy, dreaming and watching. Do what you can to stay alive. ~ Alix E. Harrow

The only person on this ship who gets paid for what they do is you, Alix. The rest of us live off our trust funds and we use those funds for our humanitarian missions. I do what I do because I can't stand to see innocent people bullied by a corrupt government. I don't want to see a baby starve and die because some fat politician wants to work its parents into the ground for a mineral most of them can't even pronounce. (Devyn) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

I see old age not as something to hide from or dread (though there is much to oppose in the usual treatment of the old) but rather as something to embrace as the natural and inevitable end. ~ Alix Kates Shulman

Standing beside her grandmother's deathbed, woolen dress still smelling of black logwood dye, Ade had felt the way a sapling might as it watched one of the old forest giants come crashing magnificently to rest: awed, and perhaps a little frightened. But when Mama Larson's final breath rattled from her ribs, Ade discovered the same thing the young sapling would have: in the absence of the old tree, there was a hole in the canopy above her. ~ Alix E. Harrow

We were jigsawed, meant to fit together, making a whole picture. ~ Alix Ohlin

She became something else entirely, something so radiant and while and fierce that a single world could not contain her, and she was obliged to find others. ~ Alix E. Harrow

Doors, he told her, are change, and change is a dangerous necessity. Doors are revolutions and upheavals, uncertainties and mysteries, axis points around which entire worlds can be turned. ~ Alix E. Harrow

Fallen women are afforded a species of freedom.
Footnote: There is of course no such thing as a fallen woman, unless we are speaking of a woman who recently tripped on the stairs. One of the most difficult elements of this world is the way its social rules are simultaneously rigid and arbitrary. It is impermissible to engage in physical love before binding legal marriage, unless one is a young man of means. Men must be bold and assertive, but only if they are light-skinned. Any persons may fall in love regardless of station, but only if one is a woman and the other a man. I urge you not to navigate your own life by such faulty borders, my dear. There are, after all, other worlds. ~ Alix E. Harrow

Sentences may alter the weather, and poems might tear down walls. Stories may change the world. ~ Alix E. Harrow

For me, art has to have two things to really blow me away: a strong concept and drama. ~ Alix Smith

In my life I've learned that the people you love will leave you. They will abandon you, disappoint you, betray you, lock you away, and in the end you will be alone, again and always. ~ Alix E. Harrow

I did not intend to be a writer. I first wanted to be a lawyer, like my father. Then I got bit by the bug of philosophy and wanted to be a philosophy professor. I went to graduate school and quickly discovered it was impossible for a woman in those days - this was the early fifties - to be a philosopher, so I gave that up. ~ Alix Kates Shulman

You can't turn love on and off like a light switch, no matter how hard you try. All you can do is wall it off, one brick at a time, until you've created an impenetrable fortress around your emotions. And once that fortress is built, you camouflage it so well that even you can't see it anymore. ~ Katherine Allred

Usually, ordinary histories don't get the emotional feel of a period. That's what a novel can do. ~ Alix Kates Shulman

It is fashionable among intellectuals and sophisticates to scoff at true love -- to pretend it is nothing but a sweet fairy tale sold to children and young women, to be taken as seriously as magic wands or glass slippers. I feel nothing but pity for these learned persons, because they would not say such foolish things if they had ever experienced love for themselves. ~ Alix E. Harrow

I will not be your leash, my love. ~ Alix E. Harrow

I felt the most effective way to change people's perception was through the power of images. ~ Alix Smith

Hearts aren't chessboards, and they don't play by the rules. ~ Alix E. Harrow

For two years I watched my parents' lives wind to a close. This made me aware of old age as a one stage, the final one, of a long journey. ~ Alix Kates Shulman

Our society has very much limited our choices, even regarding the food we think acceptable. ~ Alix Kates Shulman

If one day I should hear the hacker's slow, booted step on the stair, perhaps I'll suggest a cup of tea and try to get the story of his life. ~ Alix Kates Shulman

- novels are untrustworthy advisers. They aren't concerned with rationality or sobriety; they peddle in tragedy and suspense, in chaos and rule breaking, in madness and heartache, and they will steer you toward such things with all the guile of a piper luring rats into a river. ~ Alix E. Harrow

What if there is no dirt on Merjack?
Oh, I can answer this one. (Omari raised his hand like he was in a classroom, then dropped it to his side.) We all die. (Omari)
I just love teenage angst. By the way, chip, there are worse things in life than dying. (Nero)
Like what? (Omari)
Living as a slave. (Alix) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

Most people can't tell the difference between truthtelling and madness; try it sometime and you'll see what I mean. ~ Alix E. Harrow

One important part of historical recording is to get people of another generation to understand the feelings, the passion that went into social transformation. That's why oral history is so valuable. ~ Alix Kates Shulman

Fiction is ideally suited to re-creating the important emotional aspects of history. ~ Alix Kates Shulman

There is a lot of gender segregation. You still have many poor women who work in women-only jobs. In the family, in most cases, only women have the double job of working outside the home and taking care of the family. ~ Alix Kates Shulman

People often say to me now, "Your work changed my life." I'm sure that's an exaggeration, but they say it had a big effect on them and enabled them to change. I'm not sure I believe that a book will cause someone to change. ~ Alix Kates Shulman

The study of abnormality is one of the main ways that power relations are established in society. When an abnormality and its corresponding norm are defined, somehow it is always the normal person who has the power over the abnormal.
The psychologist tells us about the madmen, the physician about the patients, the criminologist (or the legal theorist, or the politician) talks about the criminal, but we never expect to hear the latter talk about the former - what they have to say has already been ruled irrelevant, because by definition they have no knowledge (but that is code for not wanting them to have any power). ~ Lydia Alix Fillingham

So we're talking into death? (Alix)
Gods, I hope not. I don't have on the right boots for it. These are only good for a mild ass-whipping. (Devyn) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

May she wander but always return home, may all her words be written true, may every door lie open before her. ~ Alix E. Harrow

As with most small town southerners, respectability was as much a part of my DNA as was my hair and eye color. It was the goal everyone strived for, the standard by which every citizen of Morganville was judged. And while my family, the Frenchs, weren't the richest- that honor going to Ian and Helena Morgan- we were one of the most respected. Thanks mostly to the Judge, my grandfather.

His name was Carl, but no one, including his daughters, had ever called him anything but Judge. He retired from the bench when I was five, and since my own father pulled a vanishing act shortly before my birth, the Judge stepped forward to fill that role for me. I thought the man walked on water and took every word from his lips as gospel.

"Alix," he told me. "Stay away from the railroad tracks. A wowzer cat lives under the trestle, and you don't want to get tangled up with one of those."

"What's a wowzer cat?" I asked, enthralled.

"It's a fifty pound cat with eight legs and nine bung holes, and it's meaner than a gar."

The Judge had an odd sense of humor. ~ Katherine Allred

In 1970, Alix Kates Shulman, a wife, mother, and writer who had joined the Women's Liberation Movement in New York, wrote a poignant account of how the initial equality and companionship of her marriage had deteriorated once she had children. "[N]ow I was restricted to the company of two demanding preschoolers and to the four walls of an apartment. It seemed unfair that while my husband's life had changed little when the children were born, domestic life had become the only life I had." His job became even more demanding, requiring late nights and travel out of town. Meanwhile it was virtually impossible for her to work at home. "I had no time for myself; the children were always there." Neither she nor her husband was happy with the situation, so they did something radical, which received considerable media coverage: they wrote up a marriage agreement... In it they asserted that "each member of the family has an equal right to his/her own time, work, values and choices... The ability to earn more money is already a privilege which must not be compounded by enabling the larger earner to buy out of his/her duties and put the burden on the one who earns less, or on someone hired from outside." The agreement insisted that domestic jobs be shared fifty-fifty and, get this girls, "If one party works overtime in any domestic job, she/he must be compensated by equal work by the other." The agreement then listed a complete job breakdown... in other worde, the agreement acknowledged t ~ Susan J. Douglas

That afternoon, sitting in that lonely field beside the Door that didn't lead anywhere, I wanted to write a different kind of story. A true kind of story, something I could crawl into if only I believed it hard enough. ~ Alix E. Harrow

Now I was alone, and the only path was the one I left behind me. ~ Alix E. Harrow

There is nothing quite like the anger of someone very powerful, who has been thwarted by someone who was supposed to be weak. ~ Alix E. Harrow

Destiny is a pretty story we tell ourselves. Lurking beneath it there are only people, and the terrible choices we make. ~ Alix E. Harrow

Just as the sailor yearns for port, the writer longs for the last line. ~ Alix Christie

I felt like an explorer at the precipice of some new, wild world, armed only with ink and hope. ~ Alix E. Harrow

This isn't a church social, Sweetheart. You aren't going to be able to save me this time. ~ Katherine Allred

Books are Doors and I wanted out. ~ Alix E. Harrow

...the place you are born isn't necessarily the place you belong. ~ Alix E. Harrow