You can never know how your clock runs. But it does run – and always faster than you think.
I burn, I freeze; I am never warm. I am rigid; I forgot softness because it did not serve me.
If you want to kill yourself, do not use us as your knife.
Just remember that the only question in a house is who is to rule. The rest is only dancing around that, trying not to look it in the eye.
Everyone is a criminal! We are beset on all sides by antirevolutionary forces. Naturally, then, humans fall into three categories: the criminal, the not-yet-criminal, and the not-yet-caught.
In both marriage and war you must cut up the things people say like a cake and eat only what you can stomach.
Tell it fast before you get scared and silence yourself. You’ll never wish you’d held back a little more.
Monsters almost always are culture’s way of working out their fears.
After love, no one is what they were before.
I’m not lost, because I haven’t any idea where to go that I might get lost on the way to. I’d like to get lost, because then I’d know where I was going, you see.
I am selfish. I am cruel. My mate cannot be less than I.
He missed you like a fish in a bowl misses the open sea.
There is no such thing as a people who are all wicked or even all good. Everyone chooses. But even they, even they looked at people and saw only tools. No one is a cup for another to drink from.
It’s Latin, which is an excellent language for mischief-making, which is why governments are so fond of it.
And if they thought her aimless, if they thought her a bit mad, let them. It meant they left her alone. Marya was not aimless, anyway. She was thinking.
How much better if life were more like books, if life lied a little more, and gave up its stubborn and boring adherence to the way things can be, and thought a little more imaginatively about the way things might be.
When the world changes, it stashes us away where we can’t make it run the other way again.
And it’s the wonders I’m after, even if I have to bleed for them.
All stories must end so, with the next tale winking out of the corners of the last pages, promising more, promising moonlight and dancing and revels, if only you will come back when spring comes again.
Well, very splendid and very frightening. But splendid things are often frightening. Sometimes, it’s the fright that makes them splendid at all.