Victoria Aveyard

The truth is what I make it. I could set this world on fire and call it rain.

Anyone can betray anyone.

Rise, red as the dawn.

Words can lie. See beyond them.

I told you to hide your heart once. You should have listened.

Flame and shadow. One cannot exist without the other.

If you know someone's fear, you know them.

The gods rule us still. They have come down from the stars. And they are no longer kind.

No one is born evil, just like no one is born alone. They become that way, through choice and circumstance.

Kathryn Croft

I had never felt more alone. That was what happened when you let people in.

Imagine being part of a pair, attached so firmly to someone that their life was entwined with mine.

You can’t erase the past but you can make sure your future isn’t dictated by it.

I wasn’t a cat person. Or a dog person. Or an any animal person, but that didn’t mean I wanted any harm to come to them.

People don't wear signs pointing them out as a wife beater or murderer. They're often the complete contrast of what we'd expect.

Houses have a different feel when you are alone in them. Silent and cold, no matter what time of the day or month it is.

You can’t erase the past but you can make sure your future isn’t dictated by it. Punishing yourself won’t change anything. And you’ve done that long enough.

For them today is another day without their daughter. I know that time will make things worse for them rather than easier; it does not heal the pain of a missing child. Instead, each passing day only diminishes hope, and gradually fades the image you hold of them.

Kenneth Clark

I believe order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven't changed much in the last two thousand years; and in consequence we must try to learn from history.

It would be unfair to say that I prefer the back of a book to its contents, but it is true that the sight of a lot of books gives me the hope that I may some day read them, which sometimes develops into the belief that I have read them.

Lives devoted to Beauty seldom end well.

As I have said, it may be difficult to define civilization, but it isn't so difficult to recognize barbarism.

The moral and intellectual failure of Marxism has left us with no alternative to heroic materialism, and that isn't enough.

Richard Russo

Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don't have to go looking for it.

And there comes a time in your life when you realize that if you don't take the opportunity to be happy, you may never get another chance again.

What if all everybody needed in the world was to be sure of one friend? What if you were the one, and you refused to say those simple words?

After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their heart's impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble.

Not giving a shit, she decided, is like the defrost option on a car's heater that miraculously unfogs the windshield, allowing you to see where you're headed.

People sometimes get in the habit of being loyal to a mistake.

What I discovered I liked best about striking out on my bicycle was that the farther I got from home, the more interesting and unusual my thoughts became.

Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves. We need them to tell us. We need them to say, "I know you, Al. You are not the kind of man who.

Margot Lee Shetterly

Women, on the other hand, had to wield their intellects like a scythe, hacking away against the stubborn underbrush of low expectations.

Katherine Johnson knew: once you took the first step, anything was possible.

Their dark skin, their gender, their economic status--none of those were acceptable excuses for not giving the fullest rein to their imaginations and ambitions.

Their path to advancement might look less like a straight line and more like some of the pressure distributions and orbits they plotted, but they were determined to take a seat at the table.

I changed what I could, and what I couldn't, I endured.

Or maybe it was her father's pragmatic dictum -- "You are no better than anyone else, and no one is better than you"-- that disposed her to see the hardships of her life as a fate shared by everyone, her good fortunes as an unearned blessing.

Ibram X Kendi

The opposite of racist isn't 'not racist.' It is 'anti-racist.' What's the difference? One endorses either the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist, or racial equality as an anti-racist. One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an anti-racist. One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an anti-racist. There is no in-between safe space of 'not racist

Black people are apparently responsible for calming the fears of violent cops in the way women are supposedly responsible for calming the sexual desires of male rapists.

The good news is that racist and antiracist are not fixed identities. We can be a racist one minute and an antiracist the next. What we say about race, what we do about race, in each moment, determines what -- not who -- we are.

Americans have long been trained to see the deficiencies of people rather than policy. It's a pretty easy mistake to make: People are in our faces. Policies are distant. We are particularly poor at seeing the policies lurking behind the struggles of people.

Fiona Barton

I remember looking at him lying there in a small pool of blood and thinking ‘oh well, that’s the end of his nonsense.

The simple lies are the hardest, funnily enough. The big ones seem to just fall off the tongue.

People say what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. They say that when you been through something terrible ... But it doesn't. It breaks your bones, leaving everything splintered and held together with grubby bandages and yellowing sticky tape. Creaking along the fault lines, Fragile and exhausting to hold together. Sometimes you wish it had killed you.

It's a strange feeling, owning a secret. It's like a stone in my stomach, crushing my insides and making me feel sick every time I think of it.

Addicts are brilliant liars, Inspector. They lie to themselves and then to everyone else. They’re in denial about their problem, and they are experts at finding excuses and other people to blam.

Dangerous to think you know too much, sometimes, because who really knows someone else? You can scratch the skin, but you never get to the meat of someone else. Into their bones.

Sarah J. Maas

Libraries were full of ideas—perhaps the most dangerous and powerful of all weapons.

“To the people who look at the stars and wish, Rhys."
Rhys clinked his glass against mine. “To the stars who listen— and the dreams that are answered.”

You could rattle the stars," she whispered. "You could do anything, if only you dared. And deep down, you know it, too. That’s what scares you most.

No. I can survive well enough on my own— if given the proper reading material.

We all bear scars,... Mine just happen to be more visible than most.

He thinks he'll be remembered as the villain in the story. But I forgot to tell him that the villain is usually the person who locks up the maiden and throws away the key. He was the one who let me out.

She was the heir of ash and fire, and she would bow to no one.

You cannot pick and choose what parts of her to love.

My name is Celaena Sardothien. But it makes no difference if my name's Celaena or Lillian or Bitch, because I'd still beat you, no matter what you call me.

I fell in love with you, smartass, because you were one of us—because you weren’t afraid of me, and you decided to end your spectacular victory by throwing that piece of bone at Amarantha like a javelin. I felt Cassian’s spirit beside me in that moment, and could have sworn I heard him say, ‘If you don’t marry her, you stupid prick, I will.

Robert Bryndza

The secret of blending in, is don’t try to. Everyone is so fucking self-obsessed.

You're going up against powerful people here, and the odds are not in your favour.' 'Sounds very Hunger Games...

Behind every powerful man is a woman who knows how to push his buttons. Good.

But those same eyes were beginning to crease at the corners, her forehead bore too many lines and her face was beginning to sag.

I unzipped my boots but they wouldn’t budge. My feet had swollen in the heat. After much tugging, a queue had started to form behind us. Eventually I had no choice but to hold onto the rail with my legs in the air whilst Adam pulled. It wasn’t my finest hour.

IO means Senior Investigating Officer. The “senior” part doesn’t mean you’re older then everyone and entitled to bully them when the shit hits the fan. It means you take responsibility for your fuck-ups.

Candice Millard

The ordinary traveler, who never goes off the beaten route and who on this beaten route is carried by others, without himself doing anything or risking anything, does not need to show much more initiative and intelligence than an express package," Roosevelt sneered.

Of course a man has to take advantage of his opportunities, but the opportunities have to come,” he told an audience in Cambridge, England, in the spring of 1910. “If there is not the war, you don’t get the great general; if there is not the great occasion, you don’t get the great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in times of peace, no one would know his name now.

Dr. Lister, who treated the wounded Pres. Garfield, had been so stung by the medical establishment's reaction to his embrace of African-American doctors that he, in response, refused to do part from the status quo enough to considering using antiseptic techniques.

Theologians in all ages have looked out admiringly upon the material universe and … demonstrated the power, wisdom, and goodness of God; but we know of no one who has demonstrated the same attributes from the history of the human race.