Zen Cho Quotes

#1. Love was like swallowing a cili padi whole.

Zen Cho

#2. The aunts' conception of the right to privacy went far enough to allow you to close the toilet door when you were peeing, but no further.

Zen Cho

#3. He was a typical specimen of the younger son in avid pursuit of mediocrity with which the Theurgist's teemed:

Zen Cho

#4. Other dragons are bastards. I moved out of my mother's cave after my mother tried to rip my guts out.
Granted, I had tried to steal her Tiara of Clairvoyance.

Zen Cho

#5. Why, all the greatest magic comes down to blood," said Mak Genggang. "And who knows blood better than a woman?

Zen Cho

#6. A female may be poor or delicate or a spinster, but it does seem ill-advised of Miss Liddiard to combine all three.

Zen Cho

#7. Prunella took to the ballrooms of London in the spirit of ruthless calculation of a general entering a battlefield.

Zen Cho

#8. I might go anywhere and do any magic I pleased if I were Peter, not Prunella.

Zen Cho

#9. But a woman should not marry where there is no respect. Respect is the most important thing.

Zen Cho

#10. Since the decision to become a parent is invariably self-interested, it is my belief that a parent's obligation is to the child, and the child's obligation is to itself.

Zen Cho

#11. How could you die and not be old enough to hear about premarital sex? How could you die and still not be allowed to fall in love or be honest? Surely not everything had to wait for university and a good job. Passion and truth had to trump even those things.

Zen Cho

#12. It is a mother's duty to teach her daughters about the uses of blood, particularly a magical daughter.

Zen Cho

#13. [A] life passed amid the feuds and rivalries of a girls' school had left Prunella not wholly unprepared for battle.

Zen Cho

#14. Magic ran in the family. Even her mother's second cousin, who was adopted, did small spells on the side. She sold these from a stall in Kota Bharu. Her main wares were various types of fruit fried in batter, but if you bought five pisang or cempedak goreng, she threw in a jampi for free.

Zen Cho

#15. Shameless, impudent, meddling females, who presumed to set at naught the Society's prohibition on women's magic, and duped the common people with their potions and cantrips!

Zen Cho

#16. I brought seaweed snacks from home,' chimed in another kid. "Seaweed got iron, right?"
'I don't think the teachers meant that kind of iron,' said Hui Ann.

Zen Cho

#17. Goodbye," said Siew Tsin.
"See you next time," said Lady Meng, more accurately.
"Will you remember me when I come again?"
"Of course," said Lady Meng. "I miss you every time.

Zen Cho

#18. You are having a baby,' he said.

'I certainly hope it turns out to be a baby,' I agreed.

Zen Cho

#19. I can speak four dialects, but none of them is fairy language.

Zen Cho

#20. The first time she saw the boy across the classroom, Ah Lee knew she was in love because she tasted durian on her tongue.

Zen Cho

#21. But one may like someone enough to kiss them without liking them enough to confide in them. The two are quite different emotions.

Zen Cho

#22. Whether I'm a good wife doesn't have anything to do with what he was like.

Zen Cho

#23. He would gaze at her with intrigued longan seed eyes.

Zen Cho

#24. ... it is strange to know you would be cast off by the people who greet you so warmly, if they knew the whole truth about you.

Zen Cho

#25. Zacharias's study bore the marks of his predecessors, whose taste had run decidedly stoicheiotical. They had had a fondness for skulls with burning lights in their eye sockets, crystal balls in which mysterious shapes came and went, and dark velvet window curtains traced with obscure runes.

Zen Cho

#26. I thought: if I die, I hope I get reincarnated into a mosquito so I can bite that fucker kau-kau.

Zen Cho

#27. I should advise you not to stop there, but set fire to his house, too, and sell his children to pirates. That is the only way he will learn

Zen Cho

#28. Are you going? What shall you wear?"
"I shall go in what I am standing in," said Mak Genggang. "A witch is always appropriate whatever her attire.

Zen Cho

#29. But that was the trouble with children, Sir Stephen reflected. They were confoundedly liable to pattern themselves upon one's conduct, when one would rather they simply did what they were told.

Zen Cho

#30. Your amoral ingenuity in the pursuit of your interest is perfectly shocking," said Zacharias severely. "Yes, isn't it?" said Prunella, pleased.

Zen Cho

#31. What are acquaintance for, if not to supply the pleasures of gossip?

Zen Cho