Top 100 Jennifer Donnelly Quotes
#1. For the first time in a long time, he didn't think of the past. And of all the things he'd lost. He thought only of the present, and what he had. And how it was so much more than he deserved. And he prayed then that he would never, ever lose it.
Jennifer Donnelly
#3. We who have means and a voice must use them to help those who have neither. Yet how can we help them if we don't even know about them? And how can we know about them if no one writes about them? Is it so wrong to want to know things?
Jennifer Donnelly
#4. I'm safer with the Tailor and Pretty Will and every thief and cutthroat in the bend than I am with Miss Josephine Montfort of Gramecy Park.
Jennifer Donnelly
#5. Why do you always want to read about other people's lives, Matt? Ain't your own good enough for you
Jennifer Donnelly
#6. Compared to me, everyone has normal relationships.'
Sera laughed. 'Right. Especially me. I'm the queen of normal relationships. The merman I love is about to marry someone else. We have to pretend to hate each other. And his future wife is trying to kill me. Totally normal.
Jennifer Donnelly
#7. Make them care, Mattie,' she said softly. 'And don't you ever be sorry.'
-Emily Wilcox
Jennifer Donnelly
#8. Good warrior knows when to lose a battle so she can live to fight the war.
Jennifer Donnelly
#9. You should spend more time reading the Good Book and less reading all those novels. What are you going to tell the Lord on Judgement Day when He asks you why you didn't read your bible? Hmm?
I will tell Him that His press agents could have done with a writing lesson or two, I said. To myself.
Jennifer Donnelly
#10. The thing is, you can't ever really know how rotten someone will turn out to be.
Jennifer Donnelly
#11. DNA tells you all the secrets of life,' he used to say. Except for one - how to live it.
Jennifer Donnelly
#12. There was a basket at her feet. She reached into it and lifted out the head of a young woman, a marquise. She wore Bourbon white to her death, but wears the tricolor now - white cheeks, blue lips, red dripping from her neck. Long live the revolution.
Jennifer Donnelly
#13. I have done this - made the sad prince laugh. Made his grieving parents smile. None but me. Think you only kings have power? Stand on a stage and hold the hearts of men in your hands. Make them laugh with a gesture, cry with a word. Make them love you. And you will know what power is.
Jennifer Donnelly
#14. She smells of her cooking and the perfume Eau d'Hadrien. My mother wore it, too. She used to cook, like Lili. Our house smelled of garlic and thyme instead of sadness.
Jennifer Donnelly
#17. A new word. Bright with possibilities. A flawless pearl to turn over and over in my hand, then put away for safekeeping.
Jennifer Donnelly
#18. Little by little, the old world crumbled, and not once did the king imagine that some of the pieces might fall on him.
Jennifer Donnelly
#19. Sir, no amount of money, no matter how vast, could induce me to stroll, perambulate, promenade, or engage in any form of locomotion with you whatsoever. Good evening.
Jennifer Donnelly
#20. Maximilien R. Peters! Incorruptible, ineluctable, and indestructable! It's time to start a revolution, baby
Jennifer Donnelly
#21. She was his soulmate, as much a part of him as the very flesh and bone that made him. She was with him, in him, in everything he did. She was everything he wanted from his life, the very measure of his dreams.
Jennifer Donnelly
#22. It's kind of beautiful, this scary world. I still want to go out of it as soon as possible, but when I look around and stop thinking about how insane it all is and just see it without freaking out, it's really beautiful.
Jennifer Donnelly
#23. If you're going to bury the past, bury it deep, girl. Shallow Graves always give up their dead.
Jennifer Donnelly
#24. For the first time, I saw what was in his heart, and I wondered if he might ever want to look deep enough to see mine.
Jennifer Donnelly
#26. I'm wishing he could see that music lives. Forever. That it's stronger than death. Stronger than time. And that its strength holds you together when nothing else can.
Jennifer Donnelly
#27. He pressed himself into me and kissed my neck, and it was as if everything strong and solid inside me, heart and bones and muscle and gut, softened and melted from the heat of him.
Jennifer Donnelly
#28. Love isn't idiotic. It's hard and messy, confusing and wonderful. But to love and be loved... that's all that matters.
Jennifer Donnelly
#29. So. Are you going to tell me where we're going?
Sure.
Yeah?
We're going to the most beautiful place in Paris, he says.
Cool, I say. I love that place.
He laughs and I decide to stop asking.
Jennifer Donnelly
#30. But eating was the last thing on my mind. And I didn't see how Miss Wilcox could eat, or teach, or sleep or ever find any reason to leave this room. Not with all these books in it, just begging to be read.
Jennifer Donnelly
#31. Why is it, she wondered now, that boys get to do things and be things and girls only get to watch?
Jennifer Donnelly
#32. I lift my face to the night sky.
It's still dark.
But I can see the stars.
Jennifer Donnelly
#33. It's a good thing you and your pills weren't around a few hundred years ago or there never would have been a Vermeer or a Caravaggio. You'd have drugged "Girl with a Pearl Earring" and "The Taking of Christ" right the hell out of them.
Jennifer Donnelly
#34. As a child, she'd thought all the noise and commotion was the most wild, wonderful game, but as she'd grown older, she understood why everyone rushed around so: they were chasing a story.
Jennifer Donnelly
#35. I grew up on a mixed diet of mass and class, and I still read that way. I hate it when people apologize for what they read. Some bestsellers aren't exactly literary. So what? They're fun and rip-roaring, Who instituted the book police and why do we have to answer them? Grrrrr!
Jennifer Donnelly
#37. There is an advantage to be found in most everything that happens to you, even if it is not immediately apparent.
Jennifer Donnelly
#38. An escape can become escapism before we even know it. Books are wonderful things, but you can't live in someone else's story. You have to live your own story.
Jennifer Donnelly
#40. Mirrors only show us what we are. Books show us what we can be.
Jennifer Donnelly
#43. Lots of things are true. Doesn't mean you have to go around saying them.
Jennifer Donnelly
#44. I play until my fingertips are raw. Until I rip a nail and bleed on the strings. Until my hands hurt so bad I forget my heart does.
Jennifer Donnelly
#45. Men are the weak ones, luv. Didn't you know? Oh, you make a lot of noise, but its the women who are strong. Where it counts. In 'ere,
Jennifer Donnelly
#46. I know it is a bad thing to break a promise, but I think now that it is a worse thing to let a promise break you.
Jennifer Donnelly
#48. I'M SO GLAD you're not dumb, Yaz," Neela said. Yazeed shot her a sidelong glace. "I thought you were going to say dead." "That, too.
Jennifer Donnelly
#50. The rain comes down harder as I write. It sheets off the roof in torrents. I wish it would pound against me. Pound the life from my body. The flesh from my bones. The pain from my heart.
Jennifer Donnelly
#51. Nevermore is more than an illusion child. It is very real.
Page 267
Jennifer Donnelly
#52. He was beyond damaged. He was broken. Smashed to bloody pieces. He was alone in the world without the one person who could make him whole. And he always would be.
Jennifer Donnelly
#53. I listened as the words became sentences and the sentences became pages and the pages became feelings and voices and places and people.
Jennifer Donnelly
#55. I'd wish you good luck, but you won't need it. You get to write your own story now. Nothing's luckier than that.
Jennifer Donnelly
#56. Seated atop the creature was a mermaid. She carried a crossbow. A sword hung from her hip. Her coppery hair, cut short, was angled over her forehead and cheekbones. Her green eyes blazed with fury.
'Go, Sera!' Becca shouted. 'Take back your throne!
Jennifer Donnelly
#57. I look around myself wildly, my heart bursting with grief and fear and joy. I am leaving, but I will take this place and its stories with me wherever I go.
Jennifer Donnelly
#60. The truth can be a hard thing, Jo. It's often best left hidden.
Jennifer Donnelly
#61. Life can be so difficult, and stories help us escape those difficulties. It's all right to lose yourself in one
Jennifer Donnelly
#62. Go round cringing like a dog, Matt," he said, "and folks will treat you like one. Stand up like a man, and they'll treat you like a man." That was fine for Weaver, but I wondered sometimes, How exactly do you stand up like a man when you're a girl?
Jennifer Donnelly
#64. Break a promise to the dead and they'll haunt you, Ada says. Keep the promise and they'll haunt you just the same.
Jennifer Donnelly
#66. Why do you write?' Because I love words and stories so much. Because I would be grief stricken every day of my life if I couldn't write. Because I'm obsessed and compelled. Because I'd be utterly useless at anything else.
Jennifer Donnelly
#67. And a good warrior knows when to lose a battle so she can live to fight the
Jennifer Donnelly
#68. Asking questions, demanding explanations - these things always led to trouble
Jennifer Donnelly
#69. The world goes on, stupid and brutal, but I do not. Can't you see? I do not.
Jennifer Donnelly
#72. Difficulties are things that show people what they are.
Page 257
Jennifer Donnelly
#74. Had you but seen it, I promise you, your high-minded principles would have melted like candle wax. Never would you have wished such beauty away.
Jennifer Donnelly
#75. Together in our house, in the firelight, we are the world made small.
Jennifer Donnelly
#78. There is only one thing I fear now-love. For I have seen it and I have felt it and I know that it is love, not death, that undoes us.
Jennifer Donnelly
#79. Belle hesitated. "What is this place?" she asked.
"A bit of magic, like all good books," the man replied. "An escape. A place where you can leave cares and worries behind." He smiled. "At least for a chapter or two.
Jennifer Donnelly
#80. Happiness was useless to me. It was heartache that filled my purse. What happy man has need of Shakespeare?
Jennifer Donnelly
#81. No. I meant stay with me today. And tomorrow. And every day after.
Jennifer Donnelly
#82. She wanted to scream her grief to the skies and wail like an animal, but she couldn't.
Jennifer Donnelly
#83. He had known the rarest of things -love, real love - he'd held it in his hand and he'd thrown it away. What was left for him? A lifetime of second-bests
Jennifer Donnelly
#84. Headstrong is just a word, Katie - a word others call you when you don't do what they want.
Jennifer Donnelly
#85. Becoming a parent changed you forever, as nothing else could. p. 368
Jennifer Donnelly
#86. Because in a small dark room, a broken child lies on a filthy bed and stares up at a high window.
He waits for me, too.
And I - I who have failed at everything and have failed everyone - I must not, I cannot, I will not fail him.
Jennifer Donnelly
#87. The day you stop dreaming you might as well take yourself down to the undertaker's, for you're as good as dead.
Jennifer Donnelly
#88. But here, surrounded by friends who wanted her, she recognized for the first time that there was only one voice that truly mattered. Only one she had to listen to. Her own.
Jennifer Donnelly
#89. And besides, I couldn't stay at the party. It was too dangerous. I nearly died."
"From what?"
"Boredom.
Jennifer Donnelly
#90. Funny, 'ow you can 'old a jewel in your 'and, and toss it away, and not even know what you 'ad until it's gone.
Jennifer Donnelly
#91. Hope is the crystal meth of emotions. It hooks you fast and kills you hard.
Jennifer Donnelly
#92. Don't let the darkness that's been visited upon this family pull you in so deeply, you cannot get out. Turn back from it, darling Jo ... he'd warned her. He didn't seem to understand that turning your back on the darkness didn't mean the darkness would turn its back on you.
Jennifer Donnelly
#93. Belle saw now that his gruff, sometimes-frightening exterior masked a kind and loyal heart.
Jennifer Donnelly
#94. I did not want His cold love. I wanted human love - clasping, selfish, and hot. I wanted to smell the rank sweat of the men ... I wanted love - reeking, drunken, hungry love.
Jennifer Donnelly
#95. When you can write music that endures, bravo. Until then, keep quiet and study the work of those who can.
Jennifer Donnelly
#96. He loves the sparkling fountains and their cascades and says the strangest things as he watches them.
they look like stars breaking.
Or, They look like Mama's diamonds.
Or, They look like all the souls in heaven.
Jennifer Donnelly
#98. If you wait for someone else to make things better, you'll be waiting a very long time
Jennifer Donnelly
#99. Have you ever tried to stop her from doing something she wants to do?' Desiderio asked.
Mahdi sighed. 'Yeah, actually, I have,' he said. 'No further explanation needed.
Jennifer Donnelly
#100. Love-real love- sees with the heart, master. Not with the eyes."
The Beast looked at him skeptically. "How do you know that?"
"Because I'm in love with a woman who's a feather duster," said Lumiere. "That's how.
Jennifer Donnelly
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