Samatar Quotes

#1. All through my journey his stories had fallen like snow. He was as full of them as a library with unmarked shelves. He was a talking book.

Sofia Samatar

#2. while Tolkien's stories were not historically real, they were true

Devin Brown

#3. It was "a shape to make men weep," wrote Firdred of Bain when he first saw it: "exactly the shape of a desecrated sea.

Sofia Samatar

#4. [h]ope, like a desert aloe. Hope, stubborn and bitter to the taste. That hides water. That bears the drought. An ugly plant with the power to heal.

Sofia Samatar

#5. The night sky was distended in my dreams, sinking to earth with the weight of destructive glory behind it. In one of those dreams I reached up and touched it gently with a fingertip, and it burst like a yolk, releasing a deluge of light.

Sofia Samatar

#6. I sat down in the wilderness with my books, and wept for joy.

Sofia Samatar

#7. The word for 'book' in all the known languages of the earth is vallon, 'chamber of words' ...

Sofia Samatar

#8. And since you know you cannot see yourself,
so well as by reflection, I, your glass,
will modestly discover to yourself,
that of yourself which you yet know not of.

William Shakespeare

#9. Kids are not fooled when we try to cover up inequality. They will divide a cookie precisely in half. They're the most conscientious people in the world that way.

Sofia Samatar

#10. It's all right for a woman to be, above all, human. I am a woman first of all.

Anais Nin

#11. All bleed who fight with the sword. All confront, with greater or lesser difficulty, the worship of their own flesh. The swordmaiden faces particular obstacles in this matter: she will have seen, in the temples and elsewhere, many images of unscarred women.

Sofia Samatar

#12. I understand that in some families both parents have to work, so the kids are home alone eating more processed foods. But if the kids know how to make oatmeal or eggs in the morning or pasta or a lentil soup at night - we're giving them real survival tools.

Tamra Davis

#13. It is ... courage to choose not what will make us happy, but what is precious.

Sofia Samatar

#14. But preserve your mistrust of the page, for a book is a fortress, a place of weeping, the key to a desert, a river that has no bridge, a garden of spears.

Sofia Samatar

#15. Except you never knew when you faced the last of anything. That was a universal truth I wished I didn't understand. That ridiculous curl on Doyle's forehead came back

Anonymous

#16. Darius was clearly of the opinion
That the air is also man's dominion,
And that, with paddle or fins or pinion,
We soon or late
Shall navigate
The azure, as now we sail the sea.

John Townsend Trowbridge

#17. His exaltation left no room for the human.

Sofia Samatar

#18. The truth has its own virtue, which is separate from its content.

Sofia Samatar

#19. Words are sublime, and in books we may commune with the dead. Beyond this there is nothing true, no voices we can hear.

Sofia Samatar

#20. She ignited her heart by touching it to his; and after that there was no peace for either of them.

Sofia Samatar

#21. Long is the journey homeward, Weary and worn are we. Oh, if I fall behind, my love, Will you look back for?

Sofia Samatar

#22. Those who spend long hours engaged in reading or writing should not be spoken to for seven hours afterward.

Sofia Samatar

#23. There is nothing, he tells me, more odious than a German. However, their women are seductive, and they make the world's most beautiful music. My employer sings me a German song. He sounds like a buffalo in distress. Afterward he makes me read to him from the Bible.

Sofia Samatar

#24. The tunneling entrance curves before it opens into this space and there is absolute, waiting, coiled, and sentient blackness.

Sofia Samatar

#25. I sat enchanted, far from my gods, adrift in the boat of spices, in the sigh of the South, in the net of the wheeling stars, in the country of dolphins.

Sofia Samatar

#26. It mattered. They mattered, and whatever it was that had made them not kill each other on Bullfinch beach all those years ago ... mattered.

Laini Taylor

#27. Once you have built something - something that takes all your passion and will - it becomes more precious to you than your own happiness. You don't realise that, while you are building it. That you are creating a martyrdom - something which, later, will make you suffer.

Sofia Samatar

#28. Everyone likes ice cream," he said, white with rage. The mask of patience was slipping, and I don't know how I managed to hold back my tears. "Everyone except you, son, because you're a moron.

Cesar Aira

#29. Ideas are the cheapest part of the writing. They are free. The hard part is what you do with ideas you've gathered.

Jane Yolen

#30. I want to stay there. I don't want to go any further. I want to stay. I can't remember who it was - one of the poets, perhaps Tamundein - who said that all of our happiest hours must pass away at last, even those in which we believe we are unhappy.

Sofia Samatar

#31. To lose a sibling is to lose the one different from you. There's no one now against whom to say: But I am like this. I am this.

Sofia Samatar