Trajan's Quotes

#1. The guard hit Kestrel across the face. "I said, what did you give him?"
You had a warrior's heart, even then.
Kestrel spat blood. "Nothing," she told the guard. She thought of her father, she thought of Arin. She told her final lie. "I gave him nothing.

Marie Rutkoski

#2. A lover? Maybe. Something tender, anyway. But tender like a bruise.

Marie Rutkoski

#3. We must define flattery and praise; they are distinct. Trajan was encouraged to virtue by the panegyric Pliny; Tiberius became obstinate in vice from the flattery of his senators.

Louis XVI Of France

#4. Sounds impossible. I like it. Except it is pretty impossible. You don't happen to remember anything else extremely useful that you've omitted to mention until now?"

"Er," said Paris.

"That was actually a joke," said Vai.

"I'm not good at jokes," said Paris.

Rosamund Hodge

#5. A dagger wants flesh, her father would say. Find it.

Marie Rutkoski

#6. Man's worst ill is stubbornness of heart.

Sophocles

#7. Can I have a final request in case I don't make it?"
"Anything."
"I haven't been kissed in five years, kiss me Trajan," she whispered. "I am so afraid." Trajan slowly pushed his glasses onto the top of his head and brought his lips softly to hers.

Amy Kuivalainen

#8. But she insists the family hadn't a choice. Not true. We always have choices. Isn't that what Dante teaches us?
I really have become quite the Dante scholar: There is no greater sorrow than to recall our time of joy in wretchedness.

Chris Bohjalian

#9. You don't get better as you get older in your career. It's not natural to have your best years late in your career. So I'm trying to do whatever I can to keep my body feeling good for as long as I can.

David Ortiz

#10. Basically, what you find out is the limits of your patience and your strength and your capacity to adapt. You find that out in travel and being alone and being tested. So that's a great thing.

Paul Theroux

#11. Let the morning keep what belongs to the morning,

Marie Rutkoski

#12. A child walked by, rolling a metal hoop that made a sound of autumn.

Yasunari Kawabata

#13. ... to his efforts to perpetuate man: but he has preserved nothing but sensations; and, although his invention was incomplete, he at least foreshadowed the truth: man will one day create human life.

Adolfo Bioy Casares

#14. I wish to blur the firm boundaries which we self-certain people tend to delineate around all we can achieve.

Hannah Hoch

#15. Ultimately, when he held your treasonous letter in his hand and saw how you had lied to him, the choice between me and you was the choice between someone who loves him and someone who didn't.

Marie Rutkoski

#16. You haven't been through one thing that God cannot heal you from.

Beth Moore

#17. Innocent? Her? Never.

Marie Rutkoski

#18. He said, "How can the inconsequence of your life not shame you?"
He said, "How do you not feel empty?"
I do, she thought as she pushed through the library doors and let them thud behind her. I do.

Marie Rutkoski

#19. Prosperity Comes When You Do the Right Things with Your Life

Ernie J Zelinski

#20. The true key to the declension of the Roman empire which is not to be found in all Gibbon 's immense work may be stated in two words: the imperial character overlaying, and finally destroying, the national character. Rome under Trajan was an empire without a nation.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#21. If she had learnt any lesson today it was that men were stupid, helpless creatures made needlessly cruel by their terror of showing their feelings.

Jayne Bauling

#22. Denzel Washington is a big Hollywood movie star now. But he started out as an actor in the Negro Ensemble company.

Pearl Cleage

#23. Town-meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science;

Alexis De Tocqueville

#24. When she saw the opportunity to flee, she would take it. She would bring the hounds of the empire howling down on this city.

Marie Rutkoski

#25. I don't naturally look like this. I have to feed in order to have the power to hold it."
"Feed on what exactly?" Please don't say blood, please don't say blood, she whispered in her mind.
"Death," Trajan answered. Anya didn't know if that was better or worse.

Amy Kuivalainen

#26. I cannot but think we have much to be thankful for, and more still to hope for in the future.

Winston Churchill

#27. She had dreams that shamed her in the morning, dreams where Ronan gave her a white powdered cake, yet spoke in Arin's voice. I made this for you, he said. Do you like it?
The powder was so fine that she inhaled its sweetness, but always woke before she could taste.

Marie Rutkoski

#28. My mission is to help promote peace by helping others to find inner peace. If I can find it, you can too. Peace is an idea whose time has come.

Peace Pilgrim