Jennifer Donnelly famous quotes

Meet me where the sky touches the sea. Wait for me where the world begins.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Love #Sea #Sky

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

#Thinking #Keeping Promises #Promise

Together in our house, in the firelight, we are the world made small.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#House #Together #World

Most of the mess that is called history comes about because kings and presidents cannot be satisfied with a nice chicken and a good loaf of bread.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Kings #Nice #Greed

For mad I may be, but I will never be convenient.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Mad #May #Revolution

They sat quietly together for a few minutes, Joe holding Fiona's hand, Fiona sniffling. No flowery words, no platitudes passed between them. Joe would have done anything to ease her suffering, but he knew nothing he might do, or say, could. Her grief would run its course, like a fever, and release her when it was spent. He would not shush her or tell her it was God's will and that her da was better off. That was rubbish and they both knew it. When something hurt as bad as this, you had to let it hurt. There were no shortcuts.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Running #Hurt #Grief

...Listen to your own thoughts and feelings very carefully, be aware of your observations, and learn to value them. When you're a teenager—and even when you're older—lots of people will try to tell you what to think and feel. Try to stand still inside all of that and hear your own voice. It's yours and only yours, it's unique and worth of your attention, and if you cultivate it properly, it might just make you a writer.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Teenager #Thinking #Unique

But words are more powerful than anything.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Powerful

Life’s all about the revolution, isn’t it? The one inside, I mean. You can’t change history. You can’t change the world. All you can ever change is yourself.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Mean #World #Revolution

The greenest of pastures are right here on earth.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Earth #Pastures

I will go out again this very night with my rockets and fuses. I will blow them straight out of their comfortable beds. Blow the rooftops off their houses. Blow the black, wretched night to bits. I will not stop. For mad I may be, but I will never be convenient.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Night #Blow #Mad

I don't like hope very much. In fact, I hate it. It's the crystal meth of emotions. It hooks you fast and kills you hard. It's bad news. The worst. It's sharp sticks and cherry bombs. When hope shows up, it's only a matter of time until someone gets hurt.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Hurt #Hate #Bombs

When you can write music that endures, bravo. Until then, keep quiet and study the work of those who can.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Writing #Study #Quiet

The feeling that you get.... when you know something is happening that will change you, and you don't want it to, but you can't stop it. And you know, for the first time, that there will now be a before and an after, a was and a will be. And that you will never again quite be the same person you were.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Feelings #Want #Firsts

We're not punished for our sins, lad. We're punished by them.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Sin #Lad

There is a ghost here. A lonely, heartbroken spirit. The ghost of everything that could've been and never was.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Heartbroken #Lonely #Spirit

And I knew in my bones that Emily Dickinson wouldn't have written even one poem if she'd had two howling babies, a husband bent on jamming another one into her, a house to run, a garden to tend, three cows to milk, twenty chickens to feed, and four hired hands to cook for. I knew then why they didn't marry. Emily and Jane and Louisa. I knew and it scared me. I also knew what being lonely was and I didn't want to be lonely my whole life. I didn't want to give up on my words. I didn't want to choose one over the other. Mark Twain didn't have to. Charles Dickens didn't.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Running #Baby #Lonely

A new word. Bright with possibilities. A flawless pearl to turn over and over in my hand, then put away for safekeeping.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Hands #Pearls #Flawless

What I saw next stopped me dead in my tracks. Books. Not just one or two dozen, but hundreds of them. In crates. In piles on the floor. In bookcases that stretched from floor to ceiling and lined the entire room. I turned around and around in a slow circle, feeling as if I'd just stumbled into Ali Baba's cave. I was breathless, close to tears, and positively dizzy with greed.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Book #Circles #Two

He who cannot endure the bad will not live to see the good.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Endure

Why is it that weeks and months and years go by so quickly, all in a blur, but moments last forever?
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Years #Forever #Months

Writers are damned liars. Every single one of them.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Liars

Words fail me sometimes. I have read most every word in the Webster’s International Dictionary of the English Language, but I still have trouble making them come when I want them to. Right now I want a word that describes the feeling you get – a cold sick feeling deep down inside – when you know something is happening that will change you, and you don’t want it to, but you can’t stop it. And you know you will never be the same again.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Sick #Feelings #Want

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

#Voice #People #Feelings

I think your vision gets better as you get older.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Thinking #Vision #Get Better

I've always admired your rather formidable will, your refusal to back away from difficulties, but sometimes strength isn't about perseverance. Sometimes it's about knowing when to quit.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Perseverance #Knowing #Quitting

You are a ghost, Andi," she says. "Almost gone." I look at her. I want to say something but I can't get the words out. She squeezes my hands. "Come back to us," she says. And she's gone.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Hands #Looks #Gone

Happiness was useless to me. It was heartache that filled my purse. What happy man has need of Shakespeare?
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Men #Heartache #Needs

On those nights, the words were for me alone. They came up unbidden from my heart. They spilled over my tongue and spilled out my mouth. And because of them, I, who was nothing and nobody, was a prince of Denmark, a maid of Verona, a queen of Egypt. I was a sour misanthrope, a beetling hypocrite, a conjurer's daughter, a mad and murderous king.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Daughter #Queens #Kings

I need a boy who thinks with his big head, not his little one. Since they do not exist, I have fashioned my own.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Boys #Thinking #Needs

And Robespierre, the Incorruptible, who loved us so much he cut off our heads so we would not be troubled by too many thoughts.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Cutting

You can't argue with the dead, no matter what you say, they always have the last word.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Matter #Lasts #Arguing

Never take what's offered, always ask for more.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

Hope is the crystal meth of emotions. It hooks you fast and kills you hard.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Hook #Crystals #Emotion

Because I'm on the phone, Mom!" "Fooling around with your friends again! Who is that?" "Ahmadinejad." "Oh, my goodness! What is he saying?" "That he wants to see Jeezy at the Beacon tonight. Putin's going too. He scalped a ticket from Kim Jong Il. All tha gangstas are going." "Don't be so fresh, young man!" "Gotta go," he says to me. "Enemy forces have dropped a Momshell." "Fall back, solider. Over and out.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Mom #Fall #Men

The guitar's still around me. I slip it off and put it down. I want to feel him. To feel his breath on my neck. The warmth of his skin. To feel something other than sadness. Hold me, I tell him silently. Hold me here. To this place. This life. Make me want you. Want this. Want something. Please
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Sadness #Guitar #Skins

They leave things behind sometimes, the guests. A bottle of scent. A crumpled handkerchief. A pearl button that fell off a dress and rolled under a bed. And sometimes they leave other sorts of things. Things you can't see. A sigh trapped in a corner. Memories tangled in the curtains. A sob fluttering against the windowpane like a bird that flew in and can't get back out. I can feel these things. They dart and crouch and whisper.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Memories #Tangled #Bird

Bravery is feeling fear but doing the thing anyway.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Bravery #Feelings

Namaste. It was a Nepalese greeting. It meant: The light within me bows to the light within you.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Light #Bows #Greetings

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

#Pain #Rain #Writing

Because just for a few seconds, someone else hurts, too. For just a few seconds, I'm not alone.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Hurt #Not Alone

It's only the body that's gone. Only the body. There's a part that doesn't go in the ground, a part that stays inside you forever.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Forever #Gone #Body

Who needs make-believe monsters when there are so many real ones.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Real #Believe #Monsters

She was everything he wanted from his life, the very measure of his dreams.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Love #Dream #Wanted

I struggled for a long time to get anything published.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Long

It is hope, not despair, that undoes us all.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Despair

I could almost hear the characters inside, murmuring and jostling, impatient for me to open the cover and let them out.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Character #Murmuring #Impatient

Be careful what you show the world. You never know when the wolf is watching.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#World #Be Careful #Careful

Come on you raver, you seer of visions, come on you painter, you piper, you prisoner, and shine...
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Inspirational #Shining #Vision

Airports should all belong to the same country. The country of Crappacia. Or Bleakovania. Or Suckitan.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Country #Airports #Should

The King walks. He nods. His glance is like God's touch - under it all things spring to life. A wave of his hand and a hundred musicians tear into the Handel, making a sound you've never heard before, and never will again. A sound that goes through you, through flesh and bone, and reorders the very beat of your heart.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Kings #Spring #Heart

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

#Stars #Heaven #Soul

The world goes on, as stupid and brutal as tomorrow as it was today. And though I am shuddering with pain, and twisting with pain, and sobbing with pain, i laugh.Because I know now. I know the answer. I know the truth. Oh,dead man, you are dead wrong, I tell him.Can't you see? The world goes on, stupid and brutal, but I [do not. I do not.]
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Pain #Stupid #Men

Every heart is made of stories.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Heart #Stories #Made

Because beautiful things never last. Not roses nor snow… And not fireworks, either
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Beautiful #Snow #Rose

I love you, too... I won't ever leave you again. I promise. I kept that promise. For love him I did. For nearly two years I spent almost every waking hour with him. Until he was taken from me. But I never left him. And I never will.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Taken #Love You #Two

I just love historical fiction.
-- Jennifer Donnelly

#Historical #Fiction #Historical Fiction

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

#Kings #Fall #Might