Leah Sullivan > Leah's Quotes

“Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Valley of Fear

“Hide not your talents, they for use were made,
What's a sundial in the shade?”
― Benjamin Franklin

“The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.”
― Émile Zola

“Talent is a gift, but character is a choice.”
― John C. Maxwell

“Talent is cheap; dedication is expensive. It will cost you your life.”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy

“Talent is an accident of genes, and a responsibility.”
― Alan Rickman

“Many people say I'm the best women's soccer player in the world. I don't think so. And because of that, someday I just might be.”
― Mia Hamm

“The vision of a champion is bent over, drenched in sweat, at the point of exhaustion, when nobody else is looking.”
― Mia Hamm

“Running isn't a sport for pretty boys...It's about the sweat in your hair and the blisters on your feet. Its the frozen spit on your chin and the nausea in your gut. It's about throbbing calves and cramps at midnight that are strong enough to wake the dead. It's about getting out the door and running when the rest of the world is only dreaming about having the passion that you need to live each and every day with. It's about being on a lonely road and running like a champion even when there's not a single soul in sight to cheer you on. Running is all about having the desire to train and persevere until every fiber in your legs, mind, and heart is turned to steel. And when you've finally forged hard enough, you will have become the best runner you can be. And that's all that you can ask for.”
― Paul Maurer, The Gift - A Runner's Story

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
― Albert Camus

“There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“It’s a profoundly strange feeling, to stumble across someone whose desires are shaped so closely to your own, like reaching toward your reflection in a mirror and finding warm flesh under your fingertips. If you should ever be lucky enough to find that magical, fearful symmetry, I hope you’re brave enough to grab it with both hands and not let go.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“Let that be a lesson to you: If you are too good and too quiet for too long, it will cost you. It will always cost you, in the end.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“You hating me always meant more than anyone else in this hot and stupid universe loving me. At least I’d had your full attention.”
― Tamsyn Muir

“But Harrowhark—Harrow, who was two hundred dead children; Harrow, who loved something that had not been alive for ten thousand years—Harrowhark Nonagesimus had always so badly wanted to live. She had cost too much to die.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth

“There was so much I should have told you. I just didn't have time. I didn't know. I didn't know I'd have to say: A sword doesn't hold an edge on its own, you sack of Ninth House garbage. I didn't know I'd have to say, if you dip a sword into melty bone, the metal gets more pitted than an iron mine, you cross-patched necromantic shit.

I think the main thing I should have said was, You sawed open your skull rather than be beholden to someone. You turned your brain into soup to escape anything less than 100 percent freedom. You put me in a box and buried me rather than give up your own goddamned agenda.

Harrowhark, I gave you my whole life and you didn't even want it.

Actually, scratch that, the main thing I should have said was, SQUATS ARE A START, OR A COUPLE OF STAR JUMPS, THEY'RE NOT DIFFICULT.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth

“But when she was scared, she was a child again, and she was more afraid of being a child again than anything else in her life.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth

“She was consumed. She was the kindling for the arson taking place in her heart, her brain dry wadding for the flames, her soul so much incandescent gas. She could not do this. She absolutely and fundamentally could not do this.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“This whole thing happened because you wouldn't face up to Gideon dying.' he said, which was a stab as precise as any Nonius had managed. 'I don't blame you. But where would you be, right now, if you'd said: She is dead? You're keeping her things like a lover keeping old notes, but with her death, the stuff that made her Gideon was destroyed. That's how Lyctorhood works, isn't it? She died. She can't come back, even if you keep her stuffed away in a drawer you can't look at. You're not waiting for her resurrection; you've made yourself her mausoleum.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth

“Harrow laughed. It was the first time she had ever heard Harrow really laugh. It was a rather weak and tired sound.

"Gideon the Ninth, first flower of my House," she said hoarsely, "you are the greatest cavalier we have ever produced. You are our triumph, The best of all of us. It has been my privilege to be your necromancer.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Gideon the Ninth

“It had bewildered her, back at Canaan House, how the whole of her always seemed to come back to Gideon. For one brief and beautiful space of time, she had welcomed it: that microcosm of eternity between forgiveness and the slow, uncomprehending agony of the fall. Gideon rolling up her shirt sleeves. Gideon dappled in shadow, breaking promises. One idiot with a sword and an asymmetrical smile had proved to be Harrow’s end: her apocalypse swifter than the death of the Emperor and the sun with him.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth

“And instead you rolled a rock over me and turned your back. I spent all that time drowning and surfacing in you, over and over and over, and all because in the end you could not bear to do the one thing I asked you to do. I wanted you to use me, you malign, double-crossing, corpse-obsessed bag of bones, you broken, used-up shithead! I wanted you to live and not die, you imaginary-girlfriend-having asshole! Fuck one flesh, one end, Harrow. I already gave my flesh to you, and I already gave you my end. I gave you my sword. I gave you myself. I did it while knowing I’d do it all again, without hesitation, because all I ever wanted you to do was eat me.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth

“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

“If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal- that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe