Robin > Books: 2023-reads‎ (127)

“She left me then, surrounded by my extravagantly simple finery and I sat for a long time, uncomfortable both with the person I had been and the person I was finally becoming. Caught between the two of them, I felt rather lonely, as one often does with a new acquaintance.”

“My face grew hot. "We were discussing the investigation," I told him quickly. "He was here a quarter of an hour at the most."
Father smiled at me sadly. "My dear girl, if you din't know what mischief can be gotten up to in a quarter of an hour you are no child of mine.”

She’d always delighted in the tiny banalities of existence—the lucky coin on the street; the butterfly that lands on your shoulder; the bread that bakes perfectly on the first try. Somewhere along the way, Gadriel had decided that yes, small pleasures like plucked daffodils and bits of chocolate were more important than pleasing the boss.

But while God’s angels had since become very fond of smiting the fallen, they rather had their hands full with the louder, angrier rebels like Lucifer and Beelzebub; none of them could really be bothered to visit divine judgement upon someone who spent their time tempting mortals to eat just one more crisp.

You needn’t feel bad for the chihuahua. Just as God created the platypus out of spare parts, Lucifer created the original chihuahua out of spare spite. There may be many greater evils in this world, but one would be hard-pressed to find a more concentrated form of evil than the average chihuahua.

There was no happy ending, here-- but she could choose the unhappy ending which most suited her.  That had to be enough.

"You're my tether.  Without you, I'd by only darkness."
"You're my light.  And you'll by his too."

Shane wondered if there was a term for feeling guilty about not feeling sufficiently guilty. 

"I don't want to hurt you." Which, in most other men, she would have taken as a brush-off, but in Shane was probably nothing more of less than the truth
"Physically of emotionally?"
"Errr..." He had to think about that. "I was mostly worried about physically. You, um...don't seem very vulnerable emotionally."

“Shane,” she said, turning to look at the paladin, “when a woman is lamenting that she doesn’t feel attractive, you’re supposed to tell her she’s beautiful. Not that you’re honored to kill people with her.”
He looked at her blankly, then said, “Oh.”

You either trust the Forrest of you don't. 

Now, he just kept a smile plastered on his face to cover the molten core of self-pity and loneliness that haunted his every waking moment. Like a goddamn adult.

Tell him that he makes your mind quieter and your heart louder. That you love his smile, his empathy, his kindness, and his ass.

"I'm looking for someone like Westley, I think. There's just something undeniably appealing about someone who knows exactly what they want and will do whatever it takes to get it. Even if it means climbing the Cliffs of Insanity."

“You have already grown, in fact. You simply haven't noticed it because you are constantly looking at the sky and not back at your roots.”

“It may be true that you have only half a soul, Dora,” he whispered, with a surprising abundance of empathy in his voice. “But that does not make you half a person.”

“There is such a thing as evil in this world,” Elias told her quietly. “It does not help to look away from it. It does not even help necessarily to look at it.” His fingers brushed through her hair, and she shivered. “But sometimes, when you cannot force the world to come to its senses, you must settle only for wiping away some of the small evils in front of you.”

"You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems."

“When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy. You can be satisfied anytime your system is running.”

“Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress.”