Quotes from Gordon Dahlquist

First you say I am a murderer - an agent in league against you - and now I am a deluded heartsick girl! Pray make up your mind so I can scoff at you with precision!

She did not especially appreciate children either, but could be kind to them when they were silent.

Did not pleasure depend on an architecture of perspective--on contrast and delay, withholding and loss? Did not true enjoyment rely in facing the future?

I didn't understand her being gone, either. I had seen her fall. Now her part of any conversation would always be unsaid, and the direction she would have gone walking would always be empty. Her absence extended in lines of numbers made of smoke, backward in memory and forward in futures never to occur.

each man braces his fear against his love. What you love may change. But if you love still, your fear remains

There are so many ways to tell time-one way with clocks and watches and sunsets, or other ways with how many times a person laughs, or what they forget, or how they change their minds about what they care about, or why, or whom.

It is always best when discussing serious matters to do so around a teapot.

Heroines did not pick their own battles—the ones they knew they could win. On the contrary, they managed what they had to manage, and they did not lie to themselves about relying on others for help instead of accomplishing the thing alone.

Beauty is more a danger than intelligence or wit. One becomes a living mirror for the inadequacies of others.

What was it about disfigurement, however arbitrary the source, that led the mind to underestimate, even dismiss the victim …

She was already fierce. She required none of this nonsense, and if she'd carried a man's strength and her father's horsewhip these villains would as one be on their knees.

Chang believed that learning was dangerous and best suited for private contemplation, not something to put in the service of the highest bidder- as the Institute did, in thrall to the patronage of men with blind dreams of empire. Society was not bettered by such men of "vision" - though, if Chang was honest, was it bettered by anyone?

When they find what they don't like , they destroy it. Because it scares them-and you girls would scare them as much as anything they've ever seen.' 'Why?' asked Isobel. 'Because . . . because of what they believe.

She was difficult, she knew. She did not make friends. She was brisk and demanding, unsparing and indulgent.

She knew how fortunate she was to have her independence, and to have a disposition that cared so little for the opinions of others. Let them talk, she thought, as long as they also saw her holding her head high, and as long as she possessed the whip-hand of wealth.

There was too much to say - she wanted to prove her independence but knew the Contessa would not care, she wanted revenge but knew the Contessa would never admit her defeat.

Chang despised authority on principle, for even when veiled by the rubric of practical necessity or the weight of tradition he could not see institutional power as anything but an expression of arbitrary personal will, and it galled him profoundly.

What if Captain Smythe did not reject his orders? What if Captain Smythe was not there at all? What if instead of soldiers they

This was how people were able to do things when they didn't want to - they made themselves feel something else, like anger, more than the fear.

Is thinking small?" asked Isobel. "Small as air." May tapped my head with her finger. "And just as big.

Did not pleasure depend on an architecture of perspective—on contrast and delay, withholding and loss? Did not true enjoyment rely on facing the future?

What use is decency when we have been thrust into this peril—treading about without even a corset! Are we to be judged?

That she now had a kind of uniform and a set of tools made everything that much easier and much less about her particular feelings, for tasks requiring clothes and accoutrements were by definition objective, even scientific, in nature.

Wake him or put a bullet through his brain. No one will protest. Or leave him—but I suggest choosing, my dear. I have learned it is best to be haunted by one's actions rather than one's lack of them.