Quotes from Marie Brennan

I find that respectability grows wearisome after a time, when one is accustomed to being a disgrace.

The dragon within my heart stirred, shifting her wings, as if remembering they could be used to fly.

Would that I were a man,'" I said, quoting Sarpalyce's legend. "Except that I do not wish I were a man. I only wish that being a woman did not limit me so.

That should be my epitaph when I die 'she did not have to do it'.

You may think you see plenty of stars, friend reader, but you are wrong. Night is both blacker and more brilliant than you can imagine, and the sky a glory that puts to shame the most splendid jewels at Renwick's.

But I know, at least, that you would keep a library on the subject, and I hoped that I might be allowed to read from it." He regarded me with a bemused expression. "You want me for my library.

A husband willing to fund a library for his bookish wife is not so easy to obtain; most would see it as a pointless expense. You might, however, find one willing to share his library.

There is nothing in the world so enticing as that which you have been told you may not have.

There are proverbs about frying pans and fires that I might have quoted to myself, but I preferred to adapt a different one to my purposes: better the devil that would attack everyone impartially than the devil specifically looking to kill us.

Once we love, we cannot revoke it,' she said. 'We can only glory in what it brings -- pain as well as joy, grief as well as hope.

Jake pried the head open, giving me a look when I warned him not to cut himself on the teeth. It is a look I think all children master at about his age—the one that insists the looker needs no warning while, by its very confidence, convincing the one looked at that the warning was very necessary indeed.

Sheep eat the grass, wolves eat the deer, and dragons eat everything that doesn't run away fast enough.

This was London, in all its filth and glory. Nostalgic for the past, while yearning to cast off the chains of bygone ages and step forward into the bright utopia of the future. Proud of its achievements, yet despising its own flaws. A monster in both size and nature, that would consume the unwary and spit them out again, in forms unrecognizable and undreamt. London, the monster city.

I had rather face wild beasts and diseases than the perils of civilization." There is a proverb, which Tom was kind enough not to voice: be careful what you wish for. Unfortunately, not only did I get it, but so did those around me.

You and I are not held to the same standards, Andrew. People will forgive a slip, a weakness, a minor personal folly — when it comes from a man. They may click their tongues at you, even gossip about your behavior…but at worst, it will only reflect on you. "If I misstep, it goes far beyond me. Errors on my part are proof that women are unsuited to professional work.

On no trip before or since have I carried more alcohol than undergarments.)

There's a bit of difference between swimming in shark-infested water because you're trying to retrieve something from the bottom, and staying in just because you're already there and haven't been eaten yet.

More shouts, and then my father was there, staring down at me in horror: the minor pagan god, appalled at what his worshiper had done.

One does not cease to treasure a gem simply because one owns another that is larger.

One benefit of being an old woman now, and moreover one who has been called a "national treasure," is that there are very few who can tell me what I may and may not write.

There is very little pleasure in being snubbed over a task for which one is well qualified. There is, however, quite a bit of pleasure in watching the ones who did the snubbing later eat their own words.

The lack of a husband was, for some applicants, a selling point. I imagine many of my readers are aware of the awkward position in which governesses often find themselves -- or, rather, the awkward position into which their male employers often put them, for it does no one any service to pretend this happens by some natural and inexorable process, devoid of connection with anyone's behaviour.

I honestly cannot tell whether you are the most practical women I have ever met or the most deranged." "Why can't I be both

Will there not be any scandal if she marries *me*?" I asked -- not quite believing that living in pseudo-wedlock with a half-human foreign transvestite was any improvement over spinsterhood.