Quotes About Belief

It is idle to ask those who never listen whether and how God answers prayer. Caroline Stephen, 1891

Never put your faith in a Prince. When you require a miracle, trust in a Witch.

Just tell yourself a story that'll satisfy you and pretend he told it.

That's just the first part. What others call you, you become. It's a terrible magic that everyone can do — so do it. Call yourself what you wish to become.

Just because it's imaginary doesn't mean it isn't real.

We are all dead. All equal. Broken and aimless and believing we are alive. This is Russia and it is 1952. What else would you call hell?

Dying happens to everyone, even stars. Even the stuff between the stars. But if you believe in yourself and achieve your goals, you can die so hard that no one will ever forget you, and that's almost as good as not dying at all. Well, it isn't, really, it isn't at all, and believing and achieving is just something sportscasters say, but what are you gonna do, not die? Try it. I'll wait.

Children make prayers so thoughtlessly, building them up like sand castles—and they are always surprised when suddenly the castle becomes real, and the iron gate grinds shut.

All money is imaginary," answered the Calcatrix simply. "Money is magic everyone agrees to pretend is not magic.

Never trust anyone under one hundred!

You can be innocent again. It's not true, what they say, that you can never get it back. You can. It's only that most folk cannot be bothered.

Do you know what a thirteen-year-old girl can do when she is alone and frightened and believes she is right?

In future days you will call John Mandeville a liar, and my shade will laugh at you and say: true, true, I was, but not always, not so. When the world was good enough in my sight, when it behaved as wildly and gorgeously as I always knew it could, I told the truth of it.

God is another way of talking about the power to break things, that's all. When you mean to break a goblet or a bone, well, just do it and be done. But when the things to be broken get big enough you have to start talking about God.

The Fairies called it a paw because they wanted to believe I was an animal-and not the sort of animal that discusses junkyard philosophy and enjoys Turkish coffee and knows Bone Magic and holds down a mortgage, no, the kind you can cut up for meat and only feel bad about it on Fridays. It's easier to use somebody if you can think of them as mute and dumb and made for your pleasure.

They don't know I'm beloved. But I know and that's plenty.

Lebedeva snapped her fingers. "It's like lying!" she exclaimed. "Well, we understand that, of course! The bigger the lie, the happier the liar.

September felt sure that her shadow and everyone's shadows were all part of the same broken thing, and broken things were to be fixed, whatever the cost, especially if you had been the one to break it in the first place.

What others call you, you become. It's a terrible magic that everyone can do — so do it. Call yourself what you wish to become.

First Law of Heroics." The Monaciello grinned up at a confused September. "Someone has to tell you it's impossible, or the Quest can't go on.

But which one is right? The real gods? The truth?' I asked. Balthazar smiled gently, as if speaking to a very slow child. 'That is not for us to judge. Each of us believes what seems true enough to him, and allows others the same luxury. Who can know what happened in the dim dawn of the world? We can barely decide what to have for breakfast without a theological debate - the Nurian law is polite disagreement. We do our best with how the world appears to our own eyes.

Why…" Sophia raises her eyes to the ceiling, searching for a divinity that is not there, not for her. Her eyes fill up with hopelessness. She asks a question older than day and night. "Why doesn't He love me like He loves you?" Tears fall down her perfect face. "Why does He let you do this? Why won't He tell you to stop?

But it is difficult for men to disbelieve a woman who insists that she wishes to serve them, and he nodded assent.

Draw the world the way you want it. Draw it and it will be.