Shannon Hale Quotes page 2

“Miss Hayes, have you stopped to consider that you might have this all backward? That in fact you are my fantasy?”

Source: Book of a Thousand Days

“I can see that one can never pay back Gilsa for the fear that she will give again.”

Source: Austenland

“And Isi always listened, never told Enna she had been foolish, never said hollow things like 'You'll be all right.'… Isi saw Enna's struggle and her sadness, and she understood.”

Source: The Goose Girl

Shannon Hale Enna Burning

Source: Enna Burning

“Razo knew he was best at nothing, except maybe cramming two cherries into a single nostril.”

Shannon Hale River Secrets

Source: River Secrets

“She put a wedge beside my heart
And then she brought the mallet down
She sang no song to guide her work
I lost my heart without a sound”

“Poor gosling. It hurts to be lost. And worse to be home with no kind of homecoming… I'll be lucky if I can do as well as you when all this's done, just a bit out of breath, a bit bruised and scratched, a bit wiser and sadder for it all.”

“Ah, now, don't cry over lost years and forgetfulness. The tales tell what they can. The rest is for us to learn..”

Source: The Goose Girl

“Razo was sorely tempted to assert that all was true and he'd lost his horns and tail in a tragic childhood accident”

Source: The Goose Girl

Shannon Hale River Secrets

Source: River Secrets

“Seriously, a thirty-something woman shouldn't be daydreaming about a fictional character in a two-hundred-year-old world to the point where it interfered with her very real and much more important life and relationships. Of course she shouldn't.”

“Throwing herself into learning helped Miri ignore the painful chill of solitude around her.”

Shannon Hale Princess Academy

Source: Princess Academy

“A little snark, properly directed, can change the world.”

“Get back in my cot, girl," said Gilsa. "You're sickly."
No, I'm not," said Ani.
Oh, no? Well, maybe stubbornness is a sickness, did you ever think of that?”

“Look no farther than your hand,
Make a choice and take a stand.”

Shannon Hale Princess Academy

Source: Princess Academy

“She answered by standing and kissing him first and held his cheeks and closed her eyes and felt sure as bones and deep as blood that she had found her place.”

“You've been quiet lately… but it's not so much the quiet as something inside the quiet.”

Source: The Goose Girl

“Go on, son, you're not doing me any good by bleeding.”

Source: Forest Born

“Oh, but I like my geese. Like cats, they can't be told what to do, and like dogs, they're loyal, and like people, they talk every chance they get.”

Source: The Goose Girl

“… fantasy is not practice for what is real—fantasy is the opiate of women.”

Source: The Goose Girl

“Ani felt a stirring, a hope, a winged thing waking up in her chest and brushing her heart with it's feathers.”

Source: Austenland

“Enna leaned back her head and laughed at the sky. 'Of course he wasn't! Who could kill Razo?”

Source: The Goose Girl

“Does anyone smell roasting meat?' said Razo, 'Oh, wait, it's just Geric's face.”

Source: Forest Born

“My ma says a rock lasts forever, but people don’t, and that’s what makes them more precious.”

Source: Forest Born

“He nodded. "And if I don't make you feel like the most beautiful woman in the world every day of your life, then I don't deserve to be near you.”

Source: Palace of Stone

“Why was the judgement of the disapproving so valuable? Who said that their good opinions tended to be any more rational than those of generally pleasant people?”

Source: Austenland

“It doesn't seem to matter what we think… The prince will come up here and look at us as if we're barrels in a trader's wagon. And if I'm salt pork and he doesn't care for salt pork, then there's nothing I can do.”

Source: Austenland

Shannon Hale Princess Academy

Source: Princess Academy

“I couldn’t remember the last time I had stayed up into the squeaky hours of the night because I couldn’t put a book down, and that was a tragedy.”

“Some people are born with the first word of a language resting on their tongue though it may take some time before they can taste it.”

“Years ago, before this estate was generously and unwillingly turned over to the crown, the lord here was a genuine dimwit. He had a minister stashed behind his throne to whisper clever things to say.”

Source: The Goose Girl

“… and with my last thought I felt some real sympathy for those poor chickens.”

Source: The Goose Girl

“Just like the old adage--what you dislike most in other people is what you dislike the most in yourself”

Source: Book of a Thousand Days

“They weren't nice words he said. He could've lived a good life and died never having made a person feel rubbed down to bones and too sad to hold together.”

“Her smile was peculiar - it made her nose wrinkle, not as though she smelled something unpleasant, but more that she was so amused, her whole face wanted to be a part of the smile.”

Source: Book of a Thousand Days

Shannon Hale River Secrets

Source: River Secrets

“No small thing, a bee's sting
When it enters the heart
Not so benign, the growing vine
When it tears stone apart”

“No wolf falters before the bite
So strike
No hawk wavers before the dive
Just strike”

Source: Palace of Stone

“The snow was too light to stay, the ground too warm to keep it. And the strange spring snow fell only in that golden moment of dawn, the turning of the page between night and day.”

“I wonder if everyone who faces death hurts like this. It's as though for the first time I realize how much just being alive makes my body ache. But I don't want that ache to stop.”

Source: Palace of Stone

“The three girls were sitting and lying beside her, holding one another, weeping, their arms and legs and hair tangled like the roots of close trees, sobs shaking them like leaves in a high wind.”

Source: Book of a Thousand Days

“Saying my story makes me want to change it, make it sound pretty the way I do with the stories I tell the workers. I'd like it to have a beginning as grand as a ball and an ending in a whisper, like a mother tucking in a child for sleep.”

Source: Forest Born

“No one had ever called her wild before. She wanted to be wild now, for him. Wild seemed more enticing then a bowl of berries.”

Source: The Goose Girl

“It was karma, it was kismet, it was magic. It doesn't matter how it happened, just that it did.”

Source: Forest Born

“No matter that we could be beheaded for this,” said Esa. “Heads are overrated.”
“Yes, they are so unfashionable,” said Miri, imitating an Aslandian accent. “This spring, ladies of style are wearing their feathers in their necks.”

Source: The Actor and the Housewife

“Miss Erstwhile: “It is such a relief, Mr. Nobley, to already know that you find this exercise vulgar and your partner unworthy. It saves us the idle chitchat.”
Mr. Nobley: “And yet you chat away.”

Source: Palace of Stone

“He looked at her, and the clarity of his dark eyes struck her heart with a sensation of a wound touched.”

Source: Austenland

“There's nothing more aggravating in the world than the midnight sniffling of the person you've decided to hate.”

Source: The Goose Girl

“…'Goose girl, may I kiss you?' She answered by… kissing him first.”

Source: Book of a Thousand Days

“A heart's a heart, in a child or a man. You are tougher than you feel right now. Your roots are deep, your canopy's spread wide. You're going to show everyone what it means to be a king.”

Source: The Goose Girl

“Listen to your second thought, or the third might be too late.”

“Don't beat yourself up," said Charlotte. "True love can be so easily mistaken for other things-friendship, humane concern, indigestion…”

Source: Palace of Stone