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Quote by Leigh Bardugo

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Shadow and Bone & Siege and Storm

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Author

Leigh Bardugo
Leigh Bardugo

Leigh Bardugo is a contemporary American author known for her fantasy novels. Born on April 6, 1975, she graduated from Stanford University with a degree in Comparative Literature. Bardugo's works have received critical acclaim for their complex characters, rich imagination, and profound themes. more

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“We create Hollywood and Disneyland to carry our projections of greatness. But as a society we are putting ourselves at risk in this process, for a celebrity may not be a true hero. As the great mythologist Joseph Campbell once pointed out, the celebrity lives only for his or her own ego, while the hero acts to redeem society. We have many celebrities but few true heroes these days. Modern Westerners have evolved psychologically to the point where we are placing our gold on living beings rather than dead bones, as was done in medieval times, but it remains to be seen whether we can learn to carry our own gold and find heaven within instead of without.”

“I can remember Miss Temple walking lightly and rapidly along our drooping line, her plaid cloak, which the frosty wind fluttered, gathered close about her, and encouraging us, by precept and example, to keep up our spirits, and march forward, as she said, "like stalwart soldiers." The other teachers, poor things, were generally themselves too much dejected to attempt the task of cheering others.”

“The air between us feels alive, and the grin that I've been wearing since I spotted her deepens as my cock gets hard at the thought that nothing stands between us now. I could pull her into my arms, slide my hands inside her shirt to feel her soft silky skin while I bury my nose in her neck and whisper how happy I am to see her again.”

“But to me, what the Greeks knew and what these other ancient authors, I think, tapped into is something we’re only now finding words to articulate again, which is that betrayal is the wound that cuts the deepest. You can call it whatever you want, moral distress, moral injury, but really, it’s betrayal — feeling abandoned or betrayed, or betraying oneself and one’s sense of what’s right. And so we had respiratory therapists in some of our early performances during the pandemic, who were saying, “I have 20 patients on respirators in the public hospital in the Bronx, and there’s only me, and I’m left with the guilt of not being able to attend to them all.” That’s an impossible situation. So you call that person a hero, when they’re wrestling with their own sense of betraying their own standards of care and being betrayed by the system that put them in that position, and it could actually hurt them.”

“But as the sun started to rise over the hills, they were off, on the wide-open road, heading for his home. The one he somehow needed to take this tight-assed woman to, along with her scrap of a mangy cat, the one with half an ear missing. 
Because if he hadn’t wrangled her into coming, somehow, this time, in a very weird, unexpected way…
…it wouldn’t have felt as much like his home. At all.”