S Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with S. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“She had tried to be loved by him; more important, she had tried to keep loving him, but in the end, one was impossible as the other.”
Source: The Nightingale
“She had tried to imagine him as a young Gladiator in the arena. Back then he must have been as dangerous as a lean, half-starved alley cat. Now, the alley cat had long since vanished. What stood in his stead was a scarred and even more deadly lion who carried the weight of having lived for many years in his prime.”
Source: Midnight's Kiss
“She had tried to live an honest life, but the war had given her no choice. It had forced her to make up a version of herself which was acceptable to others. In a way, making up stories had been the basis of her survival and her success.”
Source: Dust Child
“She had tried when she turned sixteen to think of herself as a woman, like Jane Eyre or Elizabeth Bennet or the multitudes of heroines who lived in her books, but in her head she wasn't there. They were all older than her, and had all, even Jane, seen more of life. And yet she was too old to be Sara Crewe or Alice or Wendy Darling either. She was a liminal person, trapped between a world she'd grown out of and another that wouldn't let her in. It was one reason why she wanted to leave the island so badly--- the hope that leaving the place she'd grown up would help her leave her childhood behind. Not forever, not yet. But for a visit, to see what it was like.”
Source: The Magician’s Daughter
“She had turned down approaches from many men, as though flicking away specks of dust.”
Source: Before the Coffee Gets Cold
“She had turned her back upon them all and no awful fate had overtaken her; instead, she had taken a firm hold upon life and made of it a fine, even glittering, success; and this is a thing which is not easily forgiven.”
Source: A Bromfield Galaxy
“She had wailed loudly enough to wake the dead and make them call the cops.”
Source: Magic Strikes
“She had waited all her life for something, and it had killed her when it found her.”
Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God
“She had walked to the brink, abandoning all belief, and just before the bitter end, she was pulled from the abyss by faith.”
Source: Upon Destiny's Song
“She had walked willingly into a fairy tale, into a world where she could trade her heart for her freedom. She may as well have donned a red cloak and strode into a darkened forest. She had always known there would be wolves.”
Source: The Hearts We Sold
“She had wandered, without rule or guidance, into a moral wilderness... Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods... The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers—stern and wild ones—and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.”
“She had wanted him to fix her, but she had known they both couldn’t put their broken pieces together to make one whole person.”
Source: All the Little Things
“She had wanted more than she could have. She had wanted him, and more... she had wanted him to want her. In the name of something bigger than tradition, bolder than reputation, more important than a silly title.”
“She had wanted to be his dream girl. But maybe, just maybe, he was not hers.”
Source: Nowhere Strangers: A Sapphic Coming-of-Age Story of Digital Romance, Heartbreak, and Self-Discovery
“She had wanted to behave like a fully grown woman and it had not come off.”
Source: The Beautiful Summer
“She had wanted to break. She had wanted, for one desperate moment, to let herself shatter into a thousand pieces, to reach out and fall apart. She knew he would have been there, welcomed that. But she was afraid that if she broke, she would not know how to put herself back together.
So she had stopped it. When the cracks were spreading just wide enough for everything to crumble, Ari had sealed them back up, pulled herself together, and moved on.”
Source: A Vision in Smoke
“She had wanted to change herself so that she could slip in among other people, although she had always known she would remain a stranger because she was not one of them. But she couldn’t bear to be alone, trapped by her own nature. She had violated her own nature. And her relationship to those people, who were so profoundly different from her, had become detestable and perverse. And now, afterward … her own innermost soul had been destroyed by it, every anchor she had within herself had failed … and crumbled. She was disintegrating from the inside.”
Source: Jenny
“She had watched Rome burn down, taking with it her own world.”
Source: The Deadly Sisterhood: Eight Princesses of the Italian Renaissance
“SHE HAD WATCHED THEM in supermarkets and she knew the signs. At seven o'clock on a Saturday evening they would be standing in the checkout line reading the horoscope in Harper's Bazaar and in their carts would be a single lamb chop and maybe two cans of cat food and the Sunday morning paper, the early edition with the comics wrapped outside. They would be very pretty some of the time, their skirts the right length and their sunglasses the right tint and maybe only a little vulnerable tightness around the mouth, but there they were, one lamb chop and some cat food and the morning paper. To avoid giving off the signs, Maria shopped always for a household, gallons of grapefruit juice, quarts of green chile salsa, dried lentils and alphabet noodles, rigatoni and canned yams, twenty-pound boxes of laundry detergent. She knew all the indices to the idle lonely, never bought a small tube of toothpaste, never dropped a magazine in her shopping cart. The house in Beverly Hills overflowed with sugar, corn-muffin mix, frozen roasts and Spanish onions. Maria ate cottage cheese.”
Source: Play it as it Lays
“She had wept until she was scrapped raw inside, empty but for the leaden weight of every memory of the life she had left, the grasping thorns of every choice that had brought her to this bleak and howling place. When darkness fell she poured rivers of tears into the wood and soul and stone beneath her, a well of loneliness that felt as though it would never run dry.”
Source: The Memory Trees
“She had wild eyes, slightly insane. She also carried an overload of compassion that was real enough and which obviously cost her something.”
Source: Women
“She had willed her heart to stay small and contained, but it wouldn’t be. Oh, well.”
Source: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Complete Collection
“She had witnessed in nauseating detail how the human world worked: its rituals of comfort (television, food, religion); its appetite for poison (television, food, religion); and for the monstrous edifices of desire (television, food, religion): she understood them all.”
Source: Abarat: Absolute Midnight
“She had witnessed the world's most beautiful things, and allowed herself to grow old and unlovely. She had felt the heat of a leviathan's roar, and the warmth within a cat's paw. She had conversed with the wind and had wiped soldier's tears. She had made people see, she'd seen herself in the sea. Butterflies had landed on her wrists, she had planted trees. She had loved, and let love go. So she smiled.”
Source: The Ghost's Child
“She had woken the house up with screams at 6 A.M. when she'd discovered that her mother's spell had changed her hair to a mermaid-blue color overnight. After the initial shock, the whole bright blue hair look had kind of grown on her, but she wasn't convinced it would be the best look for the wedding, so she had begun the painstaking process of charming it back to its original aubergine brown with flecks of purple.”
Source: Best Hex Ever
“She had woken up with the song swirling around in her mind and couldn't make it sizzle down her arm and out onto the stiff strings of her fiddle.”
Source: Clay's Quilt
“She had won the battle against her memories. But one form of torture remained, untouched by the years, the torture of the word "why?”
Source: Atlas Shrugged
“She had worn the Morgenstern ring since Jace had left it for her, and sometimes she wondered why. Did she really want to be reminded of Valentine? And yet, at the same time, was it ever right to forget?
You couldn't erase everything that caused you pain with its recollection. She didn't want to forget Max or Madeleine, or Hodge, or the Inquisitor, or even Sebastian. Every moment was valuable; even the bad ones.”
Source: City of Glass
“She had worried for her soul because she'd enjoyed the bedding too. But where she'd accepted that it must be all right because she'd vowed to obey Conall and he'd ordered her to enjoy it, this woman had... well, she'd lost her mind as far as Claray could tell. Mhairi believed that enjoying the bedding was a sin that would see her soul in hell, but that killing so many innocent people would redeem her. It was madness.”
Source: Highland Wolf
“She had worried that she would break if her heart broke, but she wasn't broken. she had lost everything, but she was not lost. It seemed a worthwhile thing to know.”
Source: Untold
“She had wrapped her marble-like body in a huge fur, and rolled herself up trembling like a cat.”
Source: Venus in Furs
“She had written something that felt like I could have written it, except I knew I couldn't have. I wouldn't have come up with something like that. Which is what we all want from art, isn't it? When someone pins down something that feels like it lives inside us? Takes a piece of your heart out and shows it to you? It's like they are introducing you to a part of yourself.”
“She had, without realizing it at the time, learned to follow Nick's gaze, learned to learn his lust...his desires remained memorized within her. She looked at the attractive women he would look at...She had become him: she longed for these women. But she was also herself, and so she despised them. She lusted after them, but she also wanted to beat them up. A rapist. She had become a rapist, driving to work in a car.”
“She had...the glimmerings of a sense of humour - which is simply another name for a sense of the fitness of things.”
“She hadn’t actually wanted to end her life that night — she actually wanted to kill
something inside her.”
Source: YOU DON’T WANT TO DIE: Life Renews in the Depths of Despair
“She hadn’t always been obsessed with babies. There was a time she believed she would change the world, lead a movement, follow Dolores Huerta and Sylvia Mendez, Ellen Ochoa and Sonia Sotomayor. Where her bisabuela had picked pecans and oranges in the orchards, climbing the tallest trees with her small girlbody, dropping the fruit to the baskets below where her tías and tíos and primos stooped to pick those that had fallen on the ground, where her abuela had sewn in the garment district in downtown Los Angeles with her bisabuela, both women taking the bus each morning and evening, making the beautiful dresses to be sold in Beverly Hills and maybe worn by a movie star, and where her mother had cared for the ill, had gone to their crumbling homes, those diabetic elderly dying in the heat in the Valley—Bianca would grow and tend to the broken world, would find where it ached and heal it, would locate its source of ugliness and make it beautiful.
Only, since she’d met Gabe and become La Llorona, she’d been growing the ugliness inside her. She could sense it warping the roots from within. The cactus flower had dropped from her when she should have been having a quinceañera, blooming across the dance floor in a bright, sequined dress, not spending the night at her boyfriend’s nana’s across town so that her mama wouldn’t know what she’d done, not taking a Tylenol for the cramping and eating the caldo de rez they’d made for her. They’d taken such good care of her.
Had they done it for her? Or for their son’s chance at a football scholarship?
She’d never know.
What she did know: She was blessed with a safe procedure. She was blessed with women to check her for bleeding. She was blessed with choice.
Only, she hadn’t chosen for herself.
She hadn’t.
Awareness must come. And it did. Too late.
If she’d chosen for herself, she would have chosen the cactus spines. She would’ve chosen the one night a year the night-blooming cereus uncoils its moon-white skirt, opens its opalescent throat, and allows the bats who’ve flown hundreds of miles with their young clutching to their fur as they swim through the air, half-starved from waiting, to drink their fill and feed their next generation of creatures who can see through the dark. She’d have been a Queen of the Night and taught her daughter to give her body to no Gabe.
She knew that, deep inside.
Where Anzaldúa and Castillo dwelled, where she fed on the nectar of their toughest blossoms.
These truths would moonstone in her palm and she would grasp her hand shut, hold it tight to her heart, and try to carry it with her toward the front door, out onto the walkway, into the world.
Until Gabe would bend her over. And call her gordita or cochina. Chubby girl. Dirty girl.
She’d open her palm, and the stone had turned to dust.
She swept it away on her jeans.
A daughter doesn’t solve anything; she needed her mama to tell her this.
But she makes the world a lot less lonely. A lot less ugly.”
Source: Jubilee
“She hadn't been born, as some of her compatriots had been, with the Gallic zeal for burning down the institutions of oppression. But it was becoming too stark to ignore. There was no better world just waiting for them: they were going to have to go out and make it for themselves.”
Source: The Island of Last Things
“She hadn't been suspicious, but she hadn't believed in me.”
Source: 恋物語 [Koimonogatari]
“She hadn't been the only one given a title. She had been Akul Kurf, the Ice Bitch.
Dwalin had been Vadok.
Death.
Bilba had always been mildly insulted by that. He got to be Death, and she got to be the hobbit with the bad attitude.”
“She hadn’t been there all those years.
Didn’t know who had held him.
Didn’t know how he had learned to let himself be held.”
Source: Ink On My Skin!
“She hadn't bothered to go to bed, since Tuesday was one of the days on which she rose before dawn to bake brioche, scones, cinnamon rolls, and- Tuesdays only- a coffee cake rich with cardamom, orange zest, and grated gingerroot: a cunningly savory sweet that left her work kitchen smelling like a fine Indian restaurant, a brief invigorating change from the happily married scents of butter, vanilla, and sugar (the fragrance, to Greenie, of ordinary life).”
Source: The Whole World Over
“She hadn't broken a nail in years; she could rip holes in walls and still look well manicured.”
Source: Longinus The Vampire: Redemption
“She hadn’t come for any of that. She came for him. Twenty feet in front of her, leaning back against the waist-high bar, stood the man she’d spent all day tracking down—the infamous Dillon James. The man who would soon have the power to take away everything she held dear.”
Source: The Playboy's Baby
“She hadn't expected the intamacy of his voice in her head. It had a smoothness to it that gave way now and then to gravel.”
Source: Toxic Game
“She hadn’t felt any emotion until he touched her, but then she found herself blinking back the tears and forcing herself to say, “It’s okay.” And it was. In a way. She could hardly remember it, but the flashes that stayed with her through the years were painful.”
Source: Acid Rain
“She hadn’t felt this way when they had arrived on the ferry… but now that she’s seen the American soldier up close and met the great-grandson that loved him, she knew in her heart that revenge would not be sweet. What was past was past. A terrible thing had happened. It would not be remedied by another terrible thing, regardless of one man’s guilt.”
Source: War Stories
“She hadn't gone back in time. The idea was silly.
Or had she? Had she knocked on the door of her home to see a younger version of herself answer; had there been a mutual shock of recognition (as the younger Rebecca realized that, yes, her husband's work was due to be a success, that he was not wasting his time chasing rainbows and tilting at windmills); had she slipped her arm into that of her past self (feeling a slight electric tingle as skin touched skin and a taste in her mouth as if she'd touched a nine-volt battery to her tongue) and said, We need to to talk? Had she sat in a coffee shop, conversing with a woman who everyone assumed was related to her in some way—Oh my god you two are so cute, you're mother and daughter but you look like sisters? Had she made some kind of idle remark overheard by a man on his way to spend two weeks' vacation in North Dakota; had that comment convinced that man to settle there permanently instead, and to contact those who had political sympathies similar to his own? Had that unknown man begun the slow process of taking over the state by placing his allies in the local governments if he could? Had that strategy failed, leaving brute force as a regrettable last resort?”
Source: Version Control
“She hadn't gotten his expression quite right in her imagination, because the stunned, vacant expression on Shane's face when she started down the stairs was even better than fantasy. His mouth actually dropped open. Next to him, Michael turned around, and although she hadn't counted on it, there was a warm fuzzy to making a hot golden-angel vampire blink and give her a quick, involuntary once-over.
Claire stopped on the steps above them and did a tentative hip-shimmy. "Okay?" she asked. Shane's mouth shut with a snap, and Michael actually cleared his throat.
"Fine," Michael said.
"Fine?" That was Eve, coming down the stairs behind Claire. She moved around the roadblock and punched Michael in the arm. "She looks amazing. I'm not half g*y and I think she's hot."
Shane wasn't saying anything. Claire felt warm and a little dizzy, the way he was looking at her. She resisted the urge to check to see if her skirt was straight -- she'd done it a dozen times already --and forced herself to meet his gaze and smile.
"You sure this is smart?" Shane asked, which was not what she'd expected, not at all. "You look fantastic."
"Thanks -- "
He interrupted her. "Fantastic in this town pops you to the top of the take-out menu."
She held up her left hand and pointed to her wrist. The gold bracelet was clearly visible. "I'll be okay," she said. "The vamps won't bother me."
"Not even talking about the vamps. You're going to be drawing every guy there who's looking to get off.”
Source: Midnight Alley
“She hadn't had a bite of her dinner. I'd even curled the pasta into a little linguine nest in the center of each bowl.
My mother's was still perfect and round and cold. The sauce had darkened.
"This is delish," she said. "But it needs red wine. I tell you because I love you and you should know for the future."
She went on about deglazing and how it brings out the earthy taste of the onions and never use wine you wouldn't drink yourself and a young, robust wine is what you use in red sauces, nothing fortified or dry, for example.”
Source: Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots
“She hadn't just drunk the Salvation Kool-Aid - she'd started to brew her own.”
Source: Enemies on Tap