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Ya Quotes

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Ya Quotes

“Don’t touch me. Don’t tell me how beautiful my eyes are, how soft my hair is, how you love to hear my voice. Don’t. Don’t pretend you are falling in love with me. I know you are lying, and every word you say hurts even more. Let us just be friends, if we can start there. Can’t we? Can’t we at least be friends? Get to know each other a little? Before the wedding, and the bedding, when I will have to take you as my lord and husband?”

“You know, when I was little, my dad told me that if I misbehaved, he'd send me to live with a witch who ate children.' 'Really?' She nods. 'I was so afraid of the witch. Feelings are magnified when you're young, I think, and the fear can stay with you for a long time. I eventually grew out of the fear but even now when I read something with a witch, my mind always traces back to that story. Isn't that weird?' 'How'd you grow out of it?' I ask. 'The fear?' She takes a long moment to answer. 'I read lots and lots of books about witches.”

“In that moment, I feel the Prophet's canvas ceiling lift away from my head, walls flying off me, and a pressure I've never put into words hisses somewhere at the back of my mind as the size of the universe assembles itself in my mind. If I close my eyes, I can see it, the endlessness beyond my ears, and knowing I'm only in a corner of that vastness doesn't make me feel tiny. It is amazing that, though I am small and ungifted and barely educated, even I can appreciate the scale of the universe. And from this perch in space, for this moment at least, it seems unimportant whether someone made it, or if it made itself.”

“My own drawing was a house made of books, but where there should have been a door, there was a book, and where there should have been windows, there were books, and where the chimney should have been open to let the smoke out, a book was covering the hole, so if anyone was in the house, they couldn't get out. They'd suffocate, to be found years later, a desiccated corpse still marking its place in the book it had been reading with a knobby finger bone, head caved in by an avalanche of fallen books. As I said, I liked books.”

“He was so close his breath touched my cheek. Staring into his eyes, I could almost forget about the nightmare. I could almost forget about Mama. Like the woods back in Virginia, his eyes changed color with his mood—greener when he laughed and darker, like now, when he was angry or worried. They were kind, serious, intelligent eyes that crinkled in the corners when he smiled.”