Top 205 Quotes & Sayings by Erin Morgenstern - Page 2

Because I do not wish to know,” he says. “I prefer to remain unenlightened, to better appreciate the dark.

Perhaps it is controlling the chaos within more than the chaos without.

The night that seemed endless hours before is now slipping through your fingers, ticking by as it falls into the past and pushes you towards the future.

It is likely to make us think we are not caged. We cannot feel the bars unless we push against them.

Esse quam videri," Celia says. "To be, rather than to seem.

And there are never really endings, happy or otherwise. Things keep going on, they overlap and blur, your story is part of your sister's story is part of many other stories, and there is no telling where any of them may lead.

I couldn't tell the difference between what was real and what I wanted to be real.

Secrets have power, and that power diminishes when they are shared, so they are best kept and kept well. Sharing secrets, real secrets, important ones, with even one other person, will change them.

I made a wish on this tree years ago," Marco says. "What did you wish for?" Bailey asks. Marco leans forward and whispers in Bailey's ear. "I wished for her.

Taking his time, as though he has all of it in the world, in the universe, from the days when tales meant more than they do now, but perhaps less than they will someday, he draws a breath that releases the tangled knot of words in his heart, and they fall from his lips effortlessly. "The circus arrives without warning.

You told me love was fickle and fleeting.

I have tried to let you go and I cannot. I cannot stop thinking of you. I cannot stop dreaming about you.

Better to have a single perfect diamond than a sack of flawed stones.

The circus looks abandoned and empty. But you think perhaps you can smell caramel wafting through the evening breeze, beneath the crisp scent of the autumn leaves. A subtle sweetness at the edges of the cold.

Each of them always gravitating toward the other. Yet still they do not touch.

Trapped in silence, Marco traces apologies and adorations across Celia's body with his tongue. Mutely expressing all the things he cannot speak aloud. He finds other ways to tell her, his fingers leaving faint trails of ink in their wake. He savors every sound he elicits from her. The entire room trembles as they come together. And though there are a great many fragile objects contained within it, nothing breaks.

So proper for a circus girl," Mme. Padva says with with a gleam in her eye. "We shall have to loosen those corset laces if we intend to keep you an intimate dinner company." "I expected the corset unlacing would take place after dinner," Celia says mildly, earning a chorus of laughter. "We shall keep Miss Bowen as intimate company regardless of the state of her corset," Chandresh says. "Make a note of that," he adds, waving a hand at Marco. "Miss Bowen's corset is duly noted, sir," Marco replies, and the laghter bubbles over the table again.

Timing is a sensitive thing.

He remembers when he was very small his mother once said she wished happiness and adventure for him. If this does not count as adventure, he is not sure what does.

You believe you could not live with the pain. Such pain is not lived with. It is only endured. I am sorry.

Is it not that bad to be trapped somewhere, then? Depending on where you're trapped?" "I suppose it depends on how much you like the place you're trapped in," Widget says. "And how much you like whoever you're stuck there with," Poppet adds, kicking his black boot with her white one.

You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone's soul

The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not.

I saw in details while she saw in scope. Not seeing the scope is why I am here and she is not. I took each element spearately and never looked to see that they never did fit together properly

Kelly Link is inimitable. Her stories are like nothing else, dark yet sparkling with her unique brand of fairy dust. This is the most marvelous kind of trouble to get in.

The silence that falls between them is a comfortable one. He longs to reach over and touch her, but he resists, fearful of destroying the delicate camaraderie they are building. He steals glances instead, watching the way the light falls over her skin. Several times he catches her regarding him in a similar manner, and the moments when she holds his eyes with hers are sublime.

Where do you get your ideas? people ask. Sometimes they’re at the bottoms of cups of tea. Sometimes they’re lurking in my shower. Sometimes they’re waiting patiently in glass cases in museums.

Follow your dreams Bailey. Be they Harvard or somehing else entirely. No matter what that father of yours says, or how loudly he might say it. He forgets that he was someone's dream once, himself

The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night.

Once they were librarians, but that is a subject they will only discuss if heavily intoxicated.

Chandresh relishes reactions. Genuine reactions, not mere polite applause. He often values the reactions over the show itself. A show without an audience is nothing, after all. In the response of the audience, that is where the power of performance lives.

They are enthusiasts, devotees. Addicts. Something about the circus stirs their souls, and they ache for it when it is absent. They seek each other out, these people of such specific like mind. They tell of how they found the circus, how those first few steps were like magic. Like stepping into a fairy tale under a curtain of stars… When they depart, they shake hands and embrace like old friends, even if they have only just met, and as they go their separate ways they feel less alone than they had before.

I don;t think there's anything wrong with being a dreamer. There is not. But dreams have ways of turning into nightmares.

If she were gone I would be nothing. You should think better of yourself than to settle for that.

I am tired of trying to hold things together that cannot be held.

We cannot go backward,' Marco says. 'A great deal is not how it used to be.

I find I think of myself not as a writer so much as someone who provides a gateway, a tangential route for readers to reach the circus. To visit the circus again, if only in their minds, when they are unable to attend it physically. I relay it through printed words on crumpled newsprint, words that they can read again and again, returning to the circus whenever they wish, regardless of time of day or physical location. Transporting them at will. When put that way, it sounds rather like magic, doesn't it? p.369

Though I have seen a great deal of the sights, traveled a number of the available paths, there are always corners that remain unexplored, doors that remain unopened.

The boy spends most of his time reading. And writing, of course. He copies out sections of books, writes out words and symbols he does not understand at first but that become intimately familiar beneath his ink-stained fingers, formed again and again in increasingly steady lines.

It's too late. It was too late by the time I arrived in London to turn your notebook into a dove; there were too many people already involved. Anything either of us does has an effect on everyone here, on every patron who walks through those gates. Hundreds if not thousands of people. All flies in a spiderweb that was spun when I was six years old and now I can barely move for fear of losing someone else.

"I am already married," she remarks to the empty air, twisting the ring on her right hand that covers an sold, distinctive scar.

All empires fall eventually. It is the way of things.

Grow up, Bailey." "That is precisely what I'm doing," Bailey says. "I don't care if you don't understand that. Staying here won't make me happy. It will make you happy because you're insipid and boring, and an insipid, boring life is enough for you. It's not enough for me. It will never be enough for me. So I'm leaving. Do me a favor and marry someone who will take decent care of the sheep.

I like that "once upon a time" quality, where the telling of a tale has an elevated sense of story. There's a whimsical quality to it. Sometimes in fairy tales more things seem possible, even though often they're real world based.

He reads histories and mythologies and fairy tales, wondering why it seems that only girls are ever swept away from their mundane lives on farms by knights or princes or wolves. It strikes him as unfair to not have the same fanciful opportunity himself. And he is not in the position to do any rescuing of his own.

Even the air feels different on Halloween, autumn-crisp and bright.

At the center, where a cuckoo bird would live in a more traditional timepiece, is the juggler. Dressed in harlequin style with a grey mask, he juggles shiny silver balls that correspond to each hour. As the clock chimes, another ball joins the rest until at midnight he juggles twelve balls in a complex pattern. After midnight the clock begins once more to fold in upon itself. The face lightens and the clouds return. The number of juggled balls decreases until the juggler himself vanishes. By noon it is a clock again, and no longer a dream.

Widge can see the past." Poppet says suddenly. "That's why his stories are so good." "The past is easier," Widget says. "It's already there." "In the stars?" Bailey asks. "No." Widget says. "On people. The past stays on you the way powdered sugar stays on fingers. Some people can get rid of it but it's still there, the events and t hings that pushed you to where you are now.

I suppose there will never be a lack of things to say, of stories to be told and shared.

Is magic not enough to live for?

Misdirection is one of my strengths.

Old stories have a habit of being told and retold and changed. Each subsequent storyteller puts his or her mark upon it. Whatever truth the story once had is buried in bias and embellishment. The reasons do not matter as much as the story itself.

It is destroying me that I cannot ask you to dance.

„I forgive you for stealing my shawl.“ She smiles as he laughs. And then she vanishes. A simple trick of distracting his attention long enough to slip out through the hall, despite the lingering temptation to stay.

Her father picks different names for her as they change locales, but he uses Miranda often, presumably because he knows how much it annoys her.

It's not a real name," she says. "Not one that he's carried with him always. It's one he wears like his hat. So he can take it off if he wants.

I do not see as well without her. I do not hear as well without her. I do not feel as well without her. I would be better off without a hand or a leg than without my sister.

Unusual yet beautiful. Provocative while remaining elegant.

Natural talent is a questionable phenomenon. Inclination perhaps, but innate ability is extremely rare.

He forgets that he was someone's dream once, himself.