A Quote by Frances Hardinge

Words were dangerous when loosed. They were more powerful than cannon and more unpredictable than storms. They could turn men’s heads inside out and warp their destinies. They could pick up kingdoms and shake them until they rattled.
Paul ascended into the third heavens and he could understand the THREE PRINCIPLE ROUNDS of Jacobs ladder - the telestial, the terrestrial, and the celestial glories or kingdoms, when Paul saw and heard things which were not lawful to utter. I COULD EXPLAIN A HUNDREDFOLD MORE THAN I EVER HAVE of the glories of the kingdoms manifested to me in the vision were I permitted and were the people ready to receive them.
I could explain a hundred fold more than I ever have of the glories of the kingdoms manifested to me in the vision, were I permitted, and were the people prepared to receive them.
There are many people who could be Olympic champions. All-Americans who have never tried. I'd estimate more than 5 million people could have beaten me in the pole vault the years I won it... at least 5 million. Men that were stronger, bigger and faster than I was could have done it, but they never picked up a pole, never made the feeble effort to pick their legs off the ground trying to get over the bar.
Thousands of men breathe, move, and live; pass off the stage of life and are heard of no more. Why? They did not a particle of good in the world; and none were blest by them, none could point to them as the instrument of their redemption; not a line they wrote, not a word they spoke, could be recalled, and so they perished--their light went out in darkness, and they were not remembered more than the insects of yesterday. Will you thus live and die, O man immortal? Live for something.
What we had went so much deeper than a kiss. When we were together, she turned me completely inside out. It didn't matter if we were dead or alive. We could never be kept apart. There were some things more powerful than worlds or universes. She was my world, as much as I was hers. What we had, we knew. The poems are all wrong. It's a bang, a really big bang. Not a whimper. And sometimes gold can stay. Anybody who's ever been in love can tell you that.
More than anything, the journal wanted. It wanted more than it could hold, more than words could describe, more than diagrams could illustrate. Longing burst from the pages, in every frantic line and every hectic sketch and every dark-printed definition. There was something pained and melancholy about it.
I wish I were stronger and more secure in myself so that I could really spend my life with a guy like Lenny. Because he has a different kind of strength than Joshie. He has the strength of his sweet tuna arms. He has the strength of putting his nose in my hair and calling it home. He has the strength to cry when I go down on him. Who IS Lenny? Who DOES that? Who will ever open up to me like that again? No one. Because it's too dangerous. Lenny is a dangerous man. Joshie is more powerful, but Lenny is much more dangerous.
No stream rises higher than its source. What ever man might build could never express or reflect more than he was. He could record neither more nor less than he had learned of life when the buildings were built.
The destinies of men are woven one with the other, and you can turn aside from them no more than you can turn aside from your own.
It daunted me that you were so beautiful, that you were so at ease in social situations, as if every room was heliotropic, with you at the center. And I guess it daunted you that I had so many more friends than you, that I could put my words together like this, on paper, and could sometimes conjure a certain sense out of things. The key is to never recognize these imbalances. To not let the dauntingness daunt us.
When you have three out of the four largest banks in America today, bigger than they were - significantly bigger than when we bailed them out because they were too big to fail, I think if Teddy Roosevelt were alive today, a good Republican by the way, what he would say is: Break them up; they are too powerful economically; they are too powerful politically.
There were always men looking for jobs in America. There were always all these usable bodies. And I wanted to be a writer. Almost everybody was a writer. Not everybody thought they could be a dentist or an automobile mechanic but everybody knew they could be a writer. Of those fifty guys in the room, probably fifteen of them thought they were writers. Almost everybody used words and could write them down, i.e., almost everybody could be a writer. But most men, fortunately, aren't writers, or even cab drivers, and some men - many men - unfortunately aren't anything.
I sat on the bench by the willows and at my honey bun and read Triton. There are some awful things in the world, it’s true, but there are also some great books. When I grow up I would like to write something that someone could read sitting on a bench on a day that isn’t all that warm and they could sit reading it and totally forget where they were or what time it was so that they were more inside the book than inside their own head. I’d like to write like Delany or Heinlein or Le Guin.
These boys, now, were living as we'd been living then, they were growing up with a rush and their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities. They were filled with rage. All they really knew were two darknesses, the darkness of their lives, which were now closing in on them, and the darkness of the movies, which had blinded them to that other darkness, and in which they now, vindictively, dreamed, at once more together than they were at any other time, and more alone.
Trees and flowers were often more meaningful to me than people. They always helped me, consoled me, giving the soul a chance to believe once more than the world was beautiful and sensible, that the mad absurdities and cruelties of men were against the laws of Nature and the Universal Mind; that sooner or later violence would suffer utter defeat on this Earth. No words collected in books were more effectively convincing to me than foliage, clouds, rippling waters, rain.
There never appear more than five or six men of genius in an age, but if they were united the world could not stand before them.
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