Nuala O'donovan Quotes & Sayings

Unrequited love," I'd say. He'd look at me sideways in that cunning way he did and say, "what about it?" and I'd reply, "it's not your color." Pithy. Just to show him that I'd noticed. Or maybe I'd show myself to her and say, "Guess I'm not the only one who uses humans around here." And then I'd summon some of Owain's hounds to chew off the bottom bits of her legs. Then she wouldn't fit just right into his arms. She'd be too short. It'd be like hugging a midget.
Nuala- pg. 75 — Maggie Stiefvater

They're fathers second, Jimmy said. They're men first. — Nuala O'Faolain

I tried not to think about it. But every so often it would burst out of me - why did he do something so unkind? What had I done to deserve it? I did believe, from my experience of life and of looking at the world, that men hated women. But there were all kinds of exceptions, and I'd have bet everything that this man didn't hate me, this woman. — Nuala O'Faolain

I did believe, from my experience of life and of looking at the world, that men hated women. — Nuala O'Faolain

Permanence, I once copied down from a magazine, is what we all want when we can love and can be loved; change is what we want when we cannot. — Nuala O'Faolain

Novels are completed when they are finished, but the memoir changes its own conclusion by virtue of being written ... I was not at all the same person, when I handed the manuscript to the publisher, as I had been when I began. A memoir may always be retrospective, but the past is not where its action takes place. — Nuala O'Faolain

...friendship is something you do. — Nuala O'Faolain

A bugler sounded the Last Post. Heartbreak made audible. — Nuala O'Faolain

The fact was, I didn't know if I was built for happy endings. — Maggie Stiefvater

But this upland pass was the right place for remembering how, when I was young, I learned to feel for the harshness underneath every soft appearance. — Nuala O'Faolain

What makes a woman into a doormat? What makes her see some quite ordinary other person as a looming Goliath? And are not these relationships such an outrage to reality that they cannot last a lifetime? — Nuala O'Faolain

Lovers are allowed to be as cruel as anything to the one who dissappoints them. — Nuala O'Faolain

Though it seemed trivial, now, to describe a place as if what is was, was what I could see of it. — Nuala O'Faolain

In any case, I would prefer to read something I don't enjoy than do almost anything else. I like the act of reading itself. Following the line of something - not just the story but the rhythm, the tone, the feel of what has accumulated from before and what is beginning to impend ... — Nuala O'Faolain

Did anyone ever hear of an intelligent fantasy? — Nuala O'Faolain

Thumbs-up. We could never make Dry Witch Toby cry. The boys said she was a hardass - she and Rebecca were the two hardest asses. Rebecca was jolly on the outside, but you did not push her buttons. As for Toby, she was leathery inside and out. "Don't try it, Shackleton," she would say, even though her back was turned. Nuala was too kind to us, but Toby held us to account, and we trusted Toby more: you'd — Margaret Atwood

There was nothing between the man and me - - nothing, not even liking. But because of the memory of some wholeness, or the hope of some regeneration, I would have dropped whatever I'd planned, just to go back to scratching around on his bed. — Nuala O'Faolain

I was sitting in a movie theater at 4:13 in the morning, with a faerie muse who had vaguely psychic vampire tendencies, watching The Sixth Sense.
At this point in my life I'd had some pretty freaky, surreal experiences already, such as (1) watching my best friend move things with her mind, (2) being dragged from my wrecked car by a soulless faerie assassin, and (3) feeling the inexorable pull of the king of the dead's nightly song. And really, sitting with Nuala and watching a crazy little boy tell Bruce Willis that he saw dead people should've been included amongst them. — Maggie Stiefvater

Let me just say that I am not often lonely in country places. In cities I am, like the writers of the letters. Nature doesn't break your heart: other people do. Yet, we cannot live apart from each other in bowers feeding on nectar. We're in this together, this getting through our lives, as the fact that we are word-users shows. — Nuala O'Faolain

She sees tall, sensible Eleanor sitting out on a terrace at twilight, with bats circling above her head. She sees the Pargiter family rising and falling through the decades like swimmers battling the waves.'
Summer Lies Bleeding — Nuala Casey

This is life, in all its gruesome, lovely, neon-lit glory. — Nuala Casey

I've been waiting for you forever."
"Forever' as in several hundred years, or forever as in since my lesson began? — Maggie Stiefvater

My life burned inside me. Even such as it was, it was the only record of me, and it was my only creation, and something in me would not accept that it was insignificant. — Nuala O'Faolain

Numbers are the only things you can trust in this life, Kerstin; they will keep you sane.'
Summer Lies Bleeding — Nuala Casey

When I was young, I learned to feel for the harshness under every soft appearance. — Nuala O'Faolain

If there were nothing else, reading would
obviously
be worth living for. — Nuala O'Faolain

I tried to picture her in a class, any class, anywhere on campus, and failed miserably. I pictured her frolicking in a forest glade around some guy she'd just sacrificed to a heathen god. That image worked way better. — Maggie Stiefvater

The wait is long, my dream of you does not end. — Nuala O'Faolain

Nuala, can we just have, like, a cease-fire? I mean, you can go back to calling me an ass and trying to lure me to my death tomorrow and I'll go back to treating you like a psychotic bitch and researching ways to exorcise you in the morning, but seriously, can we just have a cease-fire for tonight? — Maggie Stiefvater

But you know, there's one simple thing I see absolutely clearly, now that I am so very old.
I looked at her. The Albert Einstein hairstyle, and the bright black eyes and the sharp nose. That pallor on her face.
She put her small hand on mine.
The world is wonderful, she said. All its little things. It is wonderful. — Nuala O'Faolain

Do the thing that's less passive. Do the active thing. There's more of the human in that.
— Nuala O'Faolain

Duly noted." Rhys yanked open the drawers and pulled out my undergarments. He dangled the bits of midnight lace and chuckled. "I'm surprised you didn't demand Nuala and Cerridwen buy you something else." I stalked to him, snatching the lace away. "You're drooling on the carpet." I slammed the bathing room door before he could respond. He — Sarah J. Maas

Time is the third party to every relationship. — Nuala O'Faolain

Nuala shot me a hard look. Shut up. I don't think love has anything to do with how the other person is. I mean, maybe a little. I think what really matters is you yourself. Like, you know, let's say you lo- really liked a self-involved ass. That doesn't matter. What matters is how that ass makes you feel. If you feel like the best person in the world when you're with him, that's what makes you like him. It really isn't about how nice of a person he is at all. — Maggie Stiefvater

When I stay with the couple who are my closest friends, I hear them laughing and talking in bed, and sometimes in the middle of the night one of them goes down and makes tea, and when the clock goes off in the morning, they start again, talking to each other. — Nuala O'Faolain

Hough silence must add intensity to your intimate moments, it must also shrivel your soul to lie beside someone who doesn't talk to you. — Nuala O'Faolain

My desk was a present from Margaret Atwood.
After Zen and the Art of Uterus Maintenance
sold its first million, she said I needed a place
to write, other than the local bus-shelter. — Nuala Ni Chonchuir