66 Quotes by Natasha Pulley

If you go somewhere . . . very different to home, even for a long time, the memory feels like a dream when you get back.

People are like bees. They're all workers who could be queens, with the right stuff, but once a queen-making has begun, it can't be reversed. A bee that's half way a queen can't turn back into a worker. She'd starve. She must keep growing and then she must leave.

When they returned to Filigree Street, Mori refused even to go upstairs. Instead he hid under a quilt in the parlour with Thaniel's never-read copy of Anna Karenina. The Russians, he said, knew how to write genuinely boring novels, and he would only stop being afraid when he was bored enough. They were all the more boring because he could remember reading the end in the recent future.

Loyalty is a continuous phenomenon, you don't score points for past action,

She waited by the blackboard, trying to scrape up enough of her abysmal Japanese to ask what was going on. Lectures were always in English, which was just as well, because she had the linguistic capability of a sea cucumber. As far as she could tell, the word for ‘husband’ and the word for ‘prisoner’ were identical. Half the faculty were still worried that she’d got Baron Matsumoto locked away in her attic.

But he hadn't realized that grace is not a thing you performed, but a weight you carried.

Science had to have some mystery otherwise everyone would find out how simple it was.

I'm a Buddhist. You might have a Christian obligation to catch pneumonia while you sit for two and a half hours listening to some twerp in a dress drone on about the virtue of wedded life but, dear as you are to me, I don't.

He was not poor - he could afford ten candles & two baths a week. He wasn't going to throw himself in the Thames for the misery of it all and God knew most of London was worse off. All the same, he had a feeling life should not have been about ten candles and two baths a week.