What are your favourite marchetta quotes, also thank you for introducing me to her, those books are so close to my heart now!
oh gosh i have a lot i highlight so much in her books lmao! i'll try to select my absolute favorites from each:
the lumatere chronicles
[froi] just watched the way finnikin's hands rested on evanjalin's neck and he rubbed his thumb along her jaw and the way his tongue seemed to disappear inside her mouth as if he needed a part of her to breathe himself. and froi wondered what evanjalin was saying against finnikin's lips when they stopped because whatever the words were it made them start all over again and this time their hunger for each other was so frightening to watch that it made froi look away.
the gods whispered to you once, finnikin. and you listened. but they are proud and refuse to speak to those who do not believe that there is something out there mightier than the minds and intellect of mortals.
and there it was, he thought, as he looked at the women in beatriss's kitchen. the memory of a look that spoke to him of power. his. a look that made him want to kneel at the feet of his queen and worship her. because it made him feel like a king.
i fear that i will do something to bring harm to those i love, so i follow their rules to ensure that i won't. but what if you bring harm or fail to protect those you don't know? or don't love? will you care as much? probably not. then choose another bond. one written by yourself. because it is what you do for strangers that counts in the end.
if your people mean no offense, they should not speak their thoughts out loud in front of their children, tesadora. because it will be their children who come to slaughter us one day, all because of the careless words passed down by their elders who meant no harm.
you'll have to forgive my people. they are still grieving their leader. their leader is living. he's standing in front of me, and the only person on this mountain who is not acknowledging him these days is the leader himself. i'll never be as good as him. they know that. we all know that. speak the truth, lucian. what truth? you don't want him here because of the mistakes you think you're making. you want him here because you loved him and he's gone and you can't say those words out loud.
because you may not have seen it, my darling boy, but i hated with a fierceness i can't describe. and do you want to hear something that was breaking my heart, day after day? i forgot the faces of my granddaughters in all that hatred. hatred smothers all beauty.
are you a slave? in serker, only slaves are etched. with the names of the men that own them. i'm a serker, lirah. my body is etched with the names of the three women who own me. my queen. my mother. my woman.
froi saw the foolishness of dreamers, and he decided he'd like to die so foolish. with a dream in his heart about the possibilities, rather than a chain of hopelessness. finnikin had once said it was the only way to live. that he wanted to drown in hope rather than wallow in despair.
saving francesca
take away your job and take away your kids and who are you, robert? your husband. then take away me and who are you? take away you, the kids, and my job? is this a trick question? i'm dead, right?
sometimes when i get home, i convince myself that i'm just romanticizing anyone who's actually spoken to me, but then i see him the next day and my heart starts beating fast and i can't really kid myself. it's not as if he's good-looking, because he's not. sometimes he's so plain that he looks bland. but it's his voice and his mannerisms that fill him with some kind of color. i listen to his voice and its resonance hooks me in. the worry lines on his forehead, his expression when he twists his face into a smile, and the way his whole face lights up when he laughs those short bursts of laughter.
when i was seventeen, i just stopped speaking to my father for two years. i thought he was a peasant, some kind of idiot. i was embarrassed by how simple he was. i was such a bitch. but all i can remember now is his face - his beautiful patient face, waiting for his daughter to start speaking to him again. he never questioned what was going on and he never pushed, and i saw that as a weakness. but he was just waiting.
me's easy. me got on a train and ended up in woy woy. you's difficult. you're planning on puking your way through europe at a time that i thought you were... kind of interested in me. kind of interested in you. i'm kind of interested in calculus and ancient roman warfare. you don't use words like kind of interested to describe how i feel about you.
because breaking up with her was so easy and breaking up with you would be like, i don't even want to think about it. we haven't even started going out together and you're thinking of breaking up. but that's it. when i think of you, i think of future stuff. i think of this is it and i'm not supposed to think this is it at my age. i don't look at you and think nice. i look at you and think, oh my god, i want to hold her and never let her go. i think, sex— right here, right now—
the piper's son
because i miss it like you'd never believe, and then i go away from this place and i miss here too. i'm scared that i'm going to spend the rest of my life in a state of yearning, regardless of where i am.
you looked so serious and grown-up, so meticulous with your drawing and the way you'd explain the process and i'd look at your hands and think, shit, they can do anything. like frankie's will. don't you love the fact that he builds bridges? i mean, who can say that, really?
am i hard work? yes. you could have hesitated in answering that. why? i've never lied to you before. you do that all the time, you know. you ask me questions when you know the answer will piss you off. ask me a question where the answer could be yes? ask me if you're worth the hard work? ask me if in the last seven years of my life i've woken up in a cold swear knowing i lost the most important person in my life apart from this kid i'm holding? ask me if getting you pregnant has felt like the best thing that's happened to me since my son was born? [...] see this. it's all there, georgie. everything i want in the world is all there. am i worth the hard w—? yes. yes.
and i remember thinking that exact moment, i want to change the world with her. and i remember feeling that again in georgie's attic. that's a pretty powerful gift you have there, ms. finke. to make the laziest guy around want to change the world with you.
don't let anyone take care of you. can you maybe leave that for me to do? i mean, take care of you? feel free to take care of me in return... because i think i'll need you to do that.
the place on dalhousie
he clings to her and being this needed feels better than sex. it's when rosie knows she has to leave this place. because she could easily love this guy. it's what rosie does best. she loves broken people who damage her in return.
and she found herself watching it over and over again, just to get to the part where carrie bradshaw compares the loss of the unreliable big, who stands her up at the altar, with the death of a loved one. not even close, carrie. because men who stand you up at the altar get to walk back into your life holding a pair of manolo blahnik shoes. dead ones stay dead.
because rosie is powerless. every day. all day. no money. no job. no means of identifying herself. no way of climbing out of a rut. all she has is the house her father built, and now martha's got real estate agents walking in and out, telling them lies. and it always ends with that unfathomable despair that has chased rosie for years. that she will never see her mother and father again. toto's birth was a godsend and a curse. it brought back the memory of everything she lost.
we don't even have a photo of us dating to show toto one day. everyone else does. just a little glimpse of us together so we can say, "this is who we were before you came along." is that important? my favorite photos of my mum and dad are those from before i was born. because they were so into each other and i can see this love in her eyes that says, i trust this guy to fucking bits.
can you tell whoever you're sleeping with that it's over? why? you're sort of like an id thing. twenty points for usefulness, twenty points for being good in bed, twenty points for being decent, and you get triple bonus points because toto's your top-one-hundred priority. can you shave off points from usefulness and decency and give me extra for being good in bed? it would have to come out of your toto triple-bonus points. thanks, but no thanks. i think i'll hang on to those bonus points.
where did you meet? in a flood. you? here. we played each other's team on the first game of the season and during a toss up, our eyes sort of met. that's pretty romantic. yeah, so's meeting the mother of your child during a catastrophic event.
jellicoe road
my father took one hundred and thirty-two minutes to die. i counted. it happened on the jellicoe road. the prettiest road i’d ever seen, where trees made breezy canopies like a tunnel to shangri-la. we were going to the ocean, hundreds of miles away, because i wanted to see the ocean and my father said that it was about time the four of us made that journey. i remember asking, “what’s the difference between a trip and a journey?” and my father said, “narnie, my love, when we get there, you’ll understand,” and that was the last thing he ever said.
i look around at everyone and i can’t help thinking how normal we look and i don’t think i’ve ever felt normal. i watch raffy as she removes the pickles from her hamburger and hands them over to santangelo without them exchanging a word and i realize again there is more to that relationship than spelling bees and being enemies. these people have history and i crave history. i crave someone knowing me so well that they can tell what i’m thinking.
i remember love. it’s what i have to keep on reminding myself. it’s funny how you can forget everything except people loving you. maybe that’s why humans find it so hard getting over love affairs. it’s not the pain they’re getting over, it’s the love.
what are you thinking? that you deserve romance. let me see. a guy tells me that he would have thrown himself in front of a train if it wasn’t for me and then drives seven hours straight, without whingeing once, on a wild-goose chase in search of my mother with absolutely no clue where to start. he is, in all probability, going to get court-martialled because of me, has put up with my moodiness all day long, and knows exactly what to order me for breakfast. it doesn’t get any more romantic than that, jonah.
what do you want me to say? that if he asked me to marry him, i’d say yes? okay. yes. but grief makes a monster out of us sometimes, taylor, and sometimes you say and do things to the people you love that you can’t forgive yourself for. i’d forgive myself. to be with jonah i’d do anything.
looking for alibrandi
sometimes i’m with my friends and i feel as if i don’t fit in because of you. because you opened me up to this whole new world out there. i don’t want to become a mechanic and work all day long and then at night go to the pub and marry someone just like me and have two children and whine about housing payments and gas prices and the economy. i wanted that last year. no, that’s not true. i thought that’s what life was all about last year. but this year i realized, because of you, that there’s more to life. i still want to be a mechanic, but i want to step outside my circle and look at the other options. i don’t want to do what other people think i’ll end up doing. i don’t want to be stereotyped because of the school i attend or the district i live in. i want all the things in life that john barton gave up because he was scared to step out of his circle. but i have to do that on my own.
you’re going to go on living. because living is the challenge, josie. not dying. dying is so easy. sometimes it only takes ten seconds to die. but living? that can take you eighty years and you do something in that time, whether it’s giving birth to a baby or being a housewife or a barrister or a soldier. you’ve accomplished something. to throw that away at such a young age, to have no hope, is the biggest tragedy.
why don’t people do things they want to do? i’d never let anyone or anything stop me. how the hell do you know that, josie? you haven’t begun to live life. come back to me when you’re forty and tell me that you’ve done everything you’ve wanted to do. when i was seventeen i wanted to be a pilot, but we moved to adelaide and the move depressed me and i forgot everything i had wanted in my life. people change. circumstances change them.
tell the truth shame the devil
i get all the criticism about religion, you know, mr. ortley. but the thing is, you can’t take it away from people and not leave something else of substance. that’s what your generation will remembered for. taking so much away and replacing it with so little of worth.
he hid me between the fissures big enough to fit me. it was to protect me. not leave me behind. my dad wouldn’t have left me behind. it’s what i write in my letters every time i remember something. but the police here never believe me. and bish thought it strange that seventeen-year-old girls who had sex with idiot boys could still cry like babies for their fathers.
all those years ago, a man had tried to protect his child on this rock. etienne lebrac hadn’t come here to die; he’d come to be reminded of beauty in an ugly year. if bish was still a religious man, he would have sworn that the dead were with them in this ancient place. the beautiful dead. and he felt that the three in his arms sensed it too.
and there it was. that slight lisp. that awful accent. that funny face that made him ache. charlie wasn’t just a cheat. he was a liar as well. because violette zidane wasn’t just the girl he was shagging, like he told the cop. she sort of owned his heart a little. kind of a lot.
