“Of course not. No one is chosen. Not ever. Not in the real world. You chose to climb out of your window and ride on a leopard. You chose to get a witch’s Spoon back, and to make friends with a wyvern. You chose to trade your shadow for a child’s life. You chose not to let the Marquess hurt your friend--you chose to smash her cages! You chose to face your own Death, not to balk at a great sea to cross and no ship to cross it in. And twice now you have chosen not to go home when you might have, if only you abandoned your friends. You are not the chosen one, September. Fairyland did not choose you--you chose yourself. You could have had a lovely holiday in Fairyland and never met the Marquess, never worried yourself with local politics, had a romp with a few brownies and gone home with enough memories for a lifetime’s worth of novels. But you didn’t. You chose. You chose it all. Just like you chose your path on the beach: to lose your heart is not a path for the faint and fainting.”
“All my life they had made choices for me, and I had resented it. Now the choice was mine, and once it was made, I would have no right to blame anyone else for the consequences. Loss of that privilege, to blame others, unexpectedly stung.”
“You will always be a monster - there is no turning back from it. But what kind of monster you become is entirely up to you.”
“People took what they wanted, they clutched at coincidences, the few there were, and made a life from them. . . . Choices are made in brief seconds and paid for in the time that remains.”
“I can learn to live with guilt. I don t care about being good.”
“Happiness is a state of mind, a choice, a way of living; it is not something to be achieved, it is something to be experienced.”
“After all, if you run far enough, no one can catch you.”
“She wasn’t afraid of difficulties; what frightened her was being forced to choose one particular path. Choosing a path meant having to miss out on others. She had a whole life to live and she was always thinking that, in future, she might regret the choices she made now. ‘I’m afraid of committing myself,’ she thought to herself. She wanted to follow all possible paths and so ended up following none. Even in that most important area of her life, love, she had failed to commit herself. After her first romantic dissappointment, she had never again given herself entirely. She feared pain, loss and separation. These things were inevitable on the path to love, and the only way of avoiding them was by deciding not to take that path at all. In order not to suffer, you had to renounce love. It was like putting out your own eyes in order not to see the bad things in life.”
“At the end of the day, the questions we ask of ourselves determine the type of people that we will become.”
“The first time I was ever called ugly, I was thirteen. It was a rich friend of my brother Carlton s over to shoot guns in the field. Why you crying, girl? Constantine asked me in the kitchen. I told her what the boy had called me, tears streaming down my face. Well? Is you? I blinked, paused my crying. Is I what? Now you look a here, Egenia -because constantien was the only one who d occasionally follow Mama s rule. Ugly live up on the inside. Ugly be a hurtful, mean person. Is you one a them peoples? I don t know. I don t think so, I sobbed. Constantine sat down next to me, at the kitchen table. I heard the cracking of her swollen joints. She pressed her thumb hard in the palm of my hand, somthing we both knew meant Listen. Listen to me. Ever morning, until you dead in the ground, you gone have to make this decision. Constantine was so close, I could see the blackness of her gums. You gone have to ask yourself, Am I gone believe what them fools say about me today? She kept her thumb pressed hard in my hand. I nodded that I understood. I was just smart enough to realize she meant white people. And even though I still felt miserable, and knew that I was, most likely, ugly, it was the first time she ever talked to me like I was something besides my mother s white child. All my life I d been told what to believe about politics, coloreds, being a girl. But with Constantine s thumb pressed in my hand, I realized I actually had a choice in what I could believe.”
“But the past cannot be changed, and we carry our choices with us, forward, into the unknown. We can only move on.”
“Look,” he said, “the point is there’s no way to be a hundred percent sure about anyone or anything. So you’re left with a choice. Either hope for the best, or just expect the worst.” If you expect the worst, you’re never disappointed,” I pointed out. Yeah, but who lives like that?”
“I want you to take note, Commander, that turning in my badge would be like cutting off my arm. But if it comes down to a choice between the job and my marriage, then I lose the arm.”
“There are times in my life when I have been medicine for some while poison for others. I used to think I was a victim of my story until I realized the truth; that I am the creator of my story. I choose what type of person I will be and what type of impact I will leave on others. I will never choose the destructive path of self and outward victimization again.”
“Just because ‘these shoes were made for walking’ doesn’t mean that we should use them on any old road.”
“Our world is not safe. It is a toxic swamp populated by predators and parasites. The odds are stacked against us from the moment of conception. We survive only because we fight the elements, hunger, disease, each other. And, although civilization promises us safe harbor, that promise is a fairy tale. Only the storm is real. It comes for each of us. And we cannot win. We can only choose how we will suffer our defeat. We can meekly take our beatings, and die like lemmings, finding solace in the belief that we shall one day inherit the earth. Or, we can plunge into the chaos with eyes wide open, taking comfort instead from the bruises, scars, and broken bones which prove that we fought to live and die as gods.”
“You can’t control what others think. The only thing you can control is yourself. Some people will look down on you for your choices in life, no matter what they are. You can’t do anything about that. The only thing you can do is decide how to live your own life. And to hell with everybody else”