Home > Author > A.J. Hartley
1 " What must be done must be done, whatever the price, the cost, the pain. One day we all must walk through fire. "
― A.J. Hartley , Macbeth: A Novel
2 " And still you'll hesitate to tell him, won't you? Why? Because you're a woman? Is your destiny such a small thing then? To keep your legs open and your mouth shut? "
3 " Tomorrow and tomorrow come creeping in and always will. We're fools trapped in a mechanism of our own unconscious making. Shadows strutting and fretting for one brief hour upon a stage, then heard no more. I'll weep an ocean in my heart, if the world would give me time. But not now. "
4 " You speak as if this is a good world with a little evil in it. Rubbish. It's a hellish one where the best a man can do is put a little sanity back and look after his own. "
5 " Priests might divide the world into good and bad. In battle there was strong and weak and nothing else. "
6 " There are no secrets.' The thing smiled, showing a row of even, childlike teeth. 'None worth keeping. Only the ones you hide from yourself, which are the most damaging and hurtful of all. Truth is truth, and lie is lie. Tell yourself one's the other and all the world turns kilter. "
7 " You're a kid,' said Alexandra. 'There is no just about it. Only adults say just a kid and what the heck do they know about anything? Have you looked at their world lately? "
― A.J. Hartley , Darwen Arkwright and the Peregrine Pact (Darwen Arkwright, #1)
8 " Do I dream you? Or you dream me? Or does someone, something bigger than all' - her hands swept the vast constellations above them - 'this beauteous calamity, dream everything we see and more? "
9 " To watch. To wait. To wonder at a world in chaos,' the girl said. 'And hope one day you fools might learn. "
10 " In their vanity men focus on what they wish to hear and miss the hidden meaning, the lurking threat. "
11 " The only sheets I'll ever long for are my own. "
12 " My life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. It means nothing. "
13 " It's a long ride home with nothing but me for company. I bore myself sometimes. Not often. Just now and again. "
14 " ...the antidote to death was and always would be the heat and fury of life itself. "
15 " We spent today sending men to hell. What's more natural than to pass the night dreaming of procreating a few more to take their place? "
16 " A nation's not a child, for God's sake. ... It's like a wild horse you tame by breaking it. Or a fiery woman you slap till she sees sense and warms your bed. "
17 " When the line is delivered, Hamlet is gazing on Yorrick's skull, casually unearthed by the gravedigger. Yorrick's fame grew out of being the line which accompanied what is perhaps the single most recognizable iconic image in literature: a man in black, considering a human skull. Show some form of that picture to most moderately educated people and plenty who aren't and they'll know that the man is Hamlet. Such things don't find their way into the popular consciousness by accident and trivial though the line may sound, it speaks to the heart of the play: a man compelled by circumstances outside of his control to confront his own mortality. "
― A.J. Hartley , Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
18 " I've no need of reasons. The doing's enough.'Well said for once, the girl thought. The doing was everything. "
19 " I’ve never fully trusted people who don’t like dogs. They rarely turn out well. "
20 " And so the Scots grew restless, moaning all the time as only they could. "
