M. K. Hobson Quotes

“I wasn’t sure if we were still engaged.”
“After everything we’ve been through? After true love conquered all?” Emily shook her head. “Being dead had done nothing to alleviate your obtuseness, Mr. Stanton.”
“Being dead allowed me to learn the heart’s deepest secret,” he said. “That sometimes love—even true love—isn’t enough.”
”But it’s a start,” Emily said.

It was her own evil assumptions that had done her in. She hadn’t even considered the third possible explanation for his strange behavior—that he was a perfectly nice man, without an ounce of guile, just trying to be helpful. People helped people in California. Why hadn’t she thought of that? She’d only been in New York a few weeks, and already she was turning hard and suspicious.

I’d ask you to forego the jingoistic claptrap, but it’s terrifyingly obvious you truly believe it.

Was your mother furious?
"She'll get over it," Stanton said. "Perhaps not in this lifetime, but I happen to believe in reincarnation, so there's still hope."

Spread out before the pyramid, as far as the eye could see, stretched a frozen ocean of blackness—stinking oily blackness that bubbled and churned. Voider than void, colder than cold, deader than dead.
It is your world.
It is the world we will make for you.

Having engaged in vigorous and passionate debate while on their honeymoon trip from New York, they had arrived at the startling—and rather liberating—conclusion that the marriage itself was not at all necessary. Stanton no longer had a name to give, and taking Emily’s would have involved all the tedium of authority and nonsense they’d hoped to avoid. So, in the end, he had returned to her the simple gold band she had worn for so long, sliding it onto the ring finger of her new right hand. And she had given him a soft slow kiss. They were the only vows required.

She wanted to crawl into his arms and be soothed, and soothe him in return, and forget all the grand ideas she’d ever had about true love, and the necessity for it. Because true love was a load of baloney. Finding a good friend...a good friend who trusted you...was more than enough.

The sight of Oakland sprawling on the horizon gave Emily’s spirits an additional boost. Oakland was by no means lovely, but it meant they were almost to San Francisco.

I'm sorry Mr. Stanton, really I am. I didn't mean to miss it. Things...happened.
"Oh, well. Things happened. How nice to have that cleared up."

The obsessive rules of etiquette struck Emily as mean-spirited, like the old trick of tying someone’s shoelaces under the table. It was only fun if you liked watching people fall down.

Credomancy may seek to exploit the human desire for a tidy narrative where an unblemished romantic hero vanquishes all obstacles, but such ideals have very little to do with reality. Reality requires pragmatism and compromise. Men fail. Women fail. There are no heroes, only human beings who somehow find the strength to behave heroically, no matter how many times they have been unable to do so in the past. If you understand that, Miss Edwards—if you truly and deeply understand that, then you will understand the most powerful thing anyone with a heart can understand.
"And what's that?" Emily said softly.
"That love is not enough. But it's a start."

There is a difference between not understanding and being willfully obtuse.

Emily stared into the middle distance, trying to ignore the fact that the men were looking at her like a cupcake on a plate.

In New Bethel, we take the word serious. We whip whores, we hang thieves, and we burn sorcerers.

Senator Stanton? The man who’s sold his own soul so many times that no one can figure out who actually owns it?