Beasts Made Of Night Quotes

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Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door — Only this, and nothing more." Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December, And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor. Eagerly I wished the morrow; — vainly I had sought to borrow From my books surcease of sorrow — sorrow for the lost Lenore — For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore — Nameless here for evermore. And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain Thrilled me — filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before; So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating, Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door — Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door; — This it is, and nothing more." Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer, Sir," said I, "or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore; But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping, And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door, That I scarce was sure I heard you"— here I opened wide the door; — Darkness there, and nothing more. Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before; But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token, And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, "Lenore?" This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, "Lenore!" — Merely this, and nothing more. Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning, Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before. Surely," said I, "surely that is something at my window lattice: Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore — Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore; — 'Tis the wind and nothing more." Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter, In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore; Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he; But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door — Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door — Perched, and sat, and nothing more. Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling, By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore. Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou," I said, "art sure no craven, Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the Nightly shore — Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!" Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore." Much I marveled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly, Though its answer little meaning— little relevancy bore; For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being Ever yet was blest with seeing bird above his chamber door — Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door, With such name as "Nevermore.
Edgar Allan Poe (The Raven)
At night, forgotten words tried to reach me. I listened with my skin. Words tore my skin off, crept inside me, and nestled down. I was a mass of wounds. When I opened my mouth in front of the mirror, beasts lay asleep in my throat; they'd made it their home.
Margarita Karapanou (Kassandra and the Wolf)
Be careful of the curse that falls on young lovers Starts so soft and sweet and turns them to hunters A man who's pure of heart and says his prayers by night May still become a wolf when the autumn moon is bright If you could only see the beast you've made of me I held it in but now it seems you've set it running free The saints can't help me now, the ropes have been unbound I hunt for you with bloody feet across the hallow'd ground
Florence Welch
is a broken man an outlaw?" "More or less." Brienne answered. Septon Meribald disagreed. "More less than more. There are many sorts of outlaws, just as there are many sorts of birds. A sandpiper and a sea eagle both have wings, but they are not the same. The singers love to sing of good men forced to go outside the law to fight some wicked lord, but most outlaws are more like this ravening Hound than they are the lightning lord. They are evil men, driven by greed, soured by malice, despising the gods and caring only for themselves. Broken men are more deserving of our pity, though they may be just as dangerous. Almost all are common-born, simple folk who had never been more than a mile from the house where they were born until the day some lord came round to take them off to war. Poorly shod and poorly clad, they march away beneath his banners, ofttimes with no better arms than a sickle or a sharpened hoe, or a maul they made themselves by lashing a stone to a stick with strips of hide. Brothers march with brothers, sons with fathers, friends with friends. They've heard the songs and stories, so they go off with eager hearts, dreaming of the wonders they will see, of the wealth and glory they will win. War seems a fine adventure, the greatest most of them will ever know. "Then they get a taste of battle. "For some, that one taste is enough to break them. Others go on for years, until they lose count of all the battles they have fought in, but even a man who has survived a hundred fights can break in his hundred-and-first. Brothers watch their brothers die, fathers lose their sons, friends see their friends trying to hold their entrails in after they've been gutted by an axe. "They see the lord who led them there cut down, and some other lord shouts that they are his now. They take a wound, and when that's still half-healed they take another. There is never enough to eat, their shoes fall to pieces from the marching, their clothes are torn and rotting, and half of them are shitting in their breeches from drinking bad water. "If they want new boots or a warmer cloak or maybe a rusted iron halfhelm, they need to take them from a corpse, and before long they are stealing from the living too, from the smallfolk whose lands they're fighting in, men very like the men they used to be. They slaughter their sheep and steal their chicken's, and from there it's just a short step to carrying off their daughters too. And one day they look around and realize all their friends and kin are gone, that they are fighting beside strangers beneath a banner that they hardly recognize. They don't know where they are or how to get back home and the lord they're fighting for does not know their names, yet here he comes, shouting for them to form up, to make a line with their spears and scythes and sharpened hoes, to stand their ground. And the knights come down on them, faceless men clad all in steel, and the iron thunder of their charge seems to fill the world... "And the man breaks. "He turns and runs, or crawls off afterward over the corpses of the slain, or steals away in the black of night, and he finds someplace to hide. All thought of home is gone by then, and kings and lords and gods mean less to him than a haunch of spoiled meat that will let him live another day, or a skin of bad wine that might drown his fear for a few hours. The broken man lives from day to day, from meal to meal, more beast than man. Lady Brienne is not wrong. In times like these, the traveler must beware of broken men, and fear them...but he should pity them as well
George R.R. Martin
It's an unfortunate word, 'depression', because the illness has nothing to do with feeling sad, sadness is on the human palette. Depression is a whole other beast. It's when your old personality has left town and been replaced by a block of cement with black tar oozing through your veins and mind. This is when you can't decide whether to get a manicure or jump off a cliff. It's all the same. When I was institutionalised I sat on a chair unable to move for three months, frozen in fear. To take a shower was inconceivable. What made it tolerable was while I was inside, I found my tribe - my people. They understood and unlike those who don't suffer, never get bored of you asking if it will ever go away? They can talk medication all hours, day and night; heaven to my ears.
Ruby Wax
It is a cruel thing to do, to cage such a beautiful, passionate animal as if it was only a dumb beast, but humans do so all too often. They even cage themselves, though their bars are made of society, not of steel.
Amelia Atwater-Rhodes (In the Forests of the Night (Den of Shadows, #1))
A beast is just what you want. A big, dark medieval brute to throw you to the ground, tear the clothes from your body, and have his wicked way with you. I know I’m right. I haven’t forgotten how excited you were in the aftermath of that blast." The nerve of him! How could he tell? She lifted her chin. "Well, I haven't forgotten the sound you made when I first touched your brow. It wasn't even a moan, it was more like . . . like a whimper." He made a dismissive sound. "Oh yes. A plaintive, yearning whimper. Because you want an angel. A sweet, tender virgin to hold you and stroke you and whisper precious promises and make you feel human." "That's absurd," he scoffed. "You're just begging to be taught a hard, fast lesson in what it means to please a man." "You're just longing to put your head in my lap and feel my fingers in your hair. He backed her up against a rock. "You need a good ravaging." "You," she breathed, "need a hug." They stared at each other for long, tense moments. At first, looking each other in the eye. Then looking each other in the lips. "You know what I think?" he said, coming closer. So close she could feel his breath wash warm against her cheek. "I think we’re having one of those vexing arguments again." "The kind where both sides are right?" "Hell, yes." And this time, when they kissed, they both made that sound. That deep, moaning, yearning, whimpering sound. That sound that said yes. And at last. And you are exactly what I need.
Tessa Dare (A Night to Surrender (Spindle Cove, #1))
Fairy tales are about trouble, about getting into and out of it, and trouble seems to be a necessary stage on the route to becoming. All the magic and glass mountains and pearls the size of houses and princesses beautiful as the day and talking birds and part-time serpents are distractions from the core of most of the stories, the struggle to survive against adversaries, to find your place in the world, and to come into your own. Fairy tales are almost always the stories of the powerless, of youngest sons, abandoned children, orphans, of humans transformed into birds and beasts or otherwise enchanted away from their own lives and selves. Even princesses are chattels to be disowned by fathers, punished by step-mothers, or claimed by princes, though they often assert themselves in between and are rarely as passive as the cartoon versions. Fairy tales are children's stories not in wh they were made for but in their focus on the early stages of life, when others have power over you and you have power over no one. In them, power is rarely the right tool for survival anyway. Rather the powerless thrive on alliances, often in the form of reciprocated acts of kindness -- from beehives that were not raided, birds that were not killed but set free or fed, old women who were saluted with respect. Kindness sewn among the meek is harvested in crisis... In Hans Christian Andersen's retelling of the old Nordic tale that begins with a stepmother, "The Wild Swans," the banished sister can only disenchant her eleven brothers -- who are swans all day look but turn human at night -- by gathering stinging nettles barehanded from churchyard graves, making them into flax, spinning them and knitting eleven long-sleeved shirts while remaining silent the whole time. If she speaks, they'll remain birds forever. In her silence, she cannot protest the crimes she accused of and nearly burned as a witch. Hauled off to a pyre as she knits the last of the shirts, she is rescued by the swans, who fly in at the last moment. As they swoop down, she throws the nettle shirts over them so that they turn into men again, all but the youngest brother, whose shirt is missing a sleeve so that he's left with one arm and one wing, eternally a swan-man. Why shirts made of graveyard nettles by bleeding fingers and silence should disenchant men turned into birds by their step-mother is a question the story doesn't need to answer. It just needs to give us compelling images of exile, loneliness, affection, and metamorphosis -- and of a heroine who nearly dies of being unable to tell her own story.
Rebecca Solnit (The Faraway Nearby)
Stand down, Matthew,” Philippe growled. The sound was as leonine as the rest of him. The de Clermont family was a menagerie of formidable beasts. In Matthew’s presence I was always reminded of wolves. With Ysabeau it was falcons. Gallowglass had made me think of a bear. Philippe was akin to yet another deadly predator.
Deborah Harkness (Shadow of Night (All Souls Trilogy, #2))
You could expect many things of God at night when the campfire burned before the tents. You could look through and beyond the veils of scarlet and see shadows of the world as God first made it and hear the voices of the beasts He put there. It was a world as old as Time, but as new as Creation's hour had left it. In a sense it was formless. When the low stars shone over it and the moon clothed it in silver fog, it was the way the firmament must have been when the waters had gone and the night of the Fifth Day had fallen on creatures still bewildered by the wonder of their being. It was an empty world because no man had yet joined sticks to make a house or scratched the earth to make a road or embedded the transient symbols of his artifice in the clean horizon. But it was not a sterile world. It held the genesis of life and lay deep and anticipant under the sky.
Beryl Markham (West with the Night)
In trials of ir'n and silver fain “The dead will rise and walk again “The blesséd few that touch the light “Will aid the war against the night. “But one by one they all will die “Without a cause to rule them by “As Darkness spreads across the land “He'll wield the oceans in his hand. “Five warriors will oppose his reign “And overthrow the Shadow Thane “They come from sides both dark and light “The realm the mortals call “twilight.” “A magus crowned with boughs of fire “Will rise like Phoenix from his pyre “A beast of shadows touched with sight “Will claim a Dark One as her knight “The next, a prophet doomed to fail “Will find her powers to avail “The final: one mere mortal man “Who bears the mark upon his hand “The circle closes round these few “Made sacred by the bonds they hew “But if one fails then so shall all “Bring death to those of Evenfall.
Nenia Campbell (Black Beast (Shadow Thane, #1))
One day, a young boy went up to his grandfather, who was an old Cherokee chief. ‘Edudi?’ the boy asked. ‘Why are you so sad?’ The old chief bit his lip and rubbed his belly as if his stomach pained him unmercifully. ‘There is a terrible fight inside me, Uhgeeleesee’, the chief said sternly. ‘One that will not let me sleep of give me peace’. ‘A fight Grandfather? I don’t understand. What kind of fight is inside you?’ The old chief knelt in front of the boy to explain. ‘Deep inside my heart, I have two wolves. Each strong enough to devour the other, they are locked in constant war. One is evil through and through. He is revenge, sorrow, regret, rage, greed, arrogance, stupidity, superiority, envy, guilt, lies, ego, false pride, inferiority, self-doubt, suspicion and resentment. The other wolf is everything kind. He is made of peace, blissful tranquillity, wisdom, love and joy, hope and humility, compassion, benevolence, generosity, truth, faith and empathy. They circle each other inside my heart and they fight one another at all times. Day and night. There is no letup. Not even while I slumber’. The boy’s yes widened as he sucked his breath in sharply. ‘How horrible for you’. His grandfather shook his head at these words and tapped the boy’s chest right where his own heart was located. ‘It’s not just horrible for me. This same fight is also going on inside you and every single person who walks this earth with us’. Those words terrified the little boy. ‘So tell me Grandfather, which of the wolves will win this fight?’ The old chief smiled at his grandson and he cupped his young cheek before he answered with one simple truth. ‘Always the one we feed’. Be careful what you feed, child. For the beast will follow you home and live with you until you either make a bed for it to stay, or find the temerity to drive it out.
Sherrilyn Kenyon (Time Untime (Dark-Hunter, #21))
My name, among our people, means ‘slow arrow.’ It comes from a story in which the god Fen’Harel was asked by a village to kill a great beast. He came to the beast at dawn, and saw its strength, and knew it would slay him if he fought it. So instead, he shot an arrow up into the sky. The villagers asked Fen’Harel how he would save them, and he said to them, ‘When did I say that I would save you?’ And he left, and the great beast came into the village that night and killed the warriors, and the women, and the elders. It came to the children and opened its great maw, but then the arrow that Fen’Harel had loosed fell from the sky into the great beast’s mouth, and killed it. The children of the village wept for their parents and elders, but still they made an offering to Fen’Harel of thanks, for he had done what the villagers had asked. He had killed the beast, with his cunning, and a slow arrow that the beast never noticed.
Patrick Weekes (The Masked Empire (Dragon Age, #4))
It’s a battle, really, between me and the pine needles, to see which one of us moves first. But I’m too tired to lose.
Tochi Onyebuchi (Beasts Made of Night (Beasts Made of Night, #1))
The Beast turned back to me. I could look at him fairly steadily this time. After a moment he said harshly: “I am very ugly, am I not?” “You are certainly, uh, very hairy,” I said. “You are being polite,” he said. “Well, yes,” I conceded. “But then you called me beautiful, last night.” He made a noise somewhere between a roar and a bark, and after an anxious minute, I decided it was probably a laugh. “You do not believe me then?” he inquired. “Well’—no,” I said, hesitantly, wondering if this might anger him. “Any number of mirrors have told me otherwise.” “You will find no mirrors here,” he said, “for I cannot bear them: nor any quiet water in ponds. And since I am the only one who sees you, why are you not then beautiful?
Robin McKinley (Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast)
Deep inside your heart there are two wolves. Each strong enough to devour the other, they are in constant war. One is evil through and through. He is revenge, rage, greed, arrogance, stupidity, superiority, envy, guilt, lies, ego, false-pride, inferiority, self-doubt, suspicion, and resentment. The other wolf is everything kind. He is made of peace, blissful tranquility, wisdom, love and joy, hope and humility, compassion, benevolence, generosity, truth, faith, and empathy. They circle each other inside your heart and they fight one another at all times. Day and night. There is no letup. Not even while you sleep. Be careful which wolf you feed. For that beast will follow you home and live with you until you either make a bed for it to stay, or find the temerity to drive it out.
Sherrilyn Kenyon (Time Untime (Dark-Hunter, #21))
Occasionally, she drank a second glass of wine in the evenings, which made her feel rather giddy and amused, and which one night led to her poking the Beast with one bare toe when she thought he wasn’t looking up from his book fast enough. (A week ago, the notion of touching the Beast voluntarily would have made her tremble, but there was something deeply unthreatening about him when he was reading. He had to fold himself into the chair for one thing. For another, he was desperately near-sighted and had to hold the book a few inches past the end of his muzzle when reading. Apparently House could not provide adequate reading glasses.)
T. Kingfisher (Bryony and Roses)
Given the choice between protecting the innocent without Mortain’s grace or risking eternal damnation, I will protect others every time. My own true nature has nothing gentle or restrained about it. I am darkness made flesh, but it is the darkness of mystery, the endless night sky, and the deep caverns of the earth. It is the darkness that can love a man like Beast. The darkness that will protect those I love with my last breath.
Robin LaFevers (Courting Darkness (Courting Darkness Duology, #1))
In the course of my life I have had pre-pubescent ballerinas; emaciated duchesses, dolorous and forever tired, melomaniac and morphine-sodden; bankers' wives with eyes hollower than those of suburban streetwalkers; music-hall chorus girls who tip creosote into their Roederer when getting drunk... I have even had the awkward androgynes, the unsexed dishes of the day of the *tables d'hote* of Montmartre. Like any vulgar follower of fashion, like any member of the herd, I have made love to bony and improbably slender little girls, frightened and macabre, spiced with carbolic and peppered with chlorotic make-up. Like an imbecile, I have believed in the mouths of prey and sacrificial victims. Like a simpleton, I have believed in the large lewd eyes of a ragged heap of sickly little creatures: alcoholic and cynical shop girls and whores. The profundity of their eyes and the mystery of their mouths... the jewellers of some and the manicurists of others furnish them with *eaux de toilette*, with soaps and rouges. And Fanny the etheromaniac, rising every morning for a measured dose of cola and coca, does not put ether only on her handkerchief. It is all fakery and self-advertisement - *truquage and battage*, as their vile argot has it. Their phosphorescent rottenness, their emaciated fervour, their Lesbian blight, their shop-sign vices set up to arouse their clients, to excite the perversity of young and old men alike in the sickness of perverse tastes! All of it can sparkle and catch fire only at the hour when the gas is lit in the corridors of the music-halls and the crude nickel-plated decor of the bars. Beneath the cerise three-ply collars of the night-prowlers, as beneath the bulging silks of the cyclist, the whole seductive display of passionate pallor, of knowing depravity, of exhausted and sensual anaemia - all the charm of spicy flowers celebrated in the writings of Paul Bourget and Maurice Barres - is nothing but a role carefully learned and rehearsed a hundred times over. It is a chapter of the MANCHON DE FRANCINE read over and over again, swotted up and acted out by ingenious barnstormers, fully conscious of the squalid salacity of the male of the species, and knowledgeable in the means of starting up the broken-down engines of their customers. To think that I also have loved these maleficent and sick little beasts, these fake Primaveras, these discounted Jocondes, the whole hundred-franc stock-in-trade of Leonardos and Botticellis from the workshops of painters and the drinking-dens of aesthetes, these flowers mounted on a brass thread in Montparnasse and Levallois-Perret! And the odious and tiresome travesty - the corsetted torso slapped on top of heron's legs, painful to behold, the ugly features primed by boulevard boxes, the fake Dresden of Nina Grandiere retouched from a medicine bottle, complaining and spectral at the same time - of Mademoiselle Guilbert and her long black gloves!... Have I now had enough of the horror of this nightmare! How have I been able to tolerate it for so long? The fact is that I was then ignorant even of the nature of my sickness. It was latent in me, like a fire smouldering beneath the ashes. I have cherished it since... perhaps since early childhood, for it must always have been in me, although I did not know it!
Jean Lorrain (Monsieur De Phocas)
Returning from a hunting trip, Orde-Lees, traveling on skis across the rotting surface of the ice, had just about reached camp when an evil, knoblike head burst out of the water just in front of him. He turned and fled, pushing as hard as he could with his ski poles and shouting for Wild to bring his rifle. The animal—a sea leopard—sprang out of the water and came after him, bounding across the ice with the peculiar rocking-horse gait of a seal on land. The beast looked like a small dinosaur, with a long, serpentine neck. After a half-dozen leaps, the sea leopard had almost caught up with Orde-Lees when it unaccountably wheeled and plunged again into the water. By then, Orde-Lees had nearly reached the opposite side of the floe; he was about to cross to safe ice when the sea leopard’s head exploded out of the water directly ahead of him. The animal had tracked his shadow across the ice. It made a savage lunge for Orde-Lees with its mouth open, revealing an enormous array of sawlike teeth. Orde-Lees’ shouts for help rose to screams and he turned and raced away from his attacker. The animal leaped out of the water again in pursuit just as Wild arrived with his rifle. The sea leopard spotted Wild, and turned to attack him. Wild dropped to one knee and fired again and again at the onrushing beast. It was less than 30 feet away when it finally dropped. Two dog teams were required to bring the carcass into camp. It measured 12 feet long, and they estimated its weight at about 1,100 pounds. It was a predatory species of seal, and resembled a leopard only in its spotted coat—and its disposition. When it was butchered, balls of hair 2 and 3 inches in diameter were found in its stomach—the remains of crabeater seals it had eaten. The sea leopard’s jawbone, which measured nearly 9 inches across, was given to Orde-Lees as a souvenir of his encounter. In his diary that night, Worsley observed: “A man on foot in soft, deep snow and unarmed would not have a chance against such an animal as they almost bound along with a rearing, undulating motion at least five miles an hour. They attack without provocation, looking on man as a penguin or seal.
Alfred Lansing (Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage)
They build places like this with ceilings high overhead and walls very far apart to make a person feel small. They build places like this to make it seem like human beings don’t live here. People don’t live here. Things bigger than people do. Out there, you’re angry at the royal family that governs Kos and dictates everyone’s lives. In here, you’re scared of them.
Tochi Onyebuchi (Beasts Made of Night)
It was astonishing how loudly one laughed at tales of gruesome things, of war’s brutality-I with the rest of them. I think at the bottom of it was a sense of the ironical contrast between the normal ways of civilian life and this hark-back to the caveman code. It made all our old philosophy of life monstrously ridiculous. It played the “hat trick” with the gentility of modern manners. Men who had been brought up to Christian virtues, who had prattled their little prayers at mothers’ knees, who had grown up to a love of poetry, painting, music, the gentle arts, over-sensitized to the subtleties of half-tones, delicate scales of emotion, fastidious in their choice of words, in their sense of beauty, found themselves compelled to live and act like ape-men; and it was abominably funny. They laughed at the most frightful episodes, which revealed this contrast between civilized ethics and the old beast law. The more revolting it was the more, sometimes, they shouted with laughter, especially in reminiscence, when the tale was told in the gilded salon of a French chateau, or at a mess-table. It was, I think, the laughter of mortals at the trick which had been played on them by an ironical fate. They had been taught to believe that the whole object of life was to reach out to beauty and love, and that mankind, in its progress to perfection, had killed the beast instinct, cruelty, blood-lust, the primitive, savage law of survival by tooth and claw and club and ax. All poetry, all art, all religion had preached this gospel and this promise. Now that ideal had broken like a china vase dashed to hard ground. The contrast between That and This was devastating. It was, in an enormous world-shaking way, like a highly dignified man in a silk hat, morning coat, creased trousers, spats, and patent boots suddenly slipping on a piece of orange-peel and sitting, all of a heap, with silk hat flying, in a filthy gutter. The war-time humor of the soul roared with mirth at the sight of all that dignity and elegance despoiled. So we laughed merrily, I remember, when a military chaplain (Eton, Christ Church, and Christian service) described how an English sergeant stood round the traverse of a German trench, in a night raid, and as the Germans came his way, thinking to escape, he cleft one skull after another with a steel-studded bludgeon a weapon which he had made with loving craftsmanship on the model of Blunderbore’s club in the pictures of a fairy-tale. So we laughed at the adventures of a young barrister (a brilliant fellow in the Oxford “Union”) whose pleasure it was to creep out o’ nights into No Man’s Land and lie doggo in a shell-hole close to the enemy’s barbed wire, until presently, after an hour’s waiting or two, a German soldier would crawl out to fetch in a corpse. The English barrister lay with his rifle ready. Where there had been one corpse there were two. Each night he made a notch on his rifle three notches one night to check the number of his victims. Then he came back to breakfast in his dugout with a hearty appetite.
Phillip Gibbs
At some indefinite passage in night's sonorous score, it also came to her that she would be safe, that something, perhaps only her linearly fading drunkenness, would protect her. The city was hers, as, made up and sleeked so with the customary words and images (cosmopolitan, culture, cable cars) it had not been before: she had safe-passage tonight to its far blood's branchings, be they capillaries too small for more than peering into, or vessels mashed together in shameless municipal hickeys, out on the skin for all but tourists to see. Nothing of the night's could touch her; nothing did. The repetition of symbols was to be enough, without trauma as well perhaps to attenuate it or even jar it altogether loose from her memory. She was meant to remember. She faced that possibility as she might the toy street from a high balcony, roller-coaster ride, feeding-time among the beasts in a zoo—any death-wish that can be consummated by some minimum gesture. She touched the edge of its voluptuous field, knowing it would be lovely beyond dreams simply to submit to it; that not gravity's pull, laws of ballistics, feral ravening, promised more delight. She tested it, shivering: I am meant to remember. Each clue that comes is supposed to have its own clarity, its fine chances for permanence. But then she wondered if the gemlike "clues" were only some kind of compensation. To make up for her having lost the direct, epileptic Word, the cry that might abolish the night.
Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49)
You must have learned a great deal about siden,’ Tunuva said, wanting to change the subject. ‘Do you know why the Womb of Fire made a beast like the Nameless One, yet also lights the orange tree?’ Canthe sat back. ‘Siden trees – and mages – are the only natural outlet for the magic in the Womb of Fire. We let it wick away enough to stop itself burning too hot,’ she said. ‘The Nameless One was a miscreation. An affront to nature, made when that magic rose too quickly.’ ‘Then we are not like him, we mages.’ ‘No. We take only what siden is offered.
Samantha Shannon (A Day of Fallen Night (The Roots of Chaos #0))
I found a book of fairy tales, and read one called “Beauty and the Beast”. In this story, a beautiful young woman finds herself the forfeit of a bad bargain made by her father. As a result, she has to marry an ugly beast, or dishonour her family forever. Because she is good, she obeys. On her wedding night, she gets into bed with the beast, and feeling pity that everything should be so ugly, gives it a little kiss. Immediately, the beast is transformed into a handsome young prince, and they both live happily ever after. I wondered if the woman married to a pig had read this story. She must have been awfully disappointed if she had.
Jeanette Winterson (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit)
About his madmen Mr. Lecky was no more certain. He knew less than the little to be learned of the causes or even of the results of madness. Yet for practical purposes one can imagine all that is necessary. As long as maniacs walk like men, you must come close to them to penetrate so excellent a disguise. Once close, you have joined the true werewolf. Pick for your companion a manic-depressive, afflicted by any of the various degrees of mania - chronic, acute, delirious. Usually more man than wolf, he will be instructive. His disorder lies in the very process of his thinking, rather than in the content of his thought. He cannot wait a minute for the satisfaction of his fleeting desires or the fulfillment of his innumerable schemes. Nor can he, for two minutes, be certain of his intention or constant in any plan or agreement. Presently you may hear his failing made manifest in the crazy concatenation of his thinking aloud, which psychiatrists call "flight of ideas." Exhausted suddenly by this riotous expense of speech and spirit, he may subside in an apathy dangerous and morose, which you will be well advised not to disturb. Let the man you meet be, instead, a paretic. He has taken a secret departure from your world. He dwells amidst choicest, most dispendious superlatives. In his arm he has the strength to lift ten elephants. He is already two hundred years old. He is more than nine feet high; his chest is of iron, his right leg is silver, his incomparable head is one whole ruby. Husband of a thousand wives, he has begotten on them ten thousand children. Nothing is mean about him; his urine is white wine; his faeces are always soft gold. However, despite his splendor and his extraordinary attainments, he cannot successfully pronounce the words: electricity, Methodist Episcopal, organization, third cavalry brigade. Avoid them. Infuriated by your demonstration of any accomplishment not his, he may suddenly kill you. Now choose for your friend a paranoiac, and beware of the wolf! His back is to the wall, his implacable enemies are crowding on him. He gets no rest. He finds no starting hole to hide him. Ten times oftener than the Apostle, he has been, through the violence of the unswerving malice which pursues him, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils of his own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren, in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness. Now that, face to face with him, you simulate innocence and come within his reach, what pity can you expect? You showed him none; he will certainly not show you any. Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, 0 Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all the perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only Son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. Mr. Lecky's maniacs lay in wait to slash a man's head half off, to perform some erotic atrocity of disembowelment on a woman. Here, they fed thoughtlessly on human flesh; there, wishing to play with him, they plucked the mangled Tybalt from his shroud. The beastly cunning of their approach, the fantastic capriciousness of their intention could not be very well met or provided for. In his makeshift fort everywhere encircled by darkness, Mr. Lecky did not care to meditate further on the subject.
James Gould Cozzens (Castaway)
Sun, moon and stars, by day and night, At God’s commandment give us light; And when we wake, and while we sleep, Their watch, like guardian angels, keep. The bright blue sky above our head, The soft green earth on which we tread, The ocean rolling round the land, Were made by God’s almighty hand. Sweet flowers that hill and dale adorn, Fair fruit trees, fields of grass and corn, The clouds that rise, the showers that fall, The winds that blow - God sent them all. The beasts that graze with downward eye, The birds that perch, and sing, and fly, The fishes swimming in the sea, God’s creatures are as well as we. But us He formed for better things, As servants of the King of kings, With lifted hands and open face, And thankful heart to seek His grace. Montgomery.
Charlotte M. Mason (Elementary Geography: Full Illustrations & Study Guides!)
But here through the dusk comes one who is not glad to be at rest. He is a workman on the ranch, an old man, an immigrant Italian. He takes his hat off to me in all servility, because, forsooth, I am to him a lord of life. I am food to him, and shelter, and existence. He has toiled like a beast all his days, and lived less comfortably than my horses in their deep-strawed stalls. He is labour-crippled. He shambles as he walks. One shoulder is twisted higher than the other. His hands are gnarled claws, repulsive, horrible. As an apparition he is a pretty miserable specimen. His brain is as stupid as his body is ugly. "His brain is so stupid that he does not know he is an apparition," the White Logic chuckles to me. "He is sense-drunk. He is the slave of the dream of life. His brain is filled with superrational sanctions and obsessions. He believes in a transcendent over-world. He has listened to the vagaries of the prophets, who have given to him the sumptuous bubble of Paradise. He feels inarticulate self-affinities, with self-conjured non-realities. He sees penumbral visions of himself titubating fantastically through days and nights of space and stars. Beyond the shadow of any doubt he is convinced that the universe was made for him, and that it is his destiny to live for ever in the immaterial and supersensuous realms he and his kind have builded of the stuff of semblance and deception. "But you, who have opened the books and who share my awful confidence—you know him for what he is, brother to you and the dust, a cosmic joke, a sport of chemistry, a garmented beast that arose out of the ruck of screaming beastliness by virtue and accident of two opposable great toes. He is brother as well to the gorilla and the chimpanzee. He thumps his chest in anger, and roars and quivers with cataleptic ferocity. He knows monstrous, atavistic promptings, and he is composed of all manner of shreds of abysmal and forgotten instincts." "Yet he dreams he is immortal," I argue feebly. "It is vastly wonderful for so stupid a clod to bestride the shoulders of time and ride the eternities." "Pah!" is the retort. "Would you then shut the books and exchange places with this thing that is only an appetite and a desire, a marionette of the belly and the loins?" "To be stupid is to be happy," I contend. "Then your ideal of happiness is a jelly-like organism floating in a tideless, tepid twilight sea, eh?
Jack London (John Barleycorn)
The Lost Girls Nomad girls are Lost Ones too, With leaves at foot and crown; They too seek shelter in the tress, Drink Red and Gold and Brown. Their circlets made of steam and rain, Their lashes powdered ash, They're firelight, they're fox's kill, They're blood and sweat and scratch. Lost Boys fly forever, and crow the rising sun. They play all day in Neverland, their laughter mermaid-spun. But Lost Girls live underground: They steal from hole to hole. They drink the shadows, wear the night, And paint their cheeks with coal. And when the wind turns colder, They split a doe and climb inside. Still-warm sinew wraps their hands, Dead muscle soaks the light. You'll never tell what's girl, what's beast, Once bloody fur's been trussed- So think your happy thoughts, Lost Boy, Wish on your Fairy Dust.
Lauren Bird Horowitz (Shattered Blue (The Light, #1))
Hymn to Mercury : Continued 11. ... Seized with a sudden fancy for fresh meat, He in his sacred crib deposited The hollow lyre, and from the cavern sweet Rushed with great leaps up to the mountain's head, Revolving in his mind some subtle feat Of thievish craft, such as a swindler might Devise in the lone season of dun night. 12. Lo! the great Sun under the ocean's bed has Driven steeds and chariot—the child meanwhile strode O'er the Pierian mountains clothed in shadows, Where the immortal oxen of the God Are pastured in the flowering unmown meadows, And safely stalled in a remote abode.— The archer Argicide, elate and proud, Drove fifty from the herd, lowing aloud. 13. He drove them wandering o'er the sandy way, But, being ever mindful of his craft, Backward and forward drove he them astray, So that the tracks which seemed before, were aft; His sandals then he threw to the ocean spray, And for each foot he wrought a kind of raft Of tamarisk, and tamarisk-like sprigs, And bound them in a lump with withy twigs. 14. And on his feet he tied these sandals light, The trail of whose wide leaves might not betray His track; and then, a self-sufficing wight, Like a man hastening on some distant way, He from Pieria's mountain bent his flight; But an old man perceived the infant pass Down green Onchestus heaped like beds with grass. 15. The old man stood dressing his sunny vine: 'Halloo! old fellow with the crooked shoulder! You grub those stumps? before they will bear wine Methinks even you must grow a little older: Attend, I pray, to this advice of mine, As you would 'scape what might appal a bolder— Seeing, see not—and hearing, hear not—and— If you have understanding—understand.' 16. So saying, Hermes roused the oxen vast; O'er shadowy mountain and resounding dell, And flower-paven plains, great Hermes passed; Till the black night divine, which favouring fell Around his steps, grew gray, and morning fast Wakened the world to work, and from her cell Sea-strewn, the Pallantean Moon sublime Into her watch-tower just began to climb. 17. Now to Alpheus he had driven all The broad-foreheaded oxen of the Sun; They came unwearied to the lofty stall And to the water-troughs which ever run Through the fresh fields—and when with rushgrass tall, Lotus and all sweet herbage, every one Had pastured been, the great God made them move Towards the stall in a collected drove. 18. A mighty pile of wood the God then heaped, And having soon conceived the mystery Of fire, from two smooth laurel branches stripped The bark, and rubbed them in his palms;—on high Suddenly forth the burning vapour leaped And the divine child saw delightedly.— Mercury first found out for human weal Tinder-box, matches, fire-irons, flint and steel. 19. And fine dry logs and roots innumerous He gathered in a delve upon the ground— And kindled them—and instantaneous The strength of the fierce flame was breathed around: And whilst the might of glorious Vulcan thus Wrapped the great pile with glare and roaring sound, Hermes dragged forth two heifers, lowing loud, Close to the fire—such might was in the God. 20. And on the earth upon their backs he threw The panting beasts, and rolled them o'er and o'er, And bored their lives out. Without more ado He cut up fat and flesh, and down before The fire, on spits of wood he placed the two, Toasting their flesh and ribs, and all the gore Pursed in the bowels; and while this was done He stretched their hides over a craggy stone.
Percy Bysshe Shelley (The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley)
It was a sordid scene. Philip leaned over the rail, staring down, and he ceased to hear the music. They danced furiously. They danced round the room, slowly, talking very little, with all their attention given to the dance. The room was hot, and their faces shone with sweat. It seemed to Philip that they had thrown off the guard which people wear on their expression, the homage to convention, and he saw them now as they really were. In that moment of abandon they were strangely animal: some were foxy and some were wolflike; and others had the long, foolish face of sheep. Their skins were sallow from the unhealthy life the led and the poor food they ate. Their features were blunted by mean interests, and their little eyes were shifty and cunning. There was nothing of nobility in their bearing, and you felt that for all of them life was a long succession of petty concerns and sordid thoughts. The air was heavy with the musty smell of humanity. But they danced furiously as though impelled by some strange power within them, and it seemed to Philip that they were driven forward by a rage for enjoyment. They were seeking desperately to escape from a world of horror. The desire for pleasure which Cronshaw said was the only motive of human action urged them blindly on, and the very vehemence of the desire seemed to rob it of all pleasure. The were hurried on by a great wind, helplessly, they knew not why and they knew not whither. Fate seemed to tower above them, and they danced as though everlasting darkness were beneath their feet. Their silence was vaguely alarming. It was as if life terrified them and robbed them of power of speech so that the shriek which was in their hearts died at their throats. Their eyes were haggard and grim; and notwithstanding the beastly lust that disfigured them, and the meanness of their faces, and the cruelty, notwithstanding the stupidness which was the worst of all, the anguish of those fixed eyes made all that crowd terrible and pathetic. Philip loathed them, and yet his heart ached with the infinite pity which filled him. He took his coat from the cloak-room and went out into the bitter coldness of the night.
W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage)
One night, I sat Beauty on my knee. —And I found her bitter. —And I hurt her. I took arms against justice. I fled, entrusting my treasure to you, o witches, o misery, o hate. I snuffed any hint of human hope from my consciousness. I made the muffled leap of a wild beast onto any hint of joy, to strangle it. Dying, I called out to my executioners so I could bite the butts of their rifles. I called plagues to suffocate me with sand, blood. Misfortune was my god. I wallowed in the mud. I withered in criminal air. And I even tricked madness more than once. And spring gave me an idiot’s unbearable laughter. Just now, having nearly reached death’s door, I even considered seeking the key to the old feast, through which, perhaps, I might regain my appetite. [...] “A hyena you’ll remain, etc.… ” cries the demon that crowns me with merry poppies. “Make for death with every appetite intact, with your egotism, and every capital sin.” Ah. It seems I have too many already: —But, dear Satan, I beg you not to look at me that way, and while you await a few belated cowardices—you who so appreciate a writer’s inability to describe or inform—I’ll tear a few terrible leaves from my book of the damned.
Arthur Rimbaud (A Season in Hell & Illuminations)
The rock came loose, but Jake’s satisfied grunt turned into a howl of outraged pain as a set of huge teeth in the next stall clamped into Jake’s ample rear end. “You vicious bag of bones,” he shouted, jumping to his feet and throwing himself half over the rail in an attempt to land a punch on Attila’s body. As if the horse anticipated retribution, he sidled to the edge of his stall and regarded Jake from the corner of his eye with an expression that looked to Jake like complacent satisfaction. “I’ll get you for that,” Jake promised, and he started to shake his fist when he realized how absurd it was to threaten a dumb beast. Rubbing his offended backside, he turned to Mayhem and carefully put his own rump against the outside wall of the barn. He checked the hoof to make certain it was clean, but the moment his fingers touched the place where the rock had been lodged the chestnut jerked in pain. “Bruised you, did it?” Jake said sympathetically. “It’s not surprisin’, considering the size and shape of the rock. But you never gave a sign yesterday that you were hurtin’,” he continued. Raising his voice and infusing it with a wealth of exaggerated admiration, the patted the chestnut’s flank and glanced disdainfully at Attila while he spoke to Mayhem. “That’s because you’re a true aristocrat and a fine, brave animal-not a miserable, sneaky mule who’s not fit to be your stallmate!” If Attila cared one way or another for Jake’s opinion, he was disappointingly careful not to show it, which only made Jake’s mood more stormy when he stomped into the cottage. Ian was sitting at the table, a cup of steaming coffee cradled between his palms. “Good morning,” he said to Jake, studying the older man’s thunderous frown. “Mebbe you think so, but I can’t see it. Course, I’ve spent the night freezin’ out there, bedded down next to a horse that wants to make a meal of me, and who broke his fast with a bit of my arse already this mornin’. And,” he finished irately as he poured coffee from the tin pot into an earthenware mug and cast a quelling look at his amused friend, “your horse is lame!” Flinging himself into the chair beside Ian, he gulped down the scalding coffee without thinking what he was doing; his eyes bulged, and sweat popped out on his forehead. Ian’s grin faded. “He’s what?” “Picked up a rock, and he’s favoring his left foreleg.” Ian’s chair legs scraped against the wooden floor as he shoved his chair back and started to go to the barn. “There’s no need. It’s just a bruise.
Judith McNaught (Almost Heaven (Sequels, #3))
Without thinking it through, I whirled and dashed a few steps down the hall to my bedroom. I barely made it through the door when he was on me. His arms wrapped around me from behind, one of his hands cupping my chin to tilt my head back and to the side. Conner’s lips slid up my neck to my ear. “You shouldn’t have done that, Donna. Never run from a vampire. Like any predator, if you run from one of us, we will chase you.” His voice was dark. My heart started pounding as his other hand moved up my torso to cup my breast through my bra. I gasped when I felt the sharp scrape of his fangs on my neck. Since the first night we made love, he was careful not to get his teeth near my skin. I appreciated his restraint, but I had woken the beast within tonight, and he seemed hungry. While he kissed my neck and scraped the skin with his teeth, Conner’s hands drifted down to my stomach and started pushing my jeans down. I helped him until I was standing with my back to him, clad only in my underwear. My bra loosened and the straps fell down my arms. I let it fall to the floor before I turned to face him. When I saw his face, my knees weakened. His eyes were literally two burning orbs of blue and his fangs had lengthened so that they dented his bottom lip.
C.C. Wood (Bite Me (Bitten, #1))
Well, forgive the fuck out of me for being shocked senseless when I realized he wasn’t dead. Why didn’t you tell me he was the beast, Ryodan? Why did we have to kill him? I know it’s not because he can’t control himself when he’s the beast. He controlled himself last night when he rescued me from the Book. He can change at will, can’t he? What happened in the Silvers? Does the place have some kind of effect on you, make you uncontrollable?” I almost slapped myself in the forehead. Barrons had told me that the reason he tattooed himself with black and red protection runes was because using dark magic called a price due, unless you took measures to protect yourself against the backlash. Did using IYD require the blackest kind of magic to make it work? Would it grant his demand to magically transport him to me no matter where I was but devolve him into the darkest, most savage version of himself as the price? “It was because of how he got there, wasn’t it?” I said. “The spell you two worked sent him to me like was it was supposed to, but the cost was that it turned him into the lowest common denominator of himself. An insane killing machine. Which he figured was all right, because if I was dying, I’d probably need a killing machine around. A champion to show up and decimate all my enemies. That was it, wasn’t it?” Ryodan had gone completely still. Not a muscle twitched. I wasn’t sure he was breathing. “He knew what would happen if I pressed IYD, and he made plans with you to handle it.” That was Barrons, always thinking, always managing risks where I was concerned. “He tattooed me so he would sense his mark on me and not kill me. And you were supposed to track him—that’s why you both wear those cuffs, so you can find each other—and kill him so he’d come back as the man form of himself, and I’d never be any wiser. I’d get rescues and have no clue it was Barrons who’d done it or that he sometimes turns into a beast. But you screwed up. And that’s what he was mad at you about this morning on the phone. It was your failure to kill him that let the cat out of the bag.” A tiny muscle twitched in his jaw. He was pissed. I was definitely right. “He can always circumvent the price of black magic,” I marveled. “When you kill him, he comes back exactly the same as before, doesn’t he? He could tattoo his whole body with protection runes and, when he ran out of skin, kill himself so he could come back with a clean slate, to start all over.” That was why his tattoos weren’t always the same. “Talk about your ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card! And if you hadn’t botched the plan, I would never have known. It’s your fault I know, Ryodan. I think that means it’s not me you should kill, it’s yourself. Oh, gee, wait,” I said sarcastically, “that wouldn’t work, would it?
Karen Marie Moning (Shadowfever (Fever, #5))
If men had wanted to stay bad forever, they could have, agreed? Agreed. Did we stay out in the fields with the beasts? No. In the water with the barracuda? No. Somewhere we let go of the hot gorilla’s paw. Somewhere we turned in our carnivore’s teeth and started chewing blades of grass. We have been working mulch as much as blood, into our philosophy, for quite a few lifetimes. Since then we measure ourselves up the scale from apes, but not half so high as angels. It was a nice new idea and we were afraid we'd lose it, so we put it on paper and built buildings like this one around it. And we been going in and out of these buildings chewing it over, that one new sweet blade of grass, trying to figure how it all started, when we made the move, when we decided to be different. I suppose one night hundreds of thousands of years ago in a cave by a night fire when one of those shaggy men wakened to gaze over the banked coals at his woman, his children, and thought of their being cold, dead, gone forever. Then he must have wept. And he put out his hand in the night to the woman who must die some day and to the children who must follow her. And for a little bit next morning, he treated them somewhat better, for he saw that they, like himself, had the seed of night in them. He felt that seed like slime in his pulse, splitting, making more against the day they would multiply his body into darkness. So that man, the first one, knew what we know now: our hour is short, eternity is long. With this knowledge came pity and mercy, so we spared others for the later, more intricate, more mysterious benefits of love. So, In sum, what are we? We are the creatures that know and know too much.
Ray Bradbury (Something Wicked This Way Comes)
you want a romance with my blackness. and how it holds you. how it illuminates your skin. makes you break your breath. against itself. and how is this possible. when your world has never made you breath. not once. ever. but my blackness makes you think about yourself. in a way you have never. and you are open. a question. alive. and now hungry. my blackness is your first love. you are convinced it is. showing you what your eyes could ‘never’ see before. a ‘world’ bigger. brighter. dark. dusky and wild. unashamed of itself. rebellious. and it’s cosmic. your relationship with how the night rolls off me into your hands. you and my blackness are soul mates. you met so you could learn. more. expand. because you always knew you were not like the others. who made sure they ate one white thing every day. no. you were always uncomfortable with yourself. you wear my culture around your neck. bask in and praise its jewels. pick it up on days when you want attention. put it down when it starts to stain. (you don’t want to be disrespectful and take more than you should. you just want to be a part of something so beautiful.) my blackness came to save you. came to help you escape. the clutches of racism. of having that beast anywhere inside you. around you. next to you. your comfort. intimacy. proximity. with my blackness confirms. and affirms. your nonracism. your lack of hate. it is this heady trip. this painful awesome tryst. that brings you. flushed and moon eyed. to my door with thank yous. and i love yous. you have taught me to be a better person. you have changed my life. but this was never a relationship. i have no idea who you are. and i laugh incredulous and insulted. at the notion that my blackness could ever be your first love. that my blackness is your freedom. that my blackness is yours. — fetish
Nayyirah Waheed (Nejma)
We killed them all when we came here. The people came and burned their land The forests where they used to feed We burned the trees that gave them shade And burned to bush, to scrub, to heath We made it easier to hunt. We changed the land, and they were gone. Today our beasts and dreams are small As species fall to time and us But back before the black folk came Before the white folk’s fleet arrived Before we built our cities here Before the casual genocide, This was the land where nightmares loped And hopped and ran and crawled and slid. And then we did the things we did, And thus we died the things we died. We have not seen Diprotodon A wombat bigger than a room Or run from Dromornithidae Gigantic demon ducks of doom All motor legs and ripping beaks A flock of geese from hell’s dark maw We’ve lost carnivorous kangaroo A bouncy furrier T Rex And Thylacoleo Carnifex the rat-king-devil-lion-thing the dropbear fantasy made flesh. Quinkana, the land crocodile Five metres long and fast as fright Wonambi, the enormous snake Who waited by the water-holes and took the ones who came to drink who were not watchful, clever, bright. Our Thylacines were tiger-wolves until we drove them off the map Then Megalania: seven meters of venomous enormous lizard... and more, and more. The ones whose bones we’ve never seen. The megafauna haunt our dreams. This was their land before mankind Just fifty thousand years ago. Time is a beast that eats and eats gives nothing back but ash and bones And one day someone else will come to excavate a heap of stones And wonder, What were people like? Their teeth weren’t sharp. Their feet were slow. They walked Australia long ago before Time took them into tales We’re transients. The land remains. Until its outlines wash away. While night falls down like dropbears don’t to swallow up Australia Day.
Neil Gaiman
While she was enjoying this heady control, she decided to test a few minor spells on the werewolf—because it would be good practice, and by good practice she meant amusing for her. She caused a root to hike up directly in front of his feet. When he tripped, she folded her lips in, biting back a laugh. Magick . . . good. For the next hour, whenever his boots came untied just in time for the laces to collect bullet ants, or limbs whacked him across the face, or he scarcely dodged bird and monkey droppings, he always regarded her with narrow-eyed suspicion. She would casually glance over at him with a “Whaaa . . . ?” expression. But he hadn’t said anything, and as for her, well, she could do this all day— Out of the corner of her eye she spied movement. What looked like a vine suddenly uncoiled from the ground and came flying toward her. With a shriek, she attempted a pulse of energy to ward it off. But MacRieve had already snatched the snake; her magick caught him and sent him flying, his body crashing through the brush, felling the trees in his way. After landing one hundred feet away and angrily tossing the snake, he shot to his feet, charging back to her, eyes ice blue with fury. “Goddamn it, witch, no’ again!” “It was an accident!” the witch cried, and she might have been truthful, but Bowe was beyond caring. “All morning you’ve toyed with me, have you no’?” He stalked closer to her, letting her see a good glimpse of the beast within. Yet after swallowing loudly and retreating several steps, she seemed to force herself to stand her ground. He was dumbfounded that she wasn’t cowering. Battle hardened vampires recoiled in the face of a Lykae’s werewolf form, but she’d planted her boots, and she hadn’t budged. She even raised her chin. Cade had started hurrying down the embankment as if to protect her. The very idea made Bowe draw his lips back from his fangs. No doubt thinking his renewed fury was for her, she pulled magick into her hands.
Kresley Cole (Wicked Deeds on a Winter's Night (Immortals After Dark, #3))
When I looked at him, something stirred inside me. It felt like recognition sifted through dreams; like the moment before waking--when sleep blurred the true world, when beasts with sharp teeth and beautiful, winged things flew along the edges of your mind. Amar met my gaze and his eyes were raw. Burning. “Well?” he asked. There was no rebuke in his voice, only curiosity. “I see no secrets in your gaze,” I said. I see only night and smoke, dreams and glass, embers and wings. And I would not have you any other way. “You have made your request, what about mine?” “I am not the one withholding secrets.” He smiled and I stared at him for a moment. When he smiled, his severe face softened into something beautiful. I wanted to see it again. “On the contrary, I am the one who has no choice. You, on the other hand, do.” “What do you want from me?” He reached out, fingers sliding across the length of my hair. “Some strands of your hair.” Some of the courtiers in Bharata used to tie their wives’ hair around their wrists when they traveled. It was a sign of love and faith. To remain connected to the person you love, even if it was just by a circlet of hair. “May I?” asked Amar. I nodded. With a small knife, Amar deftly clipped a number of strands. Quickly, he twirled them into a bracelet and slipped it onto his wrist. There was another bracelet on his hand that I had not noticed until now. A simple strap of black leather tied into an elegant knot. “Thank you for this,” he said, pulling his sleeve over the other strap. “It’s nothing,” I said, trying for lightness. “And yet I would trade everything for it,” he said. There was no tease in his voice. Nothing but a strange straightforwardness, like he’d never said anything more honest in his entire life. “Then you must be relieved I gave it willingly.” “Astounded,” he murmured, still tracing the circlet. He looked at me and something light fluttered in my stomach. “Not relieved. Relief is when you want something to stop.
Roshani Chokshi (The Star-Touched Queen (The Star-Touched Queen, #1))
You make springs gush forth in the valleys;         they flow between the hills;     11 they give drink to every beast of the field;         the wild donkeys quench their thirst.     12 Beside them the birds of the heavens dwell;         they sing among the branches.     13 From your lofty abode you water the mountains;         the earth is satisfied with the fruit of your work.     14 You cause the grass to grow for the livestock         and plants for man to cultivate,     that he may bring forth food from the earth         15 and wine to gladden the heart of man,     oil to make his face shine         and bread to strengthen man's heart.     16 The trees of the LORD are watered abundantly,         the cedars of Lebanon that he planted.     17 In them the birds build their nests;         the stork has her home in the fir trees.     18 The high mountains are for the wild goats;         the rocks are a refuge for the rock badgers.     19 He made the moon to mark the seasons; [1]         the sun knows its time for setting.     20 You make darkness, and it is night,         when all the beasts of the forest creep about.     21 The young lions roar for their prey,         seeking their food from God.     22 When the sun rises, they steal away         and lie down in their dens.     23 Man goes out to his work         and to his labor until the evening.     24 O LORD, how manifold are your works!         In wisdom have you made them all;         the earth is full of your creatures.     25 Here is the sea, great and wide,         which teems with creatures innumerable,         living things both small and great.     26 There go the ships,         and Leviathan, which you formed to play in it. [2]     27 These all look to you,         to give them their food in due season.     28 When you give it to them, they gather it up;         when you open your hand, they are filled with good things.     29 When you hide your face, they are dismayed;         when you take away their breath, they die         and return to their dust.     30 When you send forth your Spirit, [3] they are created,         and you renew the face of the ground.     31 May the glory of the LORD endure forever;
Anonymous (ESV Daily Reading Bible: Through the Bible in 365 Days, based on the popular M'Cheyne Bible Reading Plan: Through the Bible in 365 Days, based on the popular M'Cheyne Bible Reading Plan)
Your beast's little trick didn't work on me,' she said with quiet steel. 'Apparently, an iron will is all it takes to keep a glamour from digging in. So I had to watch as Father and Elain went from sobbing hysterics into nothing. I had to listen to them talk about how lucky it was for you to be taken to some made-up aunt's house, how some winter wind had shattered our door. And I thought I'd gone mad- but every time I did, I would look at that painted part of the table, then at the claw marks farther down, and know it wasn't in my head.' I'd never heard of a glamour not working. But Nesta's mind was so entirely her own; she had put up such strong walls- of steel and iron and ash wood- that even a High Lord's magic couldn't pierce them. 'Elain said- said you went to visit me, though. That you tried.' Nesta snorted, her face grave and full of that long-simmering anger that she could never master. 'He stole you away into the night, claiming some nonsense about the Treaty. And then everything went on as if it had never happened. It wasn't right. None of it was right.' My hands slackened at my sides. 'You went after me,' I said. 'You went after me- to Prythian.' 'I got to the wall. I couldn't find a way through.' I raised a shaking hand to my throat. 'You trekked two days there and two days back- through the winter woods?' She shrugged, looking at the sliver she'd pried from the table. 'I hired that mercenary from town to bring me a week after you were taken. With the money from your pelt. She was the only one who seemed like she would believe me.' 'You did that- for me?' Nesta's eyes- my eyes, our mother's eyes- met mine. 'It wasn't right,' she said again. Tamlin had been wrong when we'd discussed whether my father would have ever come after me- he didn't possess the courage, the anger. If anything, he would have hired someone to do it for him. But Nesta had gone with that mercenary. My hateful, cold sister had been willing to brave Prythian to rescue me. ... I looked at my sister, really looked at her, at this woman who couldn't stomach the sycophants who now surrounded her, who had never spent a day in the forest but had gone into wolf territory... Who had shrouded the loss of our mother, then our downfall, in icy rage and bitterness, because the anger had been a lifeline, the cruelty a release. But she had cared- beneath it, she had cared, and perhaps loved more fiercely that I could comprehend, more deeply and loyally.
Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Thorns and Roses (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #1))
cotton wool, decided that it was not good to eat, ran all round the table, sat up and put his fur in order, scratched himself, and jumped on the small boy’s shoulder. “Don’t be frightened, Teddy,” said his father. “That’s his way of making friends.” “Ouch! He’s tickling under my chin,” said Teddy. Rikki-tikki looked down between the boy’s collar and neck, snuffed at his ear, and climbed down to the floor, where he sat rubbing his nose. “Good gracious,” said Teddy’s mother, “and that’s a wild creature! I suppose he’s so tame because we’ve been kind to him.” “All mongooses are like that,” said her husband. “If Teddy doesn’t pick him up by the tail, or try to put him in a cage, he’ll run in and out of the house all day long. Let’s give him something to eat.” They gave him a little piece of raw meat. Rikki-tikki liked it immensely, and when it was finished he went out into the veranda and sat in the sunshine and fluffed up his fur to make it dry to the roots. Then he felt better. “There are more things to find out about in this house,” he said to himself, “than all my family could find out in all their lives. I shall certainly stay and find out.” He spent all that day roaming over the house. He nearly drowned himself in the bathtubs, put his nose into the ink on a writing table, and burned it on the end of the big man’s cigar, for he climbed up in the big man’s lap to see how writing was done. At nightfall he ran into Teddy’s nursery to watch how kerosene lamps were lighted, and when Teddy went to bed Rikki-tikki climbed up too. But he was a restless companion, because he had to get up and attend to every noise all through the night, and find out what made it. Teddy’s mother and father came in, the last thing, to look at their boy, and Rikki-tikki was awake on the pillow. “I don’t like that,” said Teddy’s mother. “He may bite the child.” “He’ll do no such thing,” said the father. “Teddy’s safer with that little beast than if he had a bloodhound to watch him. If a snake came into the nursery now–” But Teddy’s mother wouldn’t think of anything so awful. · · · Early in the morning Rikki-tikki came to early breakfast in the veranda riding on Teddy’s shoulder, and they gave him banana and some boiled egg. He sat on all their laps one after the other, because every well-brought-up mongoose always hopes to be a house mongoose some day and have rooms to run about in; and Rikki-tikki’s mother (she used to live in the general’s house at Segowlee) had carefully told Rikki what to do if ever he came across white men.
Rudyard Kipling (Rikki-Tikki-Tavi)
She stayed with buses after that, getting off only now and then to walk so she'd keep awake. What fragments of dreams came had to do with the post horn. Later, possibly, she would have trouble sorting the night into real and dreamed. At some indefinite passage in night's sonorous score, it also came to her that she would be safe, that something, perhaps only her linearly fading drunkenness, would protect her. The city was hers, as, made up and sleeked so with the customary words and images (cosmopolitan, culture, cable cars) it had not been before: she had safe-passage tonight to its far blood's branchings, be they capillaries too small for more than peering into, or vessels mashed together in shameless municipal hickeys, out on the skin for all but tourists to see. Nothing of the night's could touch her; nothing did. The repetition of symbols was to be enough, without trauma as well perhaps to attenuate it or even jar it altogether loose from her memory. She was meant to remember. She faced that possibility as she might the toy street from a high balcony, roller-coaster ride, feeding-time among the beasts in a zoo-any death-wish that can be consummated by some minimum gesture. She touched the edge of its voluptuous field, knowing it would be lovely beyond dreams simply to submit to it; that not gravity's pull, laws of ballistics, feral ravening, promised more delight. She tested it, shivering: I am meant to remember. Each clue that comes is supposed to have its own clarity, its fine chances for permanence. But then she wondered if the gemlike "clues" were only some kind of compensation. To make up for her having lost the direct, epileptic Word, the cry that might abolish the night. In Golden Gate Park she came on a circle of children in their nightclothes, who told her they were dreaming the gathering. But that the dream was really no different from being awake, because in the mornings when they got up they felt tired, as if they'd been up most of the night. When their mothers thought they were out playing they were really curled in cupboards of neighbors' houses, in platforms up in trees, in secretly-hollowed nests inside hedges, sleeping, making up for these hours. The night was empty of all terror for them, they had inside their circle an imaginary fire, and needed nothing but their own unpenetrated sense of community. They knew about the post horn, but nothing of the chalked game Oedipa had seen on the sidewalk. You used only one image and it was a jump-rope game, a little girl explained: you stepped alternately in the loop, the bell, and the mute, while your girlfriend sang: Tristoe, Tristoe, one, two, three, Turning taxi from across the sea… "Thurn and Taxis, you mean?" They'd never heard it that way. Went on warming their hands at an invisible fire. Oedipa, to retaliate, stopped believing in them.
Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49)
Fuck, she was even hotter when she was furious. I seriously wouldn't have minded her taking that anger out on my body all night long. I'd be more than happy to angry fuck her until her body bent and bowed and finally gave in to the power play between us. I'd force her beneath me physically as well as with my power and maybe she'd find she liked it there just fine. Or maybe she'd stab me to death and cut my cock off for good measure because the look she was aiming my way said that was a whole lot more likely than me getting to spend the night ruining her. But it was a damn nice fantasy to indulge in for a few moments. ... She gave me a look of utter contempt and it made my cock throb as her nearness just compounded the desire I was already feeling for her and made me get all kinds of insane ideas about what I'd like to do with this little princess if I got her to myself for long enough. She made no attempt to cover herself, no sign of shame in her frosty features as she stalked forward to claim her key, a sneer touching those edible lips of hers. Her jaw was tight with rage which she was doing nothing to hide and as she reached out to snatch the key from my hand, I couldn't help but ache to bring her closer, draw her nearer, see just how far she'd go in this denial of my power over her. Her fingers curled around the brass key, but I didn't release it, instead using my hold on it to tug her a step closer so that only a breath of space divided our bodies. I looked down at her from my imposing height, dominating her space with the bulk of my body and making sure she took in every last inch of height I had over her. “Of course, if you’d rather just come on up to my room, I can give you a real welcome to the House of Fire,” I suggested my gaze dropping down to her body, the noticeable bulge in my pants making it clear enough how much I meant that offer. I probably shouldn't have been making it at all, but the beast in me couldn't help myself. Dragons saw something they wanted and they took it. And I hadn't seen something I wanted as much as this girl in as long as I could remember. Our gazes collided and the heat there was almost strong enough to burn, the tension between us crackling so loudly I was surprised the whole room couldn't hear it. But then her gaze shuttered and her lips pursed, her eyes dropping down to take me in, my skin buzzing everywhere they landed as I could feel the want in her while she assessed me. But as those deep green eyes met mine again and I gave her a knowing smirk, I couldn't tell what she was thinking. I didn't know if she was going to bow to this heat between us or just stoke the flames, and the fact that I didn't know had my heart thumping in anticipation deep in my chest. She shifted an inch closer to me, tilting her mouth towards my ear and making my flesh spark with the need to take her, own her, destroy her in all the best ways. But just as my cock began to get overexcited at the prospect of all the ways I could make her scream for me given enough time, she spoke and it wasn't in the sultry purr I'd been expecting, her voice coming out loud enough for everyone to hear instead. “I wouldn’t come near you even if someone held a knife to my heart and told me that the world would end if I didn’t,” she snarled, snatching the key out of my hand as my surprise at her words made me forget to keep my grip tight enough to keep it. “So why don’t you take a long, hard look while you can. Because I can promise you, you won’t be seeing this again.”(Darius POV)
Caroline Peckham (The Awakening as Told by the Boys (Zodiac Academy, #1.5))
CHAPTER II—THE LOWEST DEPTHS There disinterestedness vanishes. The demon is vaguely outlined; each one is for himself. The I in the eyes howls, seeks, fumbles, and gnaws. The social Ugolino is in this gulf. The wild spectres who roam in this grave, almost beasts, almost phantoms, are not occupied with universal progress; they are ignorant both of the idea and of the word; they take no thought for anything but the satisfaction of their individual desires. They are almost unconscious, and there exists within them a sort of terrible obliteration. They have two mothers, both step-mothers, ignorance and misery. They have a guide, necessity; and for all forms of satisfaction, appetite. They are brutally voracious, that is to say, ferocious, not after the fashion of the tyrant, but after the fashion of the tiger. From suffering these spectres pass to crime; fatal affiliation, dizzy creation, logic of darkness. That which crawls in the social third lower level is no longer complaint stifled by the absolute; it is the protest of matter. Man there becomes a dragon. To be hungry, to be thirsty—that is the point of departure; to be Satan—that is the point reached. From that vault Lacenaire emerges. We have just seen, in Book Fourth, one of the compartments of the upper mine, of the great political, revolutionary, and philosophical excavation. There, as we have just said, all is pure, noble, dignified, honest. There, assuredly, one might be misled; but error is worthy of veneration there, so thoroughly does it imply heroism. The work there effected, taken as a whole has a name: Progress. The moment has now come when we must take a look at other depths, hideous depths. There exists beneath society, we insist upon this point, and there will exist, until that day when ignorance shall be dissipated, the great cavern of evil. This cavern is below all, and is the foe of all. It is hatred, without exception. This cavern knows no philosophers; its dagger has never cut a pen. Its blackness has no connection with the sublime blackness of the inkstand. Never have the fingers of night which contract beneath this stifling ceiling, turned the leaves of a book nor unfolded a newspaper. Babeuf is a speculator to Cartouche; Marat is an aristocrat to Schinderhannes. This cavern has for its object the destruction of everything. Of everything. Including the upper superior mines, which it execrates. It not only undermines, in its hideous swarming, the actual social order; it undermines philosophy, it undermines human thought, it undermines civilization, it undermines revolution, it undermines progress. Its name is simply theft, prostitution, murder, assassination. It is darkness, and it desires chaos. Its vault is formed of ignorance. All the others, those above it, have but one object—to suppress it. It is to this point that philosophy and progress tend, with all their organs simultaneously, by their amelioration of the real, as well as by their contemplation of the absolute. Destroy the cavern Ignorance and you destroy the lair Crime. Let us condense, in a few words, a part of what we have just written. The only social peril is darkness. Humanity is identity. All men are made of the same clay. There is no difference, here below, at least, in predestination. The same shadow in front, the same flesh in the present, the same ashes afterwards. But ignorance, mingled with the human paste, blackens it. This incurable blackness takes possession of the interior of a man and is there converted into evil.
Anonymous
So a night together didn’t soothe the savage beast, then?” “It made the beast crave more of you. Just because you have one meal doesn’t mean that you can continue through life never to eat again. I’ve now tasted filet mignon. I don’t want to eat fast food. Not even once, for the rest of my life.
Carina Wilder (Torn (Seeking Her Mates #1))
On the Lake Street sidewalk, in front of the In the Heart of the Beast Theatre, were two big planters made of concrete and found materials, and Jim made a point for several years of trying to keep flowers alive in them: I walked over to HOBT to check on the flowers planted in the concrete sculpture constructions. As with the last two nights, several of the marigolds had been pulled out and left lying on the sidewalk. I push them back in the dirt and watered, but there is likely no winning this one. A measure of the level of alienation at large in the culture. (July 18, 1993) The sacred is everywhere, not just what has been touched by the ritual of the church and not just what is beautiful because it is untouched by human hands. Years later I found the philosophy behind Jim’s approach to this articulated with Wendell Berry’s typical clarity in his poem, “How to Be a Poet,” 2 and I called Jim immediately to read it to him. I choked up when I got to these lines: There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.
Robert Jensen (Plain Radical: Living, Loving and Learning to Leave the Planet Gracefully)
She prays here, intercedes there, and brings hope, comfort, and a zest for life with her wherever she goes. And when, exhausted, she is all alone again in the evening, the only purpose of her tiny television is to link her up once more with the other children for whom she had no time that day. The clichés that politicians spout remind her how political prisoners are forced to endure the despotism of these men, and how the populace is turned into beasts of burden. Perversely violent movies make her ponder the people upon whom these crimes are inflicted, and in her nightly prayers she has a word or two for God about perversion, violence, and their innumerable victims—prostitutes and delinquents, her other brood, who have been dumped into the street and for whom her heart bleeds in compassion. Even in her delayed and furtive sleep, Auntie Roz is never cut off from her thousands of children: In her dreams she fights the crooked cops who, on every corner and for all to see, rip off her poor little public transportation drivers and street vendors and get away with it! She fights and fights, surrounded by angels with swords of light, striking the evildoers and liberating the virtuous, healing some and feeding others, until she wakes up, always with a start. And once she’s up, the first prayer is a new surge of inspiration to serve her youthful thousands. For them, Auntie Roz imagines a better world made up of small certainties, a world just livable enough for all of them as they wait for the Eden that’s far too long in coming and impossible to foresee honestly, at the center of a world that’s worse than hell and not even truthful enough to call itself by that name. With
Werewere Liking (The Amputated Memory: A Novel (Women Writing Africa))
o resume: 2 It is often said—and even more often screamed at anti–gay marriage rallies outside the statehouse in Lansing—that I created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. 3 Wrong. 4 Now will I tell the story of the first man, Adam; and of the companion I fashioned for him, Steve; and of the great closeting that befell their relationship. 5 For after I created the earth, and sea, and every plant and seed and beast of the field and fowl of the air, and had the place pretty much set up, I saw that it was good; 6 But I also saw, that by way of oversight it made administrative sense to establish a new middle-managerial position. 7 So as my final act of Day Six, I formed a man from the dust of the ground, and breathed life into his nostrils; and I called him Adam, to give him a leg up alphabetically. 8 And lo, I made him for my image; not in my image, but for my image; because with Creations thou never gettest a second chance to make a first impression; 9 And so in fashioning him I sought to make not only a responsible planetary caretaker, but also an attractive, likeable spokesman who in the event of environmental catastrophe could project a certain warmth. 10 To immediately assess his ability to function in my absence, I decided to change my plans; for I had intended to use Day Seven to infuse the universe with an innate sense of compassion and moral justice; but instead I left him in charge and snoozed. 11 And Adam passed my test; yea, he was by far my greatest achievement; he befriended all my creatures, and named them, and cared for them; and tended the Garden most skillfully; for he had a great eye for landscape design. 12 But I soon noticed he felt bereft in his solitude; for oft he sighed, and pined for a helpmeet; and furthermore he masturbated incessantly, until he had well-nigh besplattered paradise. 13 So one night I caused him to fall into a deep sleep; fulsomely did I roofie his nectar; and as he slept, I removed a rib, though not a load-bearing one. 14 And from this rib I fashioned a companion for him; a hunk, unburdened by excess wisdom; ripped, and cut, and hung like unto a fig tree before the harvest; 15 Yea, and a power bottom. 16 And Adam arose, and saw him, and wept for joy; and he called the man Steve; I had suggested Steven, but Adam liked to keep things informal. 17 And Adam and Steve were naked, and felt no shame; they knew each other, as often as possible; truly their loins were a wonderland. 18 And they were happy, having not yet eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge That Your Lifestyle Is Sinful.
David Javerbaum (An Act of God: Previously Published as The Last Testament: A Memoir by God)
April 21, 1897, by one of the most prominent citizens in Kansas, Alexander Hamilton. In an affidavit quoted in several recent UFO books and journals, Hamilton states that he was awakened by a noise among the cattle and went out with two other men. He then saw an airship descend gently toward the ground and hover within fifty yards of it. It consisted of a great cigar-shaped portion, possibly three hundred feet long, with a carriage underneath. The carriage was made of glass or some other transparent substance alternating with a narrow strip of some material. It was brilliantly lighted within and everything was plainly visible—it was occupied by six of the strangest beings I ever saw. They were jabbering together, but we could not understand a word they said. Upon seeing the witnesses, the pilots of the strange ship turned on some unknown power, and the ship rose about three hundred feet above them: It seemed to pause and hover directly over a two-year-old heifer, which was bawling and jumping, apparently fast in the fence. Going to her, we found a cable about a half-inch in thickness made of some red material, fastened in a slip knot around her neck, one end passing up to the vessel, and the heifer tangled in the wire fence. We tried to get it off but could not, so we cut the wire loose and stood in amazement to see the ship, heifer and all, rise slowly, disappearing in the northwest. Hamilton was so frightened he could not sleep that night: Rising early Tuesday, I started out by horse, hoping to find some trace of my cow. This I failed to do, but coming back in the evening found that Link Thomas, about three or four miles west of Leroy, had found the hide, legs and head in his field that day. He, thinking someone had butchered a stolen beast, had brought the hide to town for identification, but was greatly mystified in not being able to find any tracks in the soft ground. After identifying the hide by my brand, I went home. But every time I would drop to sleep I would see the cursed thing, with its big lights and hideous people. I don’t know whether they are devils or angels, or what; but we all saw them, and my whole family saw the ship, and I don’t want any more to do with them.
Jacques F. Vallée (Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers)
For it was there, among the fanciful beasts, under all the glimmering stars in the clear night sky, and amidst a sprinkling of pink rose petals that the Duke and Duchess of Belmore made magic.
Jill Barnett (Bewitching (Regency Magic, #1))
day and the night and to divide light from darkness. God saw that it was good. 19Evening came and morning came: the fourth day. 20God said, "Let the waters teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth within the vault of heaven." And so it was. 21God created great sea-serpents and every kind of living creature with which the waters teem, and every kind of winged creature. God saw that it was good. 22God blessed them, saying, "Be fruitful, multiply, and fill the waters of the seas; and let the birds multiply upon the earth." 23Evening came and morning came: the fifth day. 24God said, "Let the earth produce every kind of living creature: cattle, reptiles, and every kind of wild beast." And so it was. 25God made every kind of wild beast, every kind of cattle, and every kind of land reptile. God saw that it was good. 26God said, "Let us" make man! in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves, and let them be masters of the fish of the sea, the birds of heaven, the cattle, all the wild beasts and all the reptiles that crawl upon the earth." 27God created man in the image of himself, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them. 28God blessed them, saying to them, "Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and conquer it. Be masters of the fish of the sea, the birds of heaven and all living animals on the earth." 29God said, "See, I give you all the seed-bearing plants that are upon the whole earth, and all the trees with seed-bearing fruit; this shall be your food. 30To all wild beasts, all birds of heaven and all living reptiles on the earth I
Editions CTAD (The Jerusalem Bible New Version)
Esalu had probably been right--the one emotion all living creatures shared was not love, but fear. This, most likely, was the hard truth. Men, beasts, all sentient beings that inhabited the planet, were incapable of trust. Somewhere in their hearts, they would always harbor the fear of others. To ensure their own survival, they would continue to devise ways to dominate and control. Only by binding each other with force, with laws, with religious precepts . . . and with the Silent Whistle, do we finally feel safe . . . No matter how hard I study the nature of living things, in the end, that's all I will find--just this empty futility. Even if she returned to Kazalumu safely, how could she ever stand in front of a class to teach? What could she possibly say to her students if the nature of living creatures only made her feel hopeless? Humans, beasts, bugs--all are but tiny pricks of gleaming in the night--a herd of countless points of light, bound in the darkness of distrust. She gazed up at the star-spangled sky as she listened to Leelan purr contentedly behind her.
Nahoko Uehashi
This man, this creature who was holding her, was going to kill her soon, she could tell. The cat-and-mouse game was coming to an end. He was too entranced by the blood and flesh of her young body to worry about the decrepit stones in the attic, letting cold air seep into the tiny garret room where she was being held prisoner. It was better than the hole she’d been in before, a room that smelled of sex and blood. She’d been relieved when she was moved. That beastly thing who’d been salivating over her body, who ran his lips across her neck and promised to take her life, was gone. She tried to turn over, finding the bonds that held her hands and legs in a frontal vise strong as ever. The young one bound her, night after night. The past two nights, the young one would come, untie her, carry her downstairs because her legs were numb from lack of movement, and sit her in a chair in the creature’s library. From behind, he’d strip off the blindfold, so she never saw his face. He would leave the room and the crippled one would talk. Tell her horrific stories, detailing the death of the man’s soul. Touching her, but unable to fulfill himself. He made her touch him. That didn’t work, either. She
J.T. Ellison (14 (Taylor Jackson, #2))
I suppose you must feel some bitterness against the historians," Roger ventured. "All the writers who got it wrong--made him out to be a hero. I mean, you can't go anywhere in the Highlands without seeing the Bonnie Prince on toffee tins and souvenir tourist mugs." Claire shook her head, gazing off in the distance. The evening mist was growing heavier, the bushes beginning to drip again from the tips of their leaves. "Not the historians. No, not them. Their greatest crime is that they presume to know what happened, how things come about, when they only have what the past chose to leave them behind--for the most part, they think what they were meant to think, and it's a rare one that sees what really happened, behind the smokescreen of artifacts and paper." There was a faint rumble in the distance. The evening passenger train from London, Roger knew. You could hear the whistle from the manse on clear nights. "No, the fault lies with the artists," Claire went on. The writers, the singers, the tellers of tales. It's them that take the past and re-create it to their liking. Them that could take a fool and give you back a hero, take a sot and make him a king." "Are they all liars, then?" Roger asked. Claire shrugged. In spite of the chilly air, she had taken off the jacket to her suit; the damp molded the cotton shirt to show the fineness of collarbone and shoulder blades. "Liars?" she asked. "Or sorcerers? Do they see the bones in the dust of the earth, see the essence of a thing that was, and clothe it in new flesh, so the plodding beast reemerges as a fabulous monster?
Diana Gabaldon (Dragonfly in Amber (Outlander, #2))
And by his side rode loathsome Gluttony, Deformed creature, on a filthie swyne, His belly was vp-blowne with luxury, And eke with fatnesse swollen were his eyne, And like a Crane his necke was long and fyne, With which he swallowd vp excessiue feast; For want whereof poore people oft did pyne; And all the way, most like a brutish beast, He spued vp his gorge, that all did him deteast. In greene vine leaues he was right fitly clad; For other clothes he could not weare for heat, And on his head an yuie girland had, From vnder which fast trickled downe the sweat: Still as he rode, he somewhat still did eat, And in his hand did beare a bouzing can, “Of which he supt so oft, that on his seat His dronken corse he scarse vpholden can, In shape and life more like a monster, then a man. Vnfit he was for any worldly thing, And eke vnhable once to stirre or go, Not meet to be of counsell to a king, Whose mind in meat and drinke was drowned so, That from his friend he seldome knew his fo: Full of diseases was his carcas blew, And a dry dropsie through his flesh did flow And next to him rode lustfull Lechery, Vpon a bearded Goat, whose rugged haire, And whally eyes (the signe of gelosy,) Was like the person selfe, whom he did beare: Who rough, and blacke, and filthy did appeare, Vnseemely man to please faire Ladies eye; Yet he of Ladies oft was loued deare, When fairer faces were bid standen by: O who does know the bent of womens fantasy? In a greene gowne he clothed was full faire, Which vnderneath did hide his filthinesse, And in his hand a burning hart he bare, Full of vaine follies, and new fanglenesse: For he was false, and fraught with ficklenesse, And learned had to loue with secret lookes, And well could daunce, and sing with ruefulnesse, And fortunes tell, and read in louing bookes, And thousand other wayes, to bait his fleshly hookes. And greedy Auarice by him did ride, Vpon a Camell loaden all with gold; Two iron coffers hong on either side, With precious mettall full, as they might hold, And in his lap an heape of coine he told; For of his wicked pelfe his God he made, And vnto hell him selfe for money sold; Accursed vsurie was all his trade, And right and wrong ylike in equall ballaunce waide. His life was nigh vnto deaths doore yplast, And tired-bare cote, and cobled shoes he ware, Ne scarse good morsell all his life did tast, But both from backe and belly still did spare, To fill his bags, and richesse to compare; Yet chylde ne kinsman liuing had he none To leaue them to; but thorough daily care To get, and nightly feare to lose his owne, He led a wretched life vnto himselfe vnknowne. And next to him malicious Enuie rode, Vpon a rauenous wolfe, and still did chaw Betweene his cankred teeth a venemous tode, That all the poison ran about his chaw; But inwardly he chawed his owne maw At neighbours wealth, that made him euer sad For death it was, when any good he saw, And wept, that cause of weeping none he had But when he heard of harme, he wexed wondrous glad. And him beside rides fierce reuenging Wrath, Vpon a Lion, loth for to be led; And in his hand a burning brond he hath, The which he brandisheth about his hed; His eyes did hurle forth sparkles fiery red, And stared sterne on all, that him beheld, As ashes pale of hew and seeming ded; And on his dagger still his hand he held, Trembling through hasty rage, when choler in him sweld.
Edmund Spenser (The Faerie Queene)
Rock was bone. Dust was flesh. Water was blood. Residues settled in multitudes, becoming layers, and upon those layers yet more, and on and on until a world was made, until all that death could hold up one's feet where one stood, and rise to meet every step one took. A solid bed to lie on. So much for the world. Death holds us up. And then there were the breaths that filled, that made the air, the heaving assertions measuring the passing of time, like notches marking the arc of a life, of every life. How many of those breaths were last ones? The final expellation of a beast, an insect, a plant, a human with film covering his or her fading eyes? And so how, how could one draw such air into the lungs? Knowing how filled with death it was, how saturated it was with failure and surrender? Such air choked him, burned down his throat, tasting of the bitterest acid. Dissolving and devouring, until he was naught but... residue. They were so young, his companions. There was no way they could understand the filth walked on, walked in, walked through. And took into themselves, only to fling some of it back out again, now flavoured by their own sordid additions. And when they slept, each night, they were as empty things. While Heboric fought on against the knowledge that the world did not breathe, not any more. No, now, the world drowned. And I drown with it. Here in this cursed wasteland. In the sand and heat and dust. I am drowning. Every night. Drowning.
Steven Erikson (The Bonehunters (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #6))
There was a man in Florence, a friar, Fra Savonarola, he induced all the people to think beauty was a sin. Some people think he was a magician and they fell under his spell for a season, they made fires in the streets and they threw in everything they liked, everything they had made or worked to buy, bolts of silk, and linen their mothers had embroidered for their marriage beds, books of poems written in the poet's hand, bonds and wills, rent-rolls, title deeds, dogs and cats, the shirts from their backs, the rings from their fingers, women their veils, and do you know what was worst, Johane – they threw in their mirrors. So then they couldn't see their faces and know how they were different from the beasts in the field and the creatures screaming on the pyre. And when they had melted their mirrors they went home to their empty houses, and lay on the floor because they had burned their beds, and when they got up next day they were aching from the hard floor and there was no table for their breakfast because they'd used the table to feed the bonfire, and no stool to sit on because they'd chopped it into splinters, and there was no bread to eat because the bakers had thrown into the flames the basins and the yeast and the flour and the scales. And you know the worst of it? They were sober. Last night they took their wine-skins …’ He turns his arm, in a mime of a man lobbing something into a fire. ‘So they were sober and their heads were clear, but they looked around and they had nothing to eat, nothing to drink and nothing to sit on.’ ‘But that wasn't the worst. You said the mirrors were the worst. Not to be able to look at yourself.’ ‘Yes. Well, so I think. I hope I can always look myself in the face. And you, Johane, you should always have a fine glass to see yourself. As you're a woman worth looking at.’ You
Hilary Mantel (Wolf Hall (Thomas Cromwell, #1))
I haven’t been drained that low in a long time. I shouldn’t have tried to take so much all at once,” I muttered, wanting to apologise but not quite finding the right words beyond that statement. “Well feel free to just steal all of mine then,” Darcy spat icily, clutching her neck tighter. I had the urge to heal her, but knew if I tried to touch her again, she’d only recoil. The ambulance pulled away and I glanced around, double checking Darius wasn’t here and I was glad to find he’d listened to me for once. That was something anyway. “Come on, I can drive you girls back in my car,” I offered. I’d left my Faerrari parked at the Acrux Hotel when I’d last visited Tucana, opting to stardust home because I’d been too drunk to drive. But I hadn’t had any magical drinks tonight, so I’d healed myself of the effects of the whiskey I’d consumed before coming to get Darius from the nightclub. Tory’s lip curled back as she glared at me with poison in her gaze. “We’re not going anywhere alone with you,” Darcy said bitterly, distrust in her eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I snapped, stepping forward to get hold of her. I’d protect her tonight whether she liked it or not. Tory moved to intercept me and Caleb joined her too like a prime asshole. “You don’t fucking touch her again,” Tory growled. I narrowed my eyes at her, about to object, but as my gaze slid to Darcy over her shoulder and I saw the wall in her eyes that told me to get fucked, I knew I wasn’t going to win this fight. “Bastard,” Darcy hissed at me, looking woozy. Shit, I needed to heal her. And I could get her a blood replenishing potion back at the academy. “Come on, girls. The bus is gonna leave soon,” Caleb said, tugging Tory after him but she dug her heels in, waiting for Darcy. I opened my mouth to try and find the words that would convince Blue to stay with me, but she walked straight past me with her cheek turned and Tory threw me one more filthy look before they all headed down the street to the bus stop where mountains of students were gathering. Professors were among them and I knew they were safe enough in numbers, but my feet were still rooted to the pavement as I watched Darcy leave. You drank way too much. You have to get a grip. How are you going to keep feeding from her if you act like a monster every time your teeth are in her? I’d never had this problem before. The only thing I could compare it to was when my magic had been Awakened and my Order had Emerged. That first feed had made me feel like a ravenous beast with a bottomless stomach, and yet it still didn’t have a pinch on what it was like to feed from Blue. Caleb led Tory and Darcy past the queue straight onto the bus and my hackles rose as they joined Max and Seth on the back seats. And as Seth pulled Darcy close to him and nuzzled against her cheek, that feral animal in me awoke once more. I took out my Atlas and shot an update to Francesca, anxiously scoring my fingers through my hair. Just as the bus pulled away and rounded a corner, the FIB appeared on the street and I was immediately surrounded by three agents with dark frowns on their faces. “Lance Orion, you need to come down to the station and make a statement,” Captain Hoskins said and I sighed, knowing it was going to be a long ass night. I agreed and as I was stardusted away to the precinct, my heart was tugged in another direction, nearly forcing the stars to guide me elsewhere. But the captain ensured I made it to where he wanted to take me and I made a silent prayer to the stars that Darcy wouldn’t end up in Seth Capella’s bed tonight. Because I wasn’t sure I could control the demon in me who’d want his head for that. (ORION POV)
Caroline Peckham (The Awakening as Told by the Boys (Zodiac Academy, #1.5))
I saw him assess the field ahead- and transform. The talons came first. Replacing fingers and feet. Then dark scales or perhaps feathers, I couldn't get a look at them, covered his legs, his arms, his chest. His body contorted, bones and muscles growing and shifting. The beast form Rhys had kept hidden. Never liked to unleash. Unless it was dire enough to do so. Before the Cauldron swept me away, I beheld what happened to his head, his face. It was a thing of nightmares. Nothing human or Fae in it. It was a creature that lived in black pits and only emerged at night to hunt and feast. That face... it was those creatures that had been carved into the rock of the Court of Nightmares. That made up his throne. The throne not only a representation of his power... but of what lurked within. And with the wings... Hybern soldiers began fleeing. Helion beheld what happened and ran, too- but towards Rhys. Shifting as well. If Rhys was a flying terror crafted from shadows and cold moonlight, Helion was his daytime equivalent. Gold feathers and shredding claws and feathered wings- Together, my mate and the High Lord of Day unleashed themselves upon Hybern.
Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Wings and Ruin (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #3))
For instance, John Calvin, a leading Reformer, relates in a footnote in his commentary notes on Psalm 63:9–11:22 Under the Hebrew word שׂועל‎, shual, here rendered fox, was comprehended, in common language, the jackal, or Vulpes aureus, golden wolf, so called in Latin because its color is a bright yellow; and in this sense שׂועל‎, shual, has been generally interpreted here, because the jackal is found in Palestine, and feeds on carrion. Both of these circumstances are, however, also applicable to the fox, and, moreover, Bochart has made it probable that the specific name of the jackal (the θως of the Greeks) in Hebrew was אי‎, aye, the howler, being so called from the howling cry which he makes particularly at night. The term occurs in Isa 13:22, 34:14; and Jer 50:39; where איים‎, ayim, is rendered, in our version, “the wild beasts of the islands,” an appellation very vague and indeterminate. At the same time, it is highly probable that shual generally refers to the jackal. Several of the modern oriental names of this animal, as the Turkish chical, and the Persian sciagal, sciachal, or schachal — whence the English jackal — from their resemblance to the Hebrew word shual, favor this supposition; and Dr Shaw, and other travelers, inform us, that while jackals are very numerous in Palestine, the common fox is rarely to be met with. We shall, therefore, be more correct, under these circumstances, in admitting that the jackal of the East is the Hebrew shual.
Bodie Hodge (Dinosaurs, Dragons, and the Bible)
The truth is that the poor are as ravening wolves, as cunning as foxes and as lecherous as he-goats. I do not say this of all the poor but of a great many of them, for poverty never made any man better. It is easy not to tell lies when you are not afraid, not to steal when you are not hungry, But the person who acquires the habit of lying and stealing soon becomes like a beast. I have seen mothers sell their daughters. I have seen mothers abandon their newborn babes in the fields. I have seen men mutilate their children to make them better beggars. I have seen sons leave their aged fathers to starve because they themselves were hungry, and ten lepers band together to abduct and rape a girl, and great oafs steal alms from the blind, and cripples torture children and bind them with chains to stop their running off with the takings. I have seen people seek shelter with peasants and then make off in the night, taking with them the last sack of flour. The rich who rob the poor do not know what they do, but the poor man who robs the poor is an eater of human flesh. -- pg 98
Zoé Oldenbourg (The Heirs of the Kingdom)
Game of Thrones - Feast for Crows. “Ser? My lady?" said Podrick. "Is a broken man an outlaw?" "More or less," Brienne answered. Septon Meribald disagreed. "More less than more. There are many sorts of outlaws, just as there are many sorts of birds. A sandpiper and a sea eagle both have wings, but they are not the same. The singers love to sing of good men forced to go outside the law to fight some wicked lord, but most outlaws are more like this ravening Hound than they are the lightning lord. They are evil men, driven by greed, soured by malice, despising the gods and caring only for themselves. Broken men are more deserving of our pity, though they may be just as dangerous. Almost all are common-born, simple folk who had never been more than a mile from the house where they were born until the day some lord came round to take them off to war. Poorly shod and poorly clad, they march away beneath his banners, ofttimes with no better arms than a sickle or a sharpened hoe, or a maul they made themselves by lashing a stone to a stick with strips of hide. Brothers march with brothers, sons with fathers, friends with friends. They've heard the songs and stories, so they go off with eager hearts, dreaming of the wonders they will see, of the wealth and glory they will win. War seems a fine adventure, the greatest most of them will ever know. "Then they get a taste of battle. "For some, that one taste is enough to break them. Others go on for years, until they lose count of all the battles they have fought in, but even a man who has survived a hundred fights can break in his hundred-and-first. Brothers watch their brothers die, fathers lose their sons, friends see their friends trying to hold their entrails in after they've been gutted by an axe. "They see the lord who led them there cut down, and some other lord shouts that they are his now. They take a wound, and when that's still half-healed they take another. There is never enough to eat, their shoes fall to pieces from the marching, their clothes are torn and rotting, and half of them are shitting in their breeches from drinking bad water. "If they want new boots or a warmer cloak or maybe a rusted iron halfhelm, they need to take them from a corpse, and before long they are stealing from the living too, from the smallfolk whose lands they're fighting in, men very like the men they used to be. They slaughter their sheep and steal their chickens, and from there it's just a short step to carrying off their daughters too. And one day they look around and realize all their friends and kin are gone, that they are fighting beside strangers beneath a banner that they hardly recognize. They don't know where they are or how to get back home and the lord they're fighting for does not know their names, yet here he comes, shouting for them to form up, to make a line with their spears and scythes and sharpened hoes, to stand their ground. And the knights come down on them, faceless men clad all in steel, and the iron thunder of their charge seems to fill the world . . . "And the man breaks. "He turns and runs, or crawls off afterward over the corpses of the slain, or steals away in the black of night, and he finds someplace to hide. All thought of home is gone by then, and kings and lords and gods mean less to him than a haunch of spoiled meat that will let him live another day, or a skin of bad wine that might drown his fear for a few hours. The broken man lives from day to day, from meal to meal, more beast than man. Lady Brienne is not wrong. In times like these, the traveler must beware of broken men, and fear them . . . but he should pity them as well.
G R R Martin
Rae’s thoughts and hope He preached, he prayed, in a place, in a congregation, He possessed an extraordinary imagination, A charm that mesmerised all, made him a believable preacher, But after prayers, the preacher never returned and so did not the holy teacher, Because what he appeared in these holy sessions was a false projection of him, Behind his conscience and veil of charm was hidden an abominable world grim, Like in all of us, he too was a host to a resident beast, Who regularly on his fancies and endless wishes did feast, He had resolved to taming the congregation and not the beast he was constantly feeding, Within him, with a renewed virility, new forms of evil were breeding, As the congregation left and he eased his hands held in prayer, He frantically shook them to get rid of the evil layer, That he recognised but never wanted to let go, Maybe that is why the priest that stood here was forsaken by his priestly conscience long ago, So after every prayer, the preacher never returned, just a man with the beast did, And then behind the morbidity of thoughts and endless fantasies this man hid, To feed the beast in million ways, In those vacant hours of nights and endless days, Because after the prayers the preacher never returned, only his beast affiliated part faced everyone, As he fed himself on diabolic thoughts and vile imaginations of always someone, a new one, And this is how the preacher lived until his last day, He was still the same and he had decided not to change anyway, And when Lucifer claimed his soul, he was confused too, Because the beast in him was there so was the preacher too, It was difficult to tell them apart, And neither of them alone wanted to depart, They had fused into one and Lucifer gave them a puzzled look, Then he looked inside himself and he was completely shaken, and the ground under his feet shook, The beast had already claimed his soul unaware that he is the God of Hell, the creator of all abomination, So he cast the beast back into the preacher and now they live in this immortal curse of incarceration, Where the preacher feels imprisoned by the beast and beast feels imprisoned by the preacher, Because after knowing the soul of Lucifer the beast had become lot meaner, Thus began the preacher’s never ending curse, He does not die, although he longs for it and keeps staring at the hearse, Because Lucifer did not want a greater God in his own kingdom, Now preacher is the victim of his own knowledge of evil and his wretched wisdom, The congregation is free, because they have learned to establish direct communion with the God, And now they don’t have to deal with the preacher who always after prayers acted diabolically and in ways odd.
Javid Ahmad Tak (They Loved in 2075!)
Rae’s thoughts and hope He preached, he prayed, in a place, in a congregation, He possessed an extraordinary imagination, A charm that mesmerised all, made him a believable preacher, But after prayers, the preacher never returned and so did not the holy teacher, Because what he appeared in these holy sessions was a false projection of him, Behind his conscience and veil of charm was hidden an abominable world grim, Like in all of us, he too was a host to a resident beast, Who regularly on his fancies and endless wishes did feast, He had resolved to taming the congregation than the beast he was regularly feeding, Within him evil was constantly breeding, As the congregation left and he eased his hands held in prayer, He frantically shook them to get rid of the evil layer, That he recognised but never wanted to let go, Maybe that is why the priest that stood here was forsaken by his priestly conscience long ago, So after every prayer, the preacher never returned, just a man with the beast did, And then behind the morbidity of thoughts and endless fantasies this man hid, To feed the beast in million ways, In those vacant hours of nights and endless days, Because after the prayers the preacher never returned, only his beast affiliated part faced everyone, As he fed himself on diabolic thoughts and vile imaginations of always someone, a new one, And this is how the preacher lived until his last day, He was still the same and he had decided not to change anyway, And when Lucifer claimed his soul, he was confused too, Because the beast in him was there so was the preacher too, It was difficult to tell them apart, And neither of them alone wanted to depart, They had fused into one and Lucifer gave them a puzzled look, Then he looked inside himself and he was completely shaken, and the ground under his feet shook, The beast had already claimed his soul unaware that he is the God of Hell, the creator of all abomination, So he cast the beast back into the preacher and now they live in this immortal curse of incarceration, Where the preacher feels imprisoned by the beast and beast feels imprisoned by the preacher, Because after knowing the soul of Lucifer the beast had become lot meaner, Thus began the preacher’s never ending curse, He does not die, although he longs for it and keeps staring at the hearse, Because Lucifer did not want a greater God in his own kingdom, Now preacher is victim of his own knowledge of evil and his wretched wisdom, The congregation is free, because they have learned to establish direct communion with the God, And now they never deal with a preacher who always after prayers acted diabolically and in ways odd.
Javid Ahmad Tak (They Loved in 2075!)
The Bible presents the creatures in an ascending order. Heaven is lower than earth. The heavenly light-givers lack life; they are lower than the lowliest living beast; they serve the living creatures, which are to be found only beneath heaven; they have been created in order to rule over day and night: they have not been made in order to rule over the earth, let alone over man.
Leo Strauss (Jerusalem and Athens)
So I was hard on the Beast, win or lose, When I got upstairs, those tragic girls in my head, Turfing him out of bed; standing alone On the balcony, the night so cold I could taste the stars On the tip of my tongue. And I made a prayer – Thumbing my pearls, the tears of Mary, one by one, Like a rosary – words for the lost, the captive beautiful, The wives, those less fortunate than we. The moon was a hand-mirror breathed on by a Queen. My breath was a chiffon scarf for an elegant ghost. I turned to go back inside. Bring me the Beast for the night. Bring me the wine-cellar key. Let the less-loving one be me. - an excerpt from Mrs. Beast -
Carol Ann Duffy (The World's Wife)
I saw Rhysand. In the thick of those breaking lines. Blood-splattered, fighting beautifully. I saw him assess the field ahead—and transform. The talons came first. Replacing fingers and feet. Then dark scales or perhaps feathers, I couldn’t get a look at them, covered his legs, his arms, his chest. His body contorted, bones and muscles growing and shifting. The beast form Rhys had kept hidden. Never liked to unleash. Unless it was dire enough to do so. Before the Cauldron swept me away, I beheld what happened to his head, his face. It was a thing of nightmares. Nothing human or Fae in it. It was a creature that lived in black pits and only emerged at night to hunt and feast. The face … it was those creatures that had been carved into the rock of the Court of Nightmares. That made up his throne. The throne not only a representation of his power … but of what lurked within. And with the wings …
Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Wings and Ruin (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #3))
St Paul's cathedral stands like a cornered beast on Ludgate hill, taking deep breaths above the smoke.  The fire has made terrifying progress in the night and is closing in on the ancient monument from three directions.  Built of massive stones, the cathedral is held to be invincible, but suddenly Pegge sees what the flames covet: the two hundred and fifty feet of scaffolding erected around the broken tower.  Once the flames have a foothold on the wooden scaffolds,, they can jump to the lead roof, and once the timbers burn and the vaulting cracks, the cathedral will be toppled by its own mass, a royal bear brought down by common dogs.
Mary Novik (Conceit)
Often Khaster heard noises in the night he could not identify. They were the sounds made by animals, but had a human resonance to them. Sometimes gouts of light would spurt into the sky-red, turquoise, gold-and some moments later thunder would come, but from beneath the earth rather than the heavens. Strange smells, bitter yet musky and sweet, would occasionally come in through an open window to haunt a room. Khaster knew that the priest-mages of Madragore employed a regiment of alchemists who worked in a shuttered citadel on the east of the city. Its huge domed roof, which was covered in flaky verdigis scales rose up from an area of factories and tanning shops. Stories leaked out of the citadel along with the fumes. Creatures were made there, homunculi, golems, beasts of war. Sometimes the creatures escaped or were let out to roam the city by their keepers. That accounted for the strange nocturnal noises. But perhaps these were only stories after all. Perhaps the citadel hid secrets of a more mundane yet brutal nature. Prisoners could be interrogated there, tortured with corrosive steams. The alchemists made killing perfumes for use on the battlefield. Khaster had heard tales of a liquid that when released into the air corroded all the flesh from anyone who smelled its delicate aroma. The alchemists made weapons; if not magical beasts, then mordant potions and poisons. They had to test them on someone.
Storm Constantine (Sea Dragon Heir (The Chronicles of Magravandias, #1))
Everyone was riding in a yellow submarine, and their friends were all aboard, a thousand feet deep in an ocean of deceits. As tempting as it was, Thorn didn’t completely buy that easy cynicism. Stories might be lies, they might be man-made inventions, but the purposes they served were absolutely necessary. They gave respite and order in the face of chaos. They were temporary strongholds pitched in the wilderness where we hunkered down, lit our fires, cooked our food, and breathed easy as the night beasts howled incessantly beyond the make-believe walls.
James W. Hall (Bad Axe (Thorn Mystery #15))
Feyre,' he said, his voice hoarse. As if he'd been screaming. 'Yes,' I said. He studied my face- the taloned hand at my throat. And released me immediately. I lay there, staring up at where he now knelt on the bed, rubbing his hands over his face. My traitorous eyes indeed dared to look lower than his chest- but my attention snagged on the twin tattoos on each of his knees: a towering mountain crowned by three stars. Beautiful- but brutal, somehow. 'You were having a nightmare,' I said, easing into a sitting position. Like some dam had been cracked open inside me, I glanced at my hand- and willed it to vanish into shadow. It did. Half a thought scattered the darkness again. His hands, however, still ended in long, black talons- and his feet... they ended in claws, too. The wings were out, slumped down behind him. And I wondered how close he'd been to fully shifting into that beast he'd once told me he hated. He lowered his hands, talons fading into fingers. 'I'm sorry.' 'That's why you're staying here, not at the House. You don't want others seeing this.' 'I normally keep it contained to my room. I'm sorry it woke you.' I fisted my hands in my lap to keep from touching him. 'How often does it happen?' Rhys's violet eyes met mine, and I knew the answer before he said, 'As often as you.' I swallowed hard. 'What did you dream of tonight?' He shook his head, looking toward the window- to where snow had dusted the nearby rooftops. 'There are memories from Under the Mountain, Feyre, that are best left unshared. Even with you.' He'd shared enough horrific things with me that they had to be... beyond nightmares, then. But I put a hand on his elbow, naked body and all. 'When you want to talk, let me know. I won't tell the others.' I made to slither off the bed, but he grabbed my hand, keeping it against his arm. 'Thank you.' I studied the hand, the ravaged face. Such pain lingered there- and exhaustion. The face he never let anyone see. I pushed up onto my knees and kissed his cheek, his skin warm and soft beneath my mouth. It was over before it started, but- but how many nights had I wanted someone to do the same for me? His eyes were a bit wide as I pulled away, and he didn't stop me as I eased off the bed. I was almost out the door when I turned back to him. Rhys still knelt, wings drooping across the white sheets, head bowed, his tattoos stark against his golden skin. A dark, fallen prince.
Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Mist and Fury (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #2))
Long before the universe was born, Chaos rose form a celestial storm. Alone for eons in an endless night, The god awoke and created light. Hail, Black Dragon. I'm Emperor of this land. What? Dragon hissed, tail swishing in the sand. Chaos made me ruler of land and beasts. I did not see you at that happy feast. True, said the Emperor, 'twas before my time. The world has since changed, land and men are now mine. 'Tis the first I've heard of this, Black Dragon said. Deep within his heart he felt the fist of dread.
B.L. Sauder (Year of the Golden Dragon (Journey to the East))
That’s the river up there. We’ll likely have to spend the night.’’ He slid me a curious glance. ‘‘I never asked whether you liked roughing it. I suppose now would be a good time, eh?’’ ‘‘Cyrene wouldn’t be caught dead camping, not for the largest lake in the world, but I have nothing against nature.’’ A large cicada flew in through the window and smacked me on the face. Startled, I instantly shadowed and batted frantically at my face. It buzzed upward, into my hair. I shrieked and tried to cram my upper half out of the window in an attempt to dislodge the beastly thing. Gabriel drove with one hand while plucking the large bug off the top of my head. He held it in front of me, one eyebrow raised as I deshadowed. ‘‘All right, perhaps I would have never made it as a Girl Scout, but you can’t judge me by my reaction to being assaulted by a large, hairy bug. I like animals. On the whole. And they like me. I just don’t like them flying into my face intent on making me look bad in front of you.’’ The cicada made an odd little chirping sound, just as if it was agreeing with me. Gabriel laughed and tossed it out of the window
Katie MacAlister (Up In Smoke (Silver Dragons, #2))
With retinas made up primarily of light-sensitive rod receptors, and a reflective tapetum lucidum layer right behind them, the tiger has night vision some six times more acute than that of a human. And coupled with those powerful eyes is an equally impressive pair of ears. Built on a swivel, they can readily hone in on a source like radar dishes, and have an impressive range of between .2 kHz and 65 kHz—considerably broader than the range for humans, whose extends only up to 20 kHz—geared toward picking up noises as faint as the swallowing of saliva and the whistling of breath through nostrils. In addition to vision and hearing worthy of a superhero, tigers also have five different types of whiskers covering their body, all of which are constantly absorbing sensory information and empowering them to navigate through the darkest and densest of underbrush.
Dane Huckelbridge (No Beast So Fierce: The Terrifying True Story of the Champawat Tiger, the Deadliest Man-Eater in History)
I feel as though all of a sudden, there’s nothing but forever between here and home.
Tochi Onyebuchi (Beasts Made of Night (Beasts Made of Night, #1))