“
Trust is like a mirror, you can fix it if it's broken, but you can still see the crack in that mother fucker's reflection.
”
”
Lady Gaga
“
Why shouldn't I hate her? She did the worst thing to me that anyone can do to anyone else. Let them believe that they're loved and wanted and then show them that it's all a sham.
”
”
Agatha Christie (The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side (Miss Marple, #9))
“
I mean, if you were to find a shattered mirror, find all the pieces, all the shards and all the tiny chips, and have whatever skill and patience it took to put all that broken glass back together so that it was complete once again, the restored mirror would still be spiderwebbed with cracks, it would still be a useless glued version of its former self, which could show only fragmented reflections of anyone looking into it. Some things are beyond repair. And that was me.
”
”
Elizabeth Wurtzel (Prozac Nation)
“
We know one another. This is the present. There is no past and no future. Here I am washing my hands, and the cracked mirror shows me to myself, suspended as it were, in time; this is me, this moment will not pass.
And then I open the door and go to the dining-room, where he is sitting waiting for me at a table, and I think how in that moment I have aged, and passed on, how I have advanced one step towards an unknown destiny.
We smile, we choose our lunch, we speak of this and that, but - I say to myself-I am not she who left him five minutes ago. She has stayed behind. I am another woman, older, more mature…
”
”
Daphne du Maurier
“
She left the web, she left the loom,
She made three paces through the room,
She saw the water-lily bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
She look'd down to Camelot.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack'd from side to side;
"The curse is come upon me," cried
The Lady of Shalott.
”
”
Alfred Tennyson (The Lady of Shalott)
“
The mirror crack'd from side to side
"The curse has come upon me," cried
The Lady of Shalott
”
”
Alfred Tennyson (The Lady of Shalott)
“
In spite of all evidence that life is discontinuous, a valley of rifts, and that random chance plays a great part in our fates, we go on believing in the continuity of things, in causation and meaning. But we live on a broken mirror, and fresh cracks appear in its surface every day.
”
”
Salman Rushdie (The Ground Beneath Her Feet)
“
One never quite allows for the moron in our midst.
”
”
Agatha Christie (The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side (Miss Marple, #9))
“
Some adventures begin easily. It is not hard, after all, to be sucked up by a tornado or pushed through a particularly porous mirror; there is no skill involved in being swept away by a great wave or pulled down a rabbit hole. Some adventures require nothing more than a willing heart and the ability to trip over the cracks in the world.
Other adventures must be committed to before they have even properly begun. How else will they know the worthy from the unworthy, if they do not require a certain amount of effort on the part of the ones who would undertake them? Some adventures are cruel, because it is the only way they know to be kind.
”
”
Seanan McGuire (Down Among the Sticks and Bones (Wayward Children, #2))
“
As I walked, I ran my fingers along the spines of hundreds of books. I let myself be imbued with the smell, with the light that filtered through the cracks or from the glass lanterns embedded in the wooden structure, floating among mirrors and shadows.
”
”
Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Angel's Game (The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, #2))
“
If communication cannot achieve consensus, we must live with the broken pieces of unfulfilled expectations and recognize the failure of dialogue, trust, and reciprocity. In the meantime, let us identify the cracks and breaches in the blurred mirror of the past and build a new canvas of hope and clarity. ("Poste Restante")
”
”
Erik Pevernagie
“
Be like water making its way through crack.
Do not be assertive but adjust to the object and you shall find a way round it or through it.
If nothing within you stays rigid outward thigs will disclose themselves.
Moving be like water.
Still be like a mirror.
Respond like an echo.
”
”
Bruce Lee
“
Heather Badcock meant no harm. She never did mean harm, but there is no doubt that people like Heather Badcock (and like my old friend Alison Wilde), are capable of doing a lot of harm because they lack - not kindness, they have kindness - but any real consideration for the way their actions may affect other people. She though always of what an action meant to her, never sparing a thought to what it might mean to somebody else.
”
”
Agatha Christie (The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side (Miss Marple, #9))
“
She had a great power of love and hate but no stability. That’s what’s so sad for anyone, to be born with no stability.
”
”
Agatha Christie (The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side (Miss Marple, #9))
“
When you were little, what inspired you to feel this way?' Then he paused and asked, 'Looking in the mirror and having it crack in two?'
Instead of clobbering him, I laughed-the kind of laugh that escapes into the air before you can catch it. The kind of chuckle that shows a tiny form of acceptance.
Trevor obviously didn't expect me to find his remark entertaining. He was primed for a fight. We both cracked up and locked eyes. His gaze lingered a little too long, not in a creepy way, but in a way that says I'm not ready to let this moment go.
”
”
Ellen Schreiber (Royal Blood (Vampire Kisses, #6))
“
He froze as the scent of her hair met him. It was touching his cheek,tickling him.
I cant afford this, he thought, but he didnt move, watching her finger trace the new line. "He cracked my mirror,"she said, clearly angry.
”
”
Kim Harrison (A Perfect Blood (The Hollows, #10))
“
The act of writing itself is much like the construction of a mirror made of words. Looking at certain illuminated corners of or cracks within the mirror, the author can see fragments of an objective reality that comprise the physical universe, social communities, political dynamics, and other facets of human existence. Looking in certain other corners of the same mirror, he or she may experience glimpses of a True Self sheltered deftly behind a mask of public proprieties.
”
”
Aberjhani (Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry)
“
What about a teakettle? What if the spout opened and closed when the steam came out, so it would become a mouth, and it could whistle pretty melodies, or do Shakespeare, or just
crack up with me? I could invent a teakettle that reads in Dad’s voice, so I could fall asleep, or maybe a set of kettles that sings the chorus of “Yellow Submarine,” which is a song by the Beatles, who I love, because entomology is one of my raisons d’être, which
is a French expression that I know. Another good thing is that I could train my anus to talk when I farted. If I wanted to be extremely hilarious, I’d train it to say, “Wasn’t me!” every time I made an incredibly bad fart. And if I ever made an incredibly bad fart in the Hall of Mirrors, which is in Versailles, which is outside of Paris, which is in France, obviously, my anus would say, “Ce n’étais pas moi!”
What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboard down the street at night you could hear everyone's heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don't really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn't have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war.
”
”
Jonathan Safran Foer
“
One has to dare if one wants to get anywhere,' said Mrs. Bantry.
”
”
Agatha Christie (The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side (Miss Marple, #9))
“
She's locked up with a spinning wheel
She can't recall what it was like to feel
She says, "This room's gonna be my grave
And there's no one who can save me,"
She sits down to her colored thread
She knows lovers waking up in their beds
She says, "How long can I live this way
Is there someone I can pay to let me go
'Cause I'm half sick of shadows
I want to see the sky
Everyone else can watch as the sun goes down
So why can't I
And it's raining
And the stars are falling from the sky
And the wind
And the wind I know it's cold
I've been waiting
For the day I will surely die
And it's here
And it's here for I've been told
That I'll die before I'm old
And the wind I know it's cold...
She looks up to the mirrored glass
She sees a horse and rider pass
She says, "This man's gonna be my death
'Cause he's all I ever wanted in my life
And I know he doesn't know my name
And that all the girls are all the same to him
But still I've got to get out of this place
'Cause I don't think I can face another night
Where I'm half sick of shadows
And I can't see the sky
Everyone else can watch as the tide comes in
So why can't I
But there's willow trees
And little breezes, waves, and walls, and flowers
And there's moonlight every single night
As I'm locked in these towers
So I'll meet my death
But with my last breath I'll sing to him I love
And he'll see my face in another place,"
And with that the glass above
Her cracked into a million bits
And she cried out, "So the story fits
But then I could have guessed it all along
'Cause now some drama queen is gonna write a song for me,"
She went down to her little boat
And she broke the chains and began to float away
And as the blood froze in her veins she said,
"Well then that explains a thing or two
'Cause I know I'm the cursed one
I know I'm meant to die
Everyone else can watch as their dreams untie
So why can't I
”
”
Emilie Autumn
“
On the evenings when my parents held parties, the drawing-room mirrors multiplied to infinity the scintillations of a crystal chandelier. Mama would take her seat at the grand piano to accompany a lady dressed in a cloud of tulle who played the violin and a cousin who performed on a cello. I would crack between my teeth the candied shell of an artificial fruit, and a burst of light would illuminate my palate with a taste of blackcurrant or pineapple: all the colours, all the lights were mine, the gauzy scarves, the diamonds, the laces; I held the whole party in my mouth.
”
”
Simone de Beauvoir (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter)
“
When she looked in the mirror these days, she saw someone she didn't recognize...She saw an old woman trying to be beautiful, her skin dry and her wrinkles like cracks. She looked like a very well-dressed winter apple.
”
”
Sarah Addison Allen
“
during my worst times
on the park benches
in the jails
or living with
whores
I always had this certain
contentment-
I wouldn't call it
happiness-
it was more of an inner
balance
that settled for
whatever was occuring
and it helped in the
factories
and when relationships
went wrong
with the
girls.
it helped
through the
wars and the
hangovers
the backalley fights
the
hospitals.
to awaken in a cheap room
in a strange city and
pull up the shade-
this was the craziest kind of
contentment
and to walk across the floor
to an old dresser with a
cracked mirror-
see myself, ugly,
grinning at it all.
what matters most is
how well you
walk through the
fire.
”
”
Charles Bukowski
“
The day we met you watched the moon
While I watched you.
Tall and alone.
Dark and lonely.
You looked like my mirror.
Cracked and empty.
Dried up and chewed out.
I could have been yours.
If only you had looked at me.
”
”
Saffron A. Kent (The Unrequited)
“
As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.
And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
"Love has no ending.
"I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,
"I'll love till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.
"The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world."
But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
"O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.
"In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.
"In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
Tomorrow or today.
"Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.
"O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.
"The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the teacup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.
"Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.
"O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress;
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.
"O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbor
With all your crooked heart."
It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.
”
”
W.H. Auden
“
I ate some emotional soup in my childhood and have spent a lifetime trying to digest it.
”
”
Billy Ray Chitwood (The Cracked Mirror: Reflections of an Appalachian Son)
“
When a bone breaks, it heals stronger in the cracks. I realize this is what is happening to her heart.
”
”
Nayomi Munaweera (Island of a Thousand Mirrors)
“
If you look into somebody's soul by accident, you feel a bit embarrassed about cashing in.
”
”
Agatha Christie (The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side (Miss Marple, #9))
“
Murder develops. Yes, like a photograph, isn’t it?” “It’s very much like photography really,” said Dermot. “Quite a good comparison of yours.
”
”
Agatha Christie (The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side (Miss Marple, #9))
“
A family is a cracked mirror that nevertheless reflects us accurately.
”
”
Mariel Hemingway (Out Came the Sun: Overcoming the Legacy of Mental Illness, Addiction, and Suicide in My Family)
“
How is he so rich and hot and normal?"
I shake my head, "He's rich and hot, but he's not normal. I see a sickness in his eyes. They're broken like mine. Like a mirror with cracks in it but none of the glass has fallen out of the frame.
”
”
Tara Brown
“
It is a map, the body of an ex-lover, pulling you into its depths and bringing you back to a part of yourself that you thought had been left behind sometime, somewhere. It is a mirror too, though, chipped and cracked, showing all the ways you have changed; and, like every mirror, it dreams of becoming whole again.
”
”
Elif Shafak (The Island of Missing Trees)
“
Something inside her brain cracked like a funhouse mirror that existed only to reflect a distorted world,
”
”
Robert McCammon (Swan Song)
“
She couldn't let the past go and she could never see the future as it really was, only as she imagined it to be.
”
”
Agatha Christie (The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side (Miss Marple, #9))
“
A sullen pier-glass, cracked from side to side,
Scorns to present the face (as do new mirrors)
With a lying flush, but shows it melancholy
And pale, as faces grow that look in mirrors.
- The Pier-Glass
”
”
Robert Graves (Poems Selected by Himself)
“
Such a sweet letter from Lady Conway... You remember my telling you about her? Her memory's bad. Can't recognize her relations always and tells them to go away."
"That might be shrewdness really," said Miss Marple, "rather than a loss of memory.
”
”
Agatha Christie (The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side (Miss Marple, #9))
“
Hemlock in the cocktails, wasn't it? Something of that kind.
”
”
Agatha Christie (The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side)
“
Miss Marple made a ladylike noise of vexation like a cat sneezing to indicate profound disgust.
”
”
Agatha Christie (The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side (Miss Marple, #9))
“
We have so many points in common that it is like looking at myself in a cracked mirror.
”
”
Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer (Tropic, #1))
“
Do you remember the Lady of Shalott? The mirror crack’d from side to side: ‘The doom has come upon me,’ cried the Lady of Shalott. Well, that’s what she looked like. People laugh at Tennyson nowadays, but the Lady of Shalott always thrilled me when I was young and it still does.
”
”
Agatha Christie (The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side (Miss Marple, #9))
“
Our masks, always in peril of smearing or cracking,
In need of continuous check in the mirror or silverware,
Keep us in thrall to ourselves, concerned with our surfaces.
[...]
So primp, preen, prink, pluck, and prize your flesh,
All posturings! All ravishment! All sensibility!
Meanwhile, have you used your mind today?
”
”
Carolyn Kizer
“
I wait on the origin of night's sounds waking. I know
that here only the blind man sings, even in rain
The notes of drenched violins rise like warped mirrors'
and the last clouds part slowly, like a cracked wheel.
”
”
Jim Carroll (Fear of Dreaming: The Selected Poems)
“
Alec surprised Magnus and the werewolf both by breaking away and lunging at Marcy. Whatever he had been planning, it didn’t work: this time the werewolf’s swipe caught him full in the chest. Alec went flying into a hot pink wall decorated with gold glitter. He hit a mirror set into the wall and decorated with curling gold fretwork with enough force to crack the glass across.
“Oh, stupid Shadowhunters,” Magnus moaned under his breath. But Alec used his own body hitting the wall as leverage, rebounding off the wall and up, catching a sparkling chandelier and swinging, then dropping down as lightly as a leaping cat and crouching to attack again in one smooth movement. “Stupid, sexy Shadowhunters.
”
”
Cassandra Clare (The Course of True Love [and First Dates] (The Bane Chronicles, #10))
“
My hands are upon his face, mirror to the spot where I’ll carry red, puckered scars for the rest of my life. In his gaze, they seem to matter less. We are not broken things, neither of us. We are cracked pottery mended with lacquer and flakes of gold, whole as we are, complete unto each other. Complete and worthy and so very loved.
”
”
Mackenzi Lee (The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue (Montague Siblings, #1))
“
The trouble with her is that either she thinks that at last she's got to that spot or place or that moment in her life where everything's like a fairy tale come true, that nothing can go wrong, that she'll never be unhappy again; or else she's down in the dumps, a woman whose life is ruined, who's never known love and happiness and who never will again.
”
”
Agatha Christie (The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side (Miss Marple, #9))
“
Ingenuousness is skewed by the cracks in the mirrors of the eye caused by the blunders of the insincere
”
”
T-anne Constable
“
When she looked in the mirror she felt as though there was an invisible crack in it, perhaps in her.
”
”
Silvia Moreno-Garcia (The Daughter of Doctor Moreau)
“
In my experience, bossy women seldom get themselves murdered. I can't think why not. When you come to think of it, it's rather a pity.
”
”
Agatha Christie (The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side (Miss Marple, #9))
“
trust is like a broken mirror, you may still see yourself, but you can never dismiss the crack.
”
”
Craig Johnson (Depth of Winter (Walt Longmire, #14))
“
It came down to that flexibility of a person’s mind. An ability to withstand horrors and snap back, like a fresh elastic band. A flinty mind shattered. In this way, he was glad not to be an adult. A grown-up’s mind—even one belonging to a decent man like Scoutmaster Tim—lacked that elasticity. The world had been robbed of all its mysteries, and with those mysteries went the horror. Adults didn’t believe in old wives’ tales. You didn’t see adults stepping over sidewalk cracks out of the fear that they might somehow, some way, break their mothers’ backs. They didn’t wish on stars: not with the squinty-eyed fierceness of kids, anyway. You’ll never find an adult who believes that saying “Bloody Mary” three times in front of a mirror in a dark room will summon a dark, blood-hungry entity. Adults were scared of different things: their jobs, their mortgages, whether they hung out with the “right people,” whether they would die unloved. These were pallid compared to the fears of a child—leering clowns under the bed and slimy monsters capering beyond the basement’s light and faceless sucking horrors from beyond the stars. There’s no 12-step or self-help group for dealing with those fears. Or maybe there is: you just grow up. And when you do, you surrender the nimbleness of mind required to believe in such things—but also to cope with them. And so when adults find themselves in a situation where that nimbleness is needed . . . well, they can’t summon it. So they fall to pieces: go insane, panic, suffer heart attacks and aneurysms brought on by fright. Why? They simply don’t believe it could be happening. That’s what’s different about kids: they believe everything can happen, and fully expect it to.
”
”
Nick Cutter (The Troop)
“
She wanted to touch him, to throw her arms around him — but something held her back. Maybe it was the fear that her arms would pass right through him, that she would have come all this way only to find a ghost after all.
As though he’d been able to read her thoughts, he slowly angled toward her. He raised his hands and held his palms out to her. Isobel lifted her own hands to mirror his. He pressed their palms together, his fingers folding down to lace through hers. She felt a rush of warmth course through her, a relief as pure and sweet as spring rain.
He was real. This was real. She had found him. She could touch him. She could feel him. Finally they were together. Finally, finally, they could forget this wasted world and go home.
"I knew it wasn’t true," she whispered. "I knew you wouldn’t stop believing." He drew her close.
Leaning into him, she felt him press his lips to her forehead in a kiss. As he spoke, the cool metal of his lip ring grazed her skin, causing a shudder to ripple through her.
"You..." His voice, low and breathy, reverberated through her, down to the thin soles of her slippers. "You think you’re different," he said. She felt his hands tighten around hers, gripping hard, too hard.
A streak of violet lightning split the sky, striking close behind them.
The house, Isobel thought. It had been struck. She could hear it cracking apart. She looked for only a brief moment, long enough to watch it split open.
"But you’re not," Varen said, calling her attention back to him. Isobel winced, her own hands surrendering under the suddenly crushing pressure of his hold. A face she did not recognize stared down at her, one twisted with anger — with hate.
"You," he scarcely more than breathed, "are just like every. Body. Else."
He moved so fast. Before she could register his words or the fact that she had once spoken them to him herself, he jerked her to one side. Isobel felt her feet part from the rocks. Weightlessness took hold of her as she swung out and over the ledge of the cliff.
As he let her go.
The wind whistled its high and lonely song in her ears. She fell away into the oblivion of the storm until she could no longer see the cliff — could no longer see him.
Only the slip of the pink ribbon as it unraveled from her wrist, floating up and away from her and out of sight forever.
”
”
Kelly Creagh (Enshadowed (Nevermore, #2))
“
There was a high scream from somewhere in Diane's house, and the sound of a mirror cracking. The refrigerator opened, and a carton of almond milk hit the floor as if it had been slapped off its shelf. (It had.) The faceless old woman who secretly lives in her home was on one of her rampages again.
”
”
Joseph Fink (Welcome to Night Vale (Welcome to Night Vale, #1))
“
A Faint Music by Robert Hass
Maybe you need to write a poem about grace.
When everything broken is broken,
and everything dead is dead,
and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt,
and the heroine has studied her face and its defects
remorselessly, and the pain they thought might,
as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves
has lost its novelty and not released them,
and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly,
watching the others go about their days—
likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears—
that self-love is the one weedy stalk
of every human blossoming, and understood,
therefore, why they had been, all their lives,
in such a fury to defend it, and that no one—
except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool
of poverty and silence—can escape this violent, automatic
life’s companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light,
faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears.
As in the story a friend told once about the time
he tried to kill himself. His girl had left him.
Bees in the heart, then scorpions, maggots, and then ash.
He climbed onto the jumping girder of the bridge,
the bay side, a blue, lucid afternoon.
And in the salt air he thought about the word “seafood,”
that there was something faintly ridiculous about it.
No one said “landfood.” He thought it was degrading to the rainbow perch
he’d reeled in gleaming from the cliffs, the black rockbass,
scales like polished carbon, in beds of kelp
along the coast—and he realized that the reason for the word
was crabs, or mussels, clams. Otherwise
the restaurants could just put “fish” up on their signs,
and when he woke—he’d slept for hours, curled up
on the girder like a child—the sun was going down
and he felt a little better, and afraid. He put on the jacket
he’d used for a pillow, climbed over the railing
carefully, and drove home to an empty house.
There was a pair of her lemon yellow panties
hanging on a doorknob. He studied them. Much-washed.
A faint russet in the crotch that made him sick
with rage and grief. He knew more or less
where she was. A flat somewhere on Russian Hill.
They’d have just finished making love. She’d have tears
in her eyes and touch his jawbone gratefully. “God,”
she’d say, “you are so good for me.” Winking lights,
a foggy view downhill toward the harbor and the bay.
“You’re sad,” he’d say. “Yes.” “Thinking about Nick?”
“Yes,” she’d say and cry. “I tried so hard,” sobbing now,
“I really tried so hard.” And then he’d hold her for a while—
Guatemalan weavings from his fieldwork on the wall—
and then they’d fuck again, and she would cry some more,
and go to sleep.
And he, he would play that scene
once only, once and a half, and tell himself
that he was going to carry it for a very long time
and that there was nothing he could do
but carry it. He went out onto the porch, and listened
to the forest in the summer dark, madrone bark
cracking and curling as the cold came up.
It’s not the story though, not the friend
leaning toward you, saying “And then I realized—,”
which is the part of stories one never quite believes.
I had the idea that the world’s so full of pain
it must sometimes make a kind of singing.
And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps—
First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing
”
”
Robert Hass (Sun under Wood)
“
Which on am I?" I drew my left eyebrow in a high, puzzled arch.
"Which what?" Crack reached for her makeup kit. "Bottom or fool?" She pulled out a tiny mirror and put another layer of mascara on her giant fake lashes. She used a special oversized mascara brush for her oversized lashes, carried in a big tube.
"No. Trixie, Twinkie, or Bubbles?" I asked. "Who, in the show?"
She shrugged. "What ever you want, Sugar. Makes no diff to me. A name's just another kind of package. Marketing. Starts the day you're born" p.136
”
”
Monica Drake (Clown Girl)
“
Insomniacs should not be forced to exist in a realm with reflective glass. From the first look I’m boxed in a prism, rainbows charming the other dark-circled self into sharing my prison. One eye turns on the other, each accusing the other of being responsible for an appearance oddly elfin, before exiting head and bouncing like lottery balls through the mirror walls and then drifting up and out the open and unguarded Well of the Wyrd. There, everyone with mirrors and mushrooms is waiting for me, faded and dissolved into giggles.
”
”
Amanda Sledz (Psychopomp Volume One: Cracked Plate)
“
She had grown older in four days, and the face that looked back at her from the spotted, cracked mirror was drawn and tired. There were dark rings beneath her eyes, and little hollows in her cheeks. Sleep came late to her at night, and she had no appetite for food. For the first time in her life she saw a resemblance between herself and her Aunt Patience.
”
”
Daphne du Maurier (Jamaica Inn)
“
Even a broken mirror isn’t broken if it allows you to see who you really are—cracked down the middle in your duality.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
“
The cracking of old and famous structures is slow and internal, while the facade holds.
”
”
Barbara W. Tuchman (A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century)
“
Miss Marple made the kind of noise that would once have been written down as 'tut-tut'.
”
”
Agatha Christie (The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side (Miss Marple, #9))
“
Murder develops. Yes, like a photograph, isn't it?
”
”
Agatha Christie (The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side (Miss Marple, #9))
“
I love mirrors,’ he had once heard Fulgrim say. ‘They let one pass through the surface of things.
”
”
Graham McNeill (The Reflection Crack'd (The Horus Heresy))
“
She’d cracked like a mirror after, and her pieces were so sharp, none of us could get close enough to put her back together again.
”
”
Jess Lourey (The Quarry Girls)
“
That's what marriage does, you know, holds a mirror up to every crack and crevice it finds hiding stuff down in your soul.
”
”
Lancelot Schaubert (Bell Hammers)
“
After you’ve fallen in love with a man and married him and got used to his ways and settled down comfortably—to go and throw it all up and start again! It seems to me madness.
”
”
Agatha Christie (The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side (Miss Marple, #9))
“
Because you want to have everything in your own volition, your deliberate voluntary consciousness. You want it all in that loathsome little skull of yours, that ought to be cracked like a nut. For you'll be the same till it is cracked, like an insect in its skin. If one cracked your skull perhaps one might get a spontaneous, passionate woman out of you, with real sensuality. As it is, what you want is pornography--looking at yourself in mirrors, watching your naked animal actions in mirrors, so that you can have it all in your consciousness, make it all mental.
”
”
D.H. Lawrence (Women in Love)
“
Sam counts the money carefully. I watch him in the mirror. “You know what I wish?” he asks when he’s done.
“What?”
“That someone would convert my bed into a robot that would fight other bed robots to the death for me.”
That startles a laugh out of me. “That would be pretty awesome.”
A slow, shy smile spreads across his mouth. “And we could take bets on them. And be filthy rich.”
I lean my head against the frame of the stall, looking at the tile wall and the pattern of yellowed cracks there, and grin. “I take back anything I might have
implied to the contrary. Sam, you are a genius.
”
”
Holly Black
“
Love The Wild Swan
I hate my verses, every line, every word.
Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try
One grass-blade's curve, or the throat of one bird
That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky.
Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch
One color, one glinting
Hash, of the splendor of things.
Unlucky hunter, Oh bullets of wax,
The lion beauty, the wild-swan wings, the storm of the wings."
--This wild swan of a world is no hunter's game.
Better bullets than yours would miss the white breast
Better mirrors than yours would crack in the flame.
Does it matter whether you hate your . . . self?
At least Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can
Hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan.
”
”
Robinson Jeffers
“
But as I stood across from Archer, I couldn't forget that I was completely, stupidly in love with the one person I could never have.
The laughter died on my lips, and I dashed at my eyes with the back of my hand. "I need to get back," I said.
"Right," he replied. He was still holding his sword in his right hand, and he twirled the hilt, the point sratching the wooden floor. "So this is it. We're done."
"Yeah," I said, my voice cracking. I cleared my throat. "And I have to say, the world's first and last Eye-demon reconnaissance mission went pretty well." It was a struggle to meet his eyes, but I managed it. "Thank you."
He shrugged, his dark gaze full of something I couldn't quite read. "We were a good team."
"We were." In more ways than one, I thought. Which is why this sucked so bad.
I stepped back. "Anyway, I should go. See ya,Cross." Then I laughed, only it sounded suspiciously like another sob. "Except I won't, will I So I guess I should say goodbye." I felt like I was about to shatter into a million tiny shards, like the mirrors I'd broken with Dad. "okay, well, best of luck with the whole Eye thing, then. Try not to kill anyone I know." I turned away, but he reached out and caught my wrist.
I could feel my pulse hammering under his fingers. "Mercer, that day in the cellar..." He searched my face, and I could sense him struggling for what he wanted to say. Then finally, "I didn't kiss you back because I had to. I kissed you because I wanted to." His eyes dropped to my lips,and it was like the whole world had shrunk to just me and him and the shaft of light between us. "I still want to," he said hoarsely. He tugged my wrist and pulled me into his arms.
My brain registered the sound of his sword clattering to he ground as his other hand came up to grab the back of my neck, but once his lips were on mine, everything else faded away. I clutched at his shoulders, raising up on my tiptoes, and kissed him with everything I had in me. As the kiss deepened, we held each other tighter, so I didn't know if the pounding heartbeat I felt was mine or his.
How stupid,I thought dreamily, to have ever thought I could give this up. Not just the kissing, although, as Archer's hands cupped my face, I had to admit that part was pretty awesome. But all of it: joking with him and working beside him. Being with a guy who was my friend and could still make me feel like this.
”
”
Rachel Hawkins (Demonglass (Hex Hall, #2))
“
I don't want to hear how he beat her after the earthquake,
tore up her writing, threw the kerosene
lantern into her face waiting
like an unbearable mirror of his own. I don't
want to hear how she finally ran from the trailer
how he tore the keys from her hands, jumped into the truck
and backed it into her. I don't want to think
how her guesses betrayed her - that he meant well, that she
was really the stronger and ought not to leave him
to his own apparent devastation. I don't want to know
wreckage, dreck and waste, but these are the materials
and so are the slow lift of the moon's belly
over wreckage, dreck, and waste, wild treefrogs calling in
another season, light and music still pouring over
our fissured, cracked terrain.
”
”
Adrienne Rich (An Atlas of the Difficult World)
“
Evidence of identification was given by the husband, and the only other evidence was medical. Heather Badcock had died as a result of four grains of hy-ethyl-dexyl-barbo-quinde-lorytate, or, let us be frank, some such name.
”
”
Agatha Christie (The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side (Miss Marple, #9))
“
If I had one sermon to preach, it would be a sermon against Pride. The more I see of existence...the more I am convinced of the reality of the old religious thesis, that all evil began with some attempt at superiority; some moment when, as we might say, the very skies were cracked across like a mirror, because there was a sneer in Heaven.
”
”
G.K. Chesterton
“
I got the feeling that if I moved the frames to the side, I'd see the artists watching me, as though through a two-way mirror, cracking their arthritic knuckles and rubbing their stubbled chins, wondering what I was wondering about them, if I saw their brilliance, or if their lives had been pointless, if only God could judge them after all. Did they want more? Was there more genius to be wrung out of the turpentine rags at their feet? Could they have painted better? Could they have painted more generously? More clearly? Could they have dropped more fruit from their windows? Did they know that glory was mundane? Did they wish they'd crushed those withered grapes between their fingers and spent their days walking through fields of grass or being in love or confessing their delusions to a priest or starving like the hungry souls they were, begging for alms in the city square with some honesty for once? Maybe they'd lived wrongly.
(...)
Or maybe not. Maybe, in the morning, they were aloof and happy to distract themselves with their brushes and oils, to mix their colors and smoke their pipes and go back to their fresh still lives without having to swat away any more flies.
”
”
Ottessa Moshfegh (My Year of Rest and Relaxation)
“
So this, Harriet thought, gazing at her black-clad reflection, was what bearing up looked like. The eyes in the mirror stared at her, somehow, while fixing themselves far away.
Bearing up, then, must be this: the feeling of perfect frozen stillness, so that to raise your hand was a wrenching and unnatural event. It was not being able to sleep or eat, and the small placid tone in which she heard herself decline the food. It was the presentiment that there must be a crack or a hole somewhere at hand down which she was to throw and extinguish herself, since there must surely be something provided to make this bearable.
”
”
Jude Morgan
“
She caught him in his schoolboy mode, polite and dutiful, mailing letters to his grandparents and step-siblings, notes full of nothing written in perfect script. Yet he feels like she caught him so unaware and alone that she saw the other side, the wolf crawling through wreckage, through broken walls, cracked Venetian mirrors, dust, blood, a turned-over rocking horse - the child who doesn't know it's own name.
”
”
Jardine Libaire (White Fur)
“
The Chief always insisted it would take acts such as this to fill the world's great hollows. Though nothing else could do it, he said, murder would fill those gaping caves in much the same way that a crack along its face will fill a mirror. Then they would achieve real power over existence.
”
”
Yukio Mishima (The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea)
“
You’re always surprising me,” she said. “The things you take an interest in.”
“I take an interest in everything,” said Miss Marple.
“I mean taking up new subjects at your age.”
Miss Marple shook her head. “They aren’t really new subjects. It’s human nature I’m interested in, you know, and human nature is much the same whether it’s film stars or hospital nurses or people in St. Mary Mead or,” she added thoughtfully, “people who live in the Development.
”
”
Agatha Christie (The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side (Miss Marple, #9))
“
For the first time in her life, Alba wanted to be beautiful. She regretted that the splendid women in her family had not bequeathed their attributes to her, that the only one who had, Rosa the Beautiful, had given her only the algae tones in her hair, which seemed more like a hairdresser's mistake then anything else. Miguel understood the source of her anxiety. He led her by the hand to the huge Venetian mirror that adorned one wall of their secret room, shook the dust from the cracked glass, and lit all the candles they had and arranged them around her. She stared at herself in the thousand pieces of the mirror. In the candlelight her skin was the unreal color of wax statues. Miguel began to caress her and she saw her face transformed in the kaleidoscope of the mirror, and she finally believed that she was the most beautiful woman in the universe because she was able to see herself with Miguel's eyes.
”
”
Isabel Allende (The House of the Spirits)
“
If there was a single moment when the breach between us, which had been cracking and splintering for two decades, was at last too vast to be bridged, I believe it was that winter night, when I stared at my reflection in the bathroom mirror, while, without my knowing it, my father grasped the phone in his knotted hands and dialed my brother. Diego, the knife. What followed was very dramatic. But the real drama had already played out in the bathroom. It had played out when, for reasons I don’t understand, I was unable to climb through the mirror and send out my sixteen-year-old self in my place. Until that moment she had always been there. No matter how much I appeared to have changed—how illustrious my education, how altered my appearance—I was still her. At best I was two people, a fractured mind. She was inside, and emerged whenever I crossed the threshold of my father’s house. That night I called on her and she didn’t answer. She left me. She stayed in the mirror. The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones she would have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self.
”
”
Tara Westover (Educated)
“
Then I get up and turn on the light. (Did anyone notice I was in here in the dark? Did they see the lack of light under the crack and notice it like a roach? Did Nia see?) Then I look in the mirror. I look so normal. I look like I’ve always looked, like I did before the fall of last year. Dark hair and dark eyes and one snaggled tooth. Big eyebrows that meet in the middle. A long nose, sort of twisted. Pupils that are naturally large—it’s not the pot—which blend into the dark brown to make two big saucer eyes, holes in me. Wisps of hair above my upper lip. This is Craig.
”
”
Ned Vizzini (It's Kind of a Funny Story)
“
It so happens I am sick of being a man.
And it happens that I walk into tailorshops and movie houses
dried up, waterproof, like a swan made of felt
steering my way in a water of wombs and ashes.
The smell of barbershops makes me break into hoarse sobs.
The only thing I want is to lie still like stones or wool.
The only thing I want is to see no more stores, no gardens,
no more goods, no spectacles, no elevators.
It so happens that I am sick of my feet and my nails
and my hair and my shadow.
It so happens I am sick of being a man.
Still it would be marvelous
to terrify a law clerk with a cut lily,
or kill a nun with a blow on the ear.
It would be great
to go through the streets with a green knife
letting out yells until I died of the cold.
I don't want to go on being a root in the dark,
insecure, stretched out, shivering with sleep,
going on down, into the moist guts of the earth,
taking in and thinking, eating every day.
I don't want so much misery.
I don't want to go on as a root and a tomb,
alone under the ground, a warehouse with corpses,
half frozen, dying of grief.
That's why Monday, when it sees me coming
with my convict face, blazes up like gasoline,
and it howls on its way like a wounded wheel,
and leaves tracks full of warm blood leading toward the night.
And it pushes me into certain corners, into some moist houses,
into hospitals where the bones fly out the window,
into shoeshops that smell like vinegar,
and certain streets hideous as cracks in the skin.
There are sulphur-colored birds, and hideous intestines
hanging over the doors of houses that I hate,
and there are false teeth forgotten in a coffeepot,
there are mirrors
that ought to have wept from shame and terror,
there are umbrellas everywhere, and venoms, and umbilical cords.
I stroll along serenely, with my eyes, my shoes,
my rage, forgetting everything,
I walk by, going through office buildings and orthopedic shops,
and courtyards with washing hanging from the line:
underwear, towels and shirts from which slow
dirty tears are falling
”
”
Pablo Neruda
“
Agnes shut her eyes, clenched her fists, opened her mouth and screamed.
It started low. Plaster dust drifted down from the ceiling. The prisms on the chandelier chimed gently as they shook.
It rose, passing quickly through the mysterious pitch at fourteen cycles per second where the human spirit begins to feel distinctly uncomfortable about the universe and the place in it of the bowels. Small items around the Opera House vibrated off shelves and smashed on the floor.
The note climbed, rang like a bell, climbed again. In the Pit, all the violin strings snapped, one by one.
As the tone rose, the crystal prisms shook in the chandelier. In the bar, champagne corks fired a salvo. Ice jingled and shattered in its bucket. A line of wine-glasses joined in the chorus, blurred around the rims, and then exploded like hazardous thistledown with attitude.
There were harmonics and echoes that caused strange effects. In the dressing-rooms the No. 3 greasepaint melted. Mirrors cracked, filling the ballet school with a million fractured images.
Dust rose, insects fell. In the stones of the Opera House tiny particles of quartz danced briefly...
Then there was silence, broken by the occasional thud and tinkle.
Nanny grinned.
'Ah,' she said, 'now the opera's over.
”
”
Terry Pratchett (Maskerade (Discworld, #18; Witches, #5))
“
Today is the starting line for the rest of your life. Yes, today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday. The problem with the past is that we remember memories we shouldn't, and we don't forget what we should“ If your eyes are stuck in the rearview mirror, you're stuck in the past. If you're stuck in the past, you're not looking ahead. If you're not looking ahead, you can't hit the mark of your future.
The universe doesn't care about your past. It is blind to it. The universe doesn't care that I wore pink pants in high school. (Hey, remember Miami Vice?) The universe doesn't care that I got in a fight with Francis Franken and lost. The universe doesn't care about your MBA from UCLA, your drug-dealing father, or that you wet your bed in junior high. The universe simply doesn't care. One person and one person only weaponizes past transgressions: you.
”
”
M.J. DeMarco (The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime!)
“
Thank you for cracking open the barrier, by the way. I’ve been meaning to stop by for ages but never had the chance until now. It’s such a shame I have to kill you. You would have made an excellent villain. After all, you’ve caused more damage in one afternoon than most henchmen do in a lifetime. And I didn’t touch your parents. The blame for their loss lies squarely on your shoulders.” She punctuated the your by pointing the mirror in my direction.
”
”
Betsy Schow (Spelled (The Storymakers, #1))
“
I have a system with bathrooms. I spend a lot of time in them. They are sanctuaries, public places of peace spaced throughout the world for people like me. When I pop into Aaron’s, I continue my normal routine of wasting time. I turn the light off first. Then I sigh. Then I turn around, face the door I just closed, pull down my pants, and fall on the toilet— I don’t sit; I fall like a carcass, feeling my butt accommodate the rim. Then I put my head in my hands and breathe out as I, well, y’know, piss. I always try to enjoy it, to feel it come out and realize that it’s my body doing something it has to do, like eating, although I’m not too good at that. I bury my face in my hands and wish that it could go on forever because it feels good. You do it and it’s done. It doesn’t take any effort or any planning. You don’t put it off. That would be really screwed up, I think. If you had such problems that you didn’t pee. Like being anorexic, except with urine. If you held it in as self-punishment. I wonder if anyone does that? I finish up and flush, reaching behind me, my head still down. Then I get up and turn on the light. (Did anyone notice I was in here in the dark? Did they see the lack of light under the crack and notice it like a roach? Did Nia see?) Then I look in the mirror. I look so normal. I look like I’ve always looked, like I did before the fall of last year. Dark hair and dark eyes and one snaggled tooth. Big eyebrows that meet in the middle. A long nose, sort of twisted. Pupils that are naturally large—it’s not the pot— which blend into the dark brown to make two big saucer eyes, holes in me. Wisps of hair above my upper lip. This is Craig. And I always look like I’m about to cry. I put on the hot water and splash it at my face to feel something. In a few seconds I’m going to have to go back and face the crowd. But I can sit in the dark on the toilet a little more, can’t I? I always manage to make a trip to the bathroom take five minutes.
”
”
Ned Vizzini (It's Kind of a Funny Story)
“
I tear down Baxter, which loops around the last mile down to Back Cove.
And then I stop short. The buildings have fallen away behind me, giving way to ramshackle sheds, sparsely situated on either side of the cracked and run-down road. Beyond that, a short strip of tall, weedy grass slants down toward the cove.
The water is an enormous mirror, tipped with pink and gold from the sky. In that single, blazing moment as I come around the bend, the sun—curved over the dip of the horizon like a solid gold archway—lets out its final winking rays of light, shattering the darkness of the water, turning everything white for a fraction of a second, and then falls away, sinking, dragging the pink and the red and the purple out of the sky with it, all the color bleeding away instantly and leaving only dark.
Alex was right. It was gorgeous—one of the best I’ve ever seen.
”
”
Lauren Oliver
“
The Congregating of Stars
They often meet in mountain lakes,
No matter how remote, no matter how deep
Down and far they must stream to arrive,
Navigating between the steep, vertical piles
Of broken limestone and chert, through shattered
Trees and dry bushes bent low by winter,
Across ravines cut by roaring avalanches
Of boulders and ripping ice.
Silently, the stars have assembled
On the surface of this lost lake tonight,
Arranged themselves to match the patterns
They maintain in the highest spheres
Of the surrounding sky.
And they continue on, passing through
The smooth, black countenance of the lake,
Through that mirror of themselves, down through
The icy waters to touch the perfect bottom
Stillness of the invisible life and death existing
In the nether of those depths.
Sky-bound- yet touching every needle
In the torn and sturdy forest, every stone,
Sharp, cracked along the ragged shore- the stars
Appear the same as in ancient human ages
On the currents of the old seas and the darkened
Trails of desert dunes, Orion’s belt the same
As it shone in Galileo’s eyes, Polaris certain above
The sails of every mariner’s voyage. An echoing
Light from the Magi’s star, that beacon, might even
Be shining on this lake tonight, unrecognized.
The stars are congregating, perhaps
in celebration, passing through their own
names and legends, through fogs, airs,
and thunders, the vapors of winter frost
and summer pollens. They are ancestors
of transfiguration, intimate with all the eyes
of the night. What can they know?
”
”
Pattiann Rogers (Quickening Fields (Penguin Poets))
“
He stood in a room, looking around, seeing thousands of himself. He banged the walls made of mirrors, but they wouldn't break. Thier laugh filled his heart and with fear, he curled up and sat there. And then She came out of nowhere and wrapped her arm around him. She held his hand, together they got up and walked towards a wall. He raised his head and looked at the reflections, but all he saw there was only him. She turned and smiled at him and touched the wall. It cracked and shattered into pieces. She inside him broke all the walls around him. He was free, he was not held and haunted by his reflections anymore.
”
”
Akshay Vasu
“
I look in the jewelry box where Joanie found the drugs. She showed me a miniature Ziploc bag filled with a clear, hard rock.
“What is this?” I said. I never did drugs, so I had no idea. Heroin? Cocaine? Crack? Ice? “What is this?” I screamed at Alex, who screamed back, “It’s not like I shoot it!”
A plastic ballerina pops up and slowly twirls to a tinkling song whose sound is discordant and deformed. The pink satin liner is dirty, and other than a black pearl necklace, the box holds only rusty paper clips and rubber bands noosed with Alex’s dark hair. I see a note stuck to the mirror and pick up the jewelry box and move the ballerina aside. She twirls against my finger. The note says, I wouldn’t hide them in the same place twice.
I let out a short breath through my nose. Good one, Alex. I close the jewelry box and shake my head, missing her tremendously. I wish she never went back to boarding school, and I don’t understand her sudden change of plans. What did they fight about? What could have been so bad?
”
”
Kaui Hart Hemmings (The Descendants)
“
She looked in the mirror and her hopes fell. “Our friend is behind us again and he’s coming up fast. Closing the distance.”
Then he knows we’re on to him.”
Christ! He’s got a gun, Red! He’s stuck his arm out the window.”
Don’t worry,” Red told her. “Shooting a pistol left-handed from a moving car at another moving car at sixty miles an hour at this distance? Hell, he’d be lucky to hit that mountain.”
There was a sharp crack and the rear window disintegrated into flashing shards. Something buzzed in the air between them and smashed into the tapedeck. Fee howled and ducked into his console.
Unless,” Red continued thoughtfully, “that’s Orvid Crayle behind us. He’s very good.
”
”
Michael Flynn (In the Country of the Blind)
“
The man under the bed The man who has been there for years waiting The man who waits for my floating bare foot The man who is silent as dustballs riding the darkness The man whose breath is the breathing of small white butterflies The man whose breathing I hear when I pick up the phone The man in the mirror whose breath blackens silver The boneman in closets who rattles the mothballs The man at the end of the end of the line I met him tonight I always meet him He stands in the amber air of a bar When the shrimp curl like beckoning fingers ride through the air on their toothpick skewers When the ice cracks & I am about to fall through he arranges his face around its hollows he opens his pupilless eyes at me For years he has waited to drag me down & now he tells me he has only waited to take me home We waltz through the street like death & the maiden We float through the wall of the wall of my room If he’s my dream he will fold back into my body His breath writes letters of mist on the glass of my cheeks I wrap myself around him like the darkness I breathe into his mouth & make him real
”
”
Erica Jong (Fear of Flying)
“
I never knew Kierkegaard was funny, but I think this is funny: “The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss—an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc.—is sure to be noticed.” I did not notice. I would catch my reflection in the mirror in the bathroom, where I went again and again to wash my hands after changing diapers. So used to gazing down at babies, I was shocked, every time, to discover there was another face up there. Our eyes would meet, and then I would finish drying my red, cracked hands and leave her behind, as if she were nothing at all. I guess it’s not that funny.
”
”
Tabitha Carvan (This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch: The Joy of Loving Something--Anything--Like Your Life Depends On It)
“
She looked at her own image and removed the bandana, shaking down her hair, not fixed in a braid today but with a sticky twistiness still in it.
As her voice had come out of her startled mouth younger than she was, she looked younger in this antique, forgiving mirror. It was slightly tipped; she looked up into it, pleased that the flesh beneath her chin did not show.
In the bathroom mirror at home she looked terrible, a hag with cracked lips and a dented nose with broken veins in her septum, and when, driving in the Subaru, she stole a peek of herself in the rearview mirror, she looked worse yet, corpselike in color, the eyes wild and a single stray lash laid like a beetle-leg across one lower lid. As a tiny girl Alexandra had imagined that behind every mirror a different person waited to peek back out, a different soul. Like so much of what we fear as a child, it turned out to be in a sense true.
”
”
John Updike (The Witches of Eastwick)
“
Lots of talk lately about the GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL that seems to be exclusively masculine. And how many of the characters in the GENIUS BOOKS are likable? Is Holden Caulfield likable? Is Meursault in The Stranger? Is Henry Miller? Is any character in any of these system novels particularly likable? Aren’t they usually loathsome but human, etc., loathsome and neurotic and obsessed? In my memory, all the characters in Jonathan Franzen are total douchebags (I know, I know, I’m not supposed to use that, feminine imagery, whatever, but it is SO satisfying to say and think). How about female characters in the genius books? Was Madame Bovary likable? Was Anna Karenina? Is Daisy Buchanan likable? Is Daisy Miller? Is it the specific way in which supposed readers HATE unlikable female characters (who are too depressed, too crazy, too vain, too self-involved, too bored, too boring), that mirrors the specific way in which people HATE unlikable girls and women for the same qualities? We do not allow, really, the notion of the antiheroine, as penned by women, because we confuse the autobiographical, and we pass judgment on the female author for her terrible self-involved and indulgent life. We do not hate Scott Fitzgerald in “The Crack-Up” or Georges Bataille in Guilty for being drunken and totally wading in their own pathos, but Jean Rhys is too much of a victim.
”
”
Kate Zambreno
“
We all lie. We all guard secrets—sometimes terrible ones—a side to us so dark, so shameful, that we quickly avert our own eyes from the shadow we might glimpse in the mirror. Instead we lock our dark halves deep in the basement of our souls. And on the surface of our lives, we work industriously to shape the public story of our selves. We say, “Look, world, this is me.” We craft posts on social media . . . See this wonderful lunch I’m eating at this trendy restaurant with my besties, see my sexy shoes, my cute puppy, boyfriend, tight ass in a bikini. See my gloriously perfect life . . . see what a fucking fabulous time I’m having drunk and at this party with my boobs swelling out of my sparkly tank top. Just look at those hot guys draped all over me. Aren’t you jealous . . . And then you wait to see how many people LIKE this fabricated version of yourself, your mood hinging on the number of clicks. Comments. Who commented. But darkness has a way of seeping through the cracks. It seeks the light . . .
”
”
Loreth Anne White (The Drowned Girls (Angie Pallorino, #1))
“
Gina hoisted herself up onto her elbows and gaped at Spike. "So that's the famous Spike I've been hearing so much about from your brothers? Damn, he is ugly."
Jesse, who'd stayed where he was, looked defensive. Spike was his baby, and you just don't go around calling Jesse's baby ugly.
"He's not so bad," I said, hoping Gina would get the message and shut up.
"Are you on crack?" Gina wanted to know. "Simon, the thing's only got one ear."
Suddenly, the large, gilt-framed mirror above the dressing table started to shake. It had a tendency to do this whenever Jesse got annoyed - really annoyed.
Gina, not knowing this, stared at the mirror with growing excitement. "Hey!" she cried. "All right! Another one!"
She meant an earthquake, of course, but this, like the one before, was no earthquake. It was just Jesse letting off steam.
Then the next thing I knew, a bottle of finger-nail polish Gina had left on the dressing table went flying and, defying all gravitational law, landed upside down in the suitcase she had placed on the floor at the end of the daybed, around seven or eight feet away.
I probably don't need to add that the bottle of polish - it was emerald green - was uncapped. And that it ended up on top of the clothes Gina hadn't unpacked yet.
Gina let out a terrified shriek, threw back the comforter, and dove to the floor, trying to salvage what she could. I, meanwhile, threw Jesse a very dirty look.
But all he said was, "Don't look at me like that, Susannah. You heard what she said about him." He sounded wounded. "She called him ugly.
”
”
Meg Cabot (Reunion (The Mediator, #3))
“
Robert Frost at Eighty"
I think there are poems greater and stranger than any I have known.
I would like to find them.
They are not on the greying paper of old books
or chanted on obscure lips.
They are not in the language of mermaids
or the sharp-tongued adjectives of vanishing.
They run like torn threads along paving stones.
They are cracked as the skull of an old man.
They stir in the mirror
at fifty,
at eighty.
My ear keeps trying to hear them
but the seafront is cold.
The tide moves in.
They migrate like crows at a cricket ground.
They knock at the door when I am out.
I have done with craft.
How can I front ghosts with cleverness,
the slick glide of paradox and rhyme
that transforms prejudice
to brittle gems of seeming wisdom?
Though I bury all I own or hold close
though my skin outlives the trees
though the lines fall shattering the stone
I cannot catch them.
They have the lilting accent
of a house I saw but never entered.
They are the sounds a child hears –
the water, the afternoon, the sky.
I watch them now
trickling through the open mirror.
Sometimes, but almost never
we touch what we desire.
”
”
Peter Boyle
“
opting to complain, life gives you things to complain about
this vicious circle ensures your happiness drought
life responds to us according to our actions and belief
thus reinforcing those beliefs to no relief
there is no first cause—still, break the cycle
abide in peaceful Silence or experience an inner hell
“others” are often a reflecting mirror shining back
revealing to us what loads are left to unstack
what are friends for but a means to practice kindness
and for fortifying the ego’s belief in disconnectedness
people cater to me according to my own nature
so they are me—there is no individual self, rest assured
tweak your thoughts about her and she then treats you thus
all minds are one, and all is illusory, as priorly discussed
she is you, and you, her
the shroud of separateness shall now henceforth wither
look back at your life’s recurring patterns and themes
and the façade of the ego will start to crack at the seams
untranscended mindsets follow wherever we go
the common denominator is what your mind has sown
that which supports life is automatically supported
the get-gain-obtain mentality can be safely aborted
”
”
Jarett Sabirsh (Love All-Knowing: An Epic Spiritual Poem)
“
Where the hell did the Pack find you two? At a beach volleyball tournament? Great tan. Love those curls.” LeBlanc shook his head. “He’s not even as big as I am. He’s what, six foot nothing? Two hundred pounds in steel-toed boots? Christ. I’m expecting some ugly bruiser bigger than Cain and what do I find? The next Baywatch star. Looks like his IQ would be low enough. Can he chew gum and tie his shoes at the same time?”
Clay stopped playing with his chair and turned to face the mirror. He got up, crossed the room, and stood in front of me. I was leaning forward, one hand pressed against the glass. Clay touched his fingertips to mine and smiled. LeBlanc jumped back.
“Fuck,” he said. “I thought that was one-way glass.”
“It is.”
Clay turned his head toward LeBlanc and mouthed three words. Then the door to his room opened and one of the officers called him out. Clay grinned at me, then sauntered out with the officer. As he left, a surge of renewed confidence ran through me.
“What did he say?” LeBlanc asked.
“Wait for me.”
“What?”
“It’s a challenge,” Marsten murmured from across the room. He didn’t look up from his magazine. “He’s inviting you to stick around and get to know him better.”
“Are you going to?” LeBlanc asked.
Marsten’s lips curved in a smile. “He didn’t invite me.”
LeBlanc snorted. “For a bunch of killer monsters, the whole lot of you are nothing but hot air. All your rules and challenges and false bravado.” He waved a hand at me. “Like you. Standing there so nonchalantly, pretending you aren’t the least bit concerned about having the two of us in the room.”
“I’m not.”
“You should be. Do you know how fast I could kill you? You’re standing two feet away from me. If I had a gun or knife in my pocket, you’d be dead before you had time to scream.”
“Really? Huh.”
LeBlanc’s cheek twitched. “You don’t believe me, do you? How do you know I’m not packing a gun? There’s no metal detector at the door. I could pull one out now, kill you, and escape in thirty seconds.”
“Then do it. I know, you don’t like our little games, but humor me. If you have a gun or a knife, pull it out. If not, pretend to. Prove you could do it."
“I don’t need to prove anything. Certainly not to a smart-mouthed—”
He whipped his hand up in mid-sentence. I grabbed it and snapped his wrist. The sound cracked through the room. The receptionist glanced over, but LeBlanc had his back to her. I smiled at her and she turned away.
“You—fucking—bitch,” LeBlanc gasped, cradling his arm. “You broke my wrist.”
“So I win.”
His face purpled. “You smug—”
“Nobody likes a sore loser,” I said. “Grit your teeth and bear it. There’s no crying in werewolf games. Didn’t Daniel teach you that?
”
”
Kelley Armstrong (Bitten (Otherworld, #1))
“
The way you see the change in a person you've been away from for a long time, where somebody who sees him every day, day in, day out, wouldn't notice because the change is gradual. All up the coast I could see the signs of what the Combine had accomplished since I was last through this country, things like, for example a train stopping at a station and laying a string of full-grown men in mirrored suits and
machined hats, laying them like a hatch of identical insects, half-life things coming pht-pht-pht out of the last car, then hooting its electric whistle and moving on down the spoiled land to deposit another hatch.
Or things like five thousand houses punched out identical by a machine and strung across the hills outside of town, so fresh from the factory theyre still linked together like sausages, a sign saying NEST IN THE WEST HOMES NO DWN. PAYMENT FOR VETS, a playground down the hill from the houses, behind a checker-wire fence and another sign that read ST. LUKE'S SCHOOL FOR BOYS there were five
thousand kids in green corduroy pants and white shirts under green pullover sweaters playing crack-the-whip across an acre of crushed gravel. The line popped and twisted and jerked like a snake, and every crack popped a little kid off the end, sent him rolling up against the fence like a tumbleweed. Every crack.
And it was always the same little kid, over and over.
All that five thousand kids lived in those five thousand houses, owned by those guys that got off the train. The houses looked so much alike that, time and time again, the kids went home by mistake to different houses and different families. Nobody ever noticed. They ate and went to bed. The only one they noticed was the little kid at the end of the whip. He'd always be so scuffed and bruised that he'd show up
out of place wherever he went. He wasn't able to open up and laugh either. It's a hard thing to laugh if you can feel the pressure of those beams coming from every new car that passes, or every new house you pass.
”
”
Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest)
“
I Never Told You
You can fill a book with everything I never said
Or the lines of a poem
Or an Empty pool
Or an empty bedroom, the candles all blown out
I never told you how the reflection of myself in your eyes
Was the only mirror I could bear to look at
Or how I fought every day
To transfuse the girl I saw there with the girl I am
I tried to breathe in the words you made me:
beautiful
good
brave
I tried to be them for you even though they were weighted with impossibility
I never told you
how I always feared the rough edges of myself were too sharp for you
and how I fought everyday to blunt them
To bring down the walls
To let you in
without cutting you because I could never bear to hurt you like the others did
Every day
a fierce pride roared in me
I was so lucky to know the truth
I was the beneficiary of your radiance
I basked in it and felt special
And if not for the pain of your solitude
I would have been content to be the only one
I never told you
How your touch made me feel like laughing and crying and singing all at once
How your hand passing over my skin where atrocities
Had not yet sloughed off,
Skin cells remembering the worst touches
Was like a tide washing over the ruddy sand
And leaving it whole and smooth
You made my skin forget
Gave me new memories
New sensations that didn't drag the shadows from the past
In your arms I could start again,
Start over.
There is no greater gift in all the world
Than you
to the wreckage
that is me...
I never told you
How I longed to kiss away your every bruise
until there was no evidence
No ghosts of your own suffering
To put your pieces back together
Seal the cracks
Vanish them like they never were
And never, ever
Leave a scar
I never told you
I would take your pain if I could
I would drink it down
And take my comfort
In making you ache a little less
For a little while
Did I?
I'll never know because I never told you that I loved you
I love you
I love you
It's too lat to say it now
The time has passed for words
How pathetic and small and weak
On the phone
Or on a piece of paper
Starving
Without the force of my own vitality
My voice
My breath
My blood singing n my veins for you
To give them power
They are lost
I love you
It's too late but I love you
And I'm sorry
I never told you.
”
”
Emma Scott (How to Save a Life (Dreamcatcher, #1))