Fracture Deep Quotes

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She thought of Aziza's stutter, and of what Aziza had said earlier about fractures and powerful collisions deep down and how sometimes all we see on the surface is a slight tremor.
Khaled Hosseini (A Thousand Splendid Suns)
And if I want your opinion, I’ll give you some forms to fill out, all right?
Suzanne Wright (Fractured (Deep in Your Veins, #5))
My mom always said that guys are like commercials—you can’t trust a single word they say.
Suzanne Wright (Fractured (Deep in Your Veins, #5))
You don't have to thank me. You're mine. I'll always take care of you.
Suzanne Wright (Fractured (Deep in Your Veins, #5))
Our lips just trespassed on those inner labyrinths hidden deep within our ears, filled them with the private music of wicked words, hers in many languages, mine in the off color of my own tongue, until as our tones shifted, and our consonants spun and squealed, rattled faster, hesitated, raced harder, syllables soon melting with groans, or moans finding purchase in new words, or old words, or made-up words, until we gathered up our heat and refused to release it, enjoying too much the dark language we had suddenly stumbled upon, craved to, carved to, not a communication really but a channeling of our rumored desires, hers for all I know gone to Black Forests and wolves, mine banging back to a familiar form, that great revenant mystery I still could only hear the shape of, which in spite of our separate lusts and individual cries still continued to drive us deeper into stranger tones, our mutual desire to keep gripping the burn fueled by sound, hers screeching, mine – I didn’t hear mine – only hears, probably counter-pointing mine, a high-pitched cry, then a whisper dropping unexpectedly to practically a bark, a grunt, whatever, no sense any more, and suddenly no more curves either, just the straight away, some line crossed, where every fractured sound already spoken finally compacts into one long agonizing word, easily exceeding a hundred letters, even thunder, anticipating the inevitable letting go, when the heat is ultimately too much to bear, threatening to burn, scar, tear it all apart, yet tempting enough to hold onto for even one second more, to extend it all, if we can, as if by getting that much closer to the heat, that much more enveloped, would prove … - which when we did clutch, hold, postpone, did in fact prove too much after all, seconds too much, and impossible to refuse, so blowing all of everything apart, shivers and shakes and deep in her throat a thousand letters crashing in a long unmodulated fall, resonating deep within my cochlea and down the cochlear nerve, a last fit of fury describing in lasting detail the shape of things already come. Too bad dark languages rarely survive.
Mark Z. Danielewski (House of Leaves)
But I was the kind of person who found social situations tiring after a while.
Suzanne Wright (Fractured (Deep in Your Veins, #5))
Hey, do you remember that time when I asked what you thought? Yeah, me neither
Suzanne Wright (Fractured (Deep in Your Veins, #5))
Feeling your body beneath me was the closest to heaven that I shall ever come.” He spoke not in a whisper but on an intimate level, his voice rolling like the caress of dark velvet. “Your skin, your mouth, your body, your sweet, sweet moans, and your blood… I want them all. I want quite a bit more, actually. So you best prepare yourself, my lady. Since I’m already damned, I aim to have all of you. I want to see that look of ecstasy on your face over and over again when I’m buried deep inside you and you’re screaming my name.
Juliette Cross (The Red Lily (Vampire Blood, #2))
The next thing Juliana knew, he had her braced against the back wall of the shower, one hand under her bottom, the other tangled in the back of her wet hair, holding her in place as he took her mouth with what seemed to be an urgent, desperate craving, and claimed her body in the same way. His c#ck found her soft notch, his first thick thrust so hard and deep it shoved the air up out of her lungs, her thoughts fracturing beneath the violent surge of sensation.
Rhyannon Byrd (Deadly is the Kiss (Primal Instinct, #9))
He appears close to my age. The left half of his face stands out beneath the hood: one side of plump lips, one squared angle of a chin. Two coppery-colored eyes look back at me – bright and metallic. The sight makes me do a double take. As far as he is from the car, I shouldn’t be able to make out the color, yet they glimmer in the shadow of his cape, like pennies catching a flashlight’s glare in a deep well.
A.G. Howard (RoseBlood)
Time interacts with attention in funny ways. At one extreme, when Ruth was gripped by the compulsive mania and hyperfocus of an Internet search, the hours seemed to aggregate and swell like a wave, swallowing huge chunks of her day. At the other extreme, when her attention was disengaged and fractured, she experienced time at its most granular, wherein moments hung around like particles, diffused and suspended in standing water. There used to be a middle way, too, when her attention was focused but vast, and time felt like a limpid pool, ringed by sunlit ferns. An underground spring fed the pool from deep below, creating a gentle current of words that bubbled up, while on the surface, breezes shimmered and played.
Ruth Ozeki (A Tale for the Time Being)
Awe is quite a specific experience. It happens when we view beauty amid vastness, predominantly in nature, triggering a deep sense of belonging. Our smallness against a backdrop of immensity reminds us of our insignificance and interconnectedness, which brings about a profound, yet elated, peace.
Sarah Wilson (This One Wild and Precious Life: A Hopeful Path Forward in a Fractured World)
It was a beautiful room, not an office at all, and much bigger than it looked from outside--airy and white, with a high ceiling and a breeze fluttering in the starched curtains. In the corner, near a low bookshelf, was a big round table littered with teapots and Greek books, and there were flowers everywhere, roses and carnations and anemones, on his desk, on the table, in the windowsills. The roses were especially fragrant; their smell hung rich and heavy in the air, mingled with the smell of bergamot, and black China tea, and a faint inky scent of camphor. Breathing deep, I felt intoxicated. Everywhere I looked was something beautiful--Oriental rugs, porcelains, tiny paintings like jewels--a dazzle of fractured color that struck me as if I had stepped into one of those little Byzantine churches that are so plain on the outside; inside, the most paradisal painted eggshell of gilt and
Donna Tartt (The Secret History)
Where were you born?” “Miami, Florida.
Suzanne Wright (Fractured (Deep in Your Veins, #5))
I’m not trying to fracture the most important relationship in my life because my curiosity got me more than I bargained for.
Rilzy Adams (Go Deep (Unexpected Lovers #1))
I'm the stranger in the foreign land; The one walking without a brand. The one with someone deep within. I want to be the one who doesn't fit in.
Cali Willette (Fractures of Gold)
When the state of Florida dug him up fifty years later, the forensic examiner noted the fractures in the wrists and speculated that he’d been restrained before he died, in addition to the other violence attested by the broken bones. Most of those who know the story of the rings in the trees are dead by now. The iron is still there. Rusty. Deep in the heartwood. Testifying to anyone who cares to listen.
Colson Whitehead (The Nickel Boys)
The final entity was the beast. The steel juggernaut that raked claws made of screams along the bones of their soul.All of the pain that Jango had endured as a child had never left his mind. That pain had created a sort of primordial ooze in his fractured mind that sloshed and bled until the beast was birthed from the suffering. The beast lived in a cage forged of willpower deep in the recesses of the mad matrix of his splintered mind. It rattled the cage and roared for release, but he was loath to ever set the beast loose…again.
Cedric Nye (Rage and Ruin (Zombie Fighter Jango, #3))
Americans were attached to a vague cultural conservatism mostly because of the seemingly broad consensus around it, rather than by deep personal commitment. As that consensus, like most forms of consensus in our national life, has frayed, their attachment has weakened. T
Yuval Levin (The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism)
Clowns.” Clowns? “Really?” I tried to imagine a tiny Aiden crying over men and women with overly painted faces and red noses, but I couldn’t. The big guy was still facing me. His expression clear and even, as he dipped his chin. “Eh.” God help me, he’d gone Canadian on me. I had to will my face not to react at the fact he’d gone with the one word he usually used only when he was super relaxed around other people. “I thought they were going to eat me.” Now imagining that had me cracking a little smile. I slid my palm under my cheek. “How old were you? Nineteen?” Those big chocolate-colored eyes blinked, slow, slow, slow. His dark pink lips parted just slightly. “Are you making fun of me?” he drawled. “Yes.” The fractures of my grin cracked into bigger pieces. “Because I was scared of clowns?” It was like he couldn’t understand why that was amusing. But it was. “I just can’t imagine you scared of anything, much less clowns. Come on. Even I’ve never been scared of clowns.” “I was four.” I couldn’t help but snicker. “Four… fourteen, same difference.” Based on the mule-ish expression on his face, he wasn’t amused. “This is the last time that I come over to save you from the boogeyman.” Shocked out of my mind for a split second, I tried to pretend like I wasn’t, but… I was. He was joking with me. Aiden was in bed joking around. With me. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I was just messing with you.” I scooted one more millimeter closer to him, drawing my knees up so that they hit his thighs. “Please don’t leave yet.” “I won’t,” he said, settling on his pillow with his hands under his cheek, his eyes already drifting to a close. I didn’t need to ask him to promise not to leave me; I knew he wouldn’t if he said so. That was just the kind of man he was. “Aiden?” I whispered. “Hmm?” he murmured. “Thank you for coming in here with me.” “Uh-huh.” That big body adjusted itself just slightly before he let out a long, deep exhale. Without turning around, I laid the flashlight down behind me and aimed the beam toward the wall. He didn’t ask if I was really going to leave the flashlight on all night—or at least however long the battery lasted—instead, I just smiled at him as I took my glasses off and set them on the unused nightstand behind me. Then I tucked my hands under my cheek and watched him. “Good night. Thank you again for staying with me.” Peeking one eye open, just a narrow slit, he hummed. “Shh.” That ‘shh’ was about as close to a ‘you’re welcome’ as I was going to get. I closed my eyes with a little grin on my face. Maybe five seconds later, Aiden’s spoke up. “Vanessa?” “Hmm?” “Why was I saved on your work phone as Miranda P.?” That had my eyes snapping open. I hadn’t deleted that entry off the contacts when I quit, had I? “It’s a long, boring story, and you should go to sleep. Okay?” The “uh-huh” out of him sounded as disbelieving as it should have. He knew I was full of shit, but somehow, knowing he knew, wasn’t enough to keep me from falling asleep soon after
Mariana Zapata (The Wall of Winnipeg and Me)
If we could admit how bad things are, that would be the beginning of something good, of a kind of radical honesty with ourselves. That would inspire a certain compassion for one another because we would understand that we’re all in the same boat, all shipwrecked. To confess the wounded, fractured condition of our lives—that is who we are! And that would be the beginning of wisdom in deconstruction, of something good. If everyone actually believed that, if everybody acted on that, there would be better political processes and better relationships. If people actually believed that they really don’t know in some deep way what is true, we would have more modest and tolerant and humane institutions.
John D. Caputo (After the Death of God (Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture))
Look, I know this won’t be easy, Imani. I won’t be easy. I can be pushy, selfish, insensitive, aggressive, and I like my own way. I’ll fuck up, but I will never purposely hurt you. I want to be the one who makes you smile, who makes you laugh, who makes you feel safe, and who makes you come every night. I’ll do my damn best to make sure all of that happens.
Suzanne Wright (Fractured (Deep in Your Veins, #5))
The earliest storytellers were magi, seers, bards, griots, shamans. They were, it would seem, as old as time, and as terrifying to gaze upon as the mysteries with which they wrestled. They wrestled with mysteries and transformed them into myths which coded the world and helped the community to live through one more darkness, with eyes wide open and hearts set alight. "I can see them now, the old masters. I can see them standing on the other side of the flames, speaking in the voices of lions, or thunder, or monsters, or heroes, heroines, or the earth, or fire itself -- for they had to contain all voices within them, had to be all things and nothing. They had to have the ability to become lightning, to become a future homeland, to be the dreaded guide to the fabled land where the community will settle and fructify. They had to be able to fight in advance all the demons they would encounter, and summon up all the courage needed on the way, to prophesy about all the requisite qualities that would ensure their arrival at the dreamt-of land. "The old masters had to be able to tell stories that would make sleep possible on those inhuman nights, stories that would counter terror with enchantment, or with a greater terror. I can see them, beyond the flames, telling of a hero's battle with a fabulous beast -- the beast that is in the hero." "The storyteller's art changed through the ages. From battling dread in word and incantations before their people did in reality, they became the repositories of the people's wisdom and follies. Often, conscripted by kings, they became the memory of a people's origins, and carried with them the long line of ancestries and lineages. Most important of all, they were the living libraries, the keepers of legends and lore. They knew the causes and mutations of things, the herbs, trees, plants, cures for diseases, causes for wars, causes of victory, the ways in which victory often precipitates defeat, or defeat victory, the lineages of gods, the rites humans have to perform to the gods. They knew of follies and restitutions, were advocates of new and old ways of being, were custodians of culture, recorders of change." "These old storytellers were the true magicians. They were humanity's truest friends and most reliable guides. Their role was both simple and demanding. They had to go down deep into the seeds of time, into the dreams of their people, into the unconscious, into the uncharted fears, and bring shapes and moods back up into the light. They had to battle with monsters before they told us about them. They had to see clearly." "They risked their sanity and their consciousness in the service of dreaming better futures. They risked madness, or being unmoored in the wild realms of the interspaces, or being devoured by the unexpected demons of the communal imagination." "And I think that now, in our age, in the mid-ocean of our days, with certainties collapsing around us, and with no beliefs by which to steer our way through the dark descending nights ahead -- I think that now we need those fictional old bards and fearless storytellers, those seers. We need their magic, their courage, their love, and their fire more than ever before. It is precisely in a fractured, broken age that we need mystery and a reawoken sense of wonder. We need them to be whole again.
Ben Okri (A Way of Being Free)
How could such adoration and devotion ever be a bad thing? Because so many dog owners are unworthy of it. We are shamed by our dog’s loyalty, and we know, deep in our hearts, we will never measure up to it. In a fractured, impersonal world like ours, such a precious gift should be treasured, and yet so many of us take it for granted. Worse of all, we turn it against our dogs, repaying loyalty with mistreatment and neglect.
Bradley Trevor Greive (Why Dogs Are Better Than Cats)
We have a fractured understanding of how the body exists in physical space and also a deeper internal sense of the body and its purposes. We are, in a way, disconnected from equations of reproduction, or our sexuality has evolutionarily been tilted in a different direction. It begs the scientific question: to what purpose? It doesn’t feel accidental to me that throughout history queer people have been magical, holy, and artistic.
Kazim Ali (Our Deep Gossip: Conversations with Gay Writers on Poetry and Desire)
We could go up to the top of the hill, and restructure our entrance, do away with the contradiction of being nowhere but here, the assumed proportion of a presence that will always escape, of being nowhere but near the presumed indifference that solicits our wakefulness. Day begins its indiscreet translation once again, flowing through the pearl white of loss, or the indelible deep blue of fractured words. Remove emptiness. Replace nothing.
Jay Wright (The Presentable Art of Reading Absence)
I guess part of me hoped that you'd come to me because you trusted me to help. And because maybe you missed me, just a little." Beka took a deep breath. "Just a little? Hell, Marcus, it felt like I was missing half my soul."... His hazel eyes stared into hers, as if he could read her mind, or maybe her heart, which stuttered and skipped as if it only half remembered how to beat. Then he said in a low, fervent voice, "I think I found it for you." He pulled her into his arms, wrapping her in strength and warmth and longing, tugging her in close until his lips met hers.
Deborah Blake (Wickedly Wonderful (Baba Yaga, #2))
They learned about purity before they learned about sex, and they have a silver ring to prove it. They watched The Passion of the Christ, Soul Surfer, or the latest Kirk Cameron film with their youth group. They attended Promise Keepers with guys from church and read Wild at Heart in small groups. They’ve learned more from Pat Robertson, John Piper, Joyce Meyer, and The Gospel Coalition than they have from their pastor’s Sunday sermons. The diffusion of evangelical consumer culture extends far beyond the orbit of evangelical churches. Cultural evangelicalism has made deep inroads into mainline Christianity,
Kristin Kobes Du Mez (Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation)
In writing this, I am not being political, but am rather pointing out the deeply divided condition of the nation. Divisions range from politics to religion to race. Not since the Civil War have we seen so many fractures in so many places at such deep levels. We are no longer “one nation” and no longer does our nation regard itself to be “under God” in any effective sense. The bad news is that we are beyond healing. Certain trends have been allowed to go too far unchecked and we now live with a shattered national consciousness, a downgraded consciousness of morality and a broken sense of who we are as a people.
R. Loren Sandford (Visions of the Coming Days: What to Look For and How to Prepare)
Time interacts with attention in funny ways. At one extreme, when Ruth was gripped by the compulsive mania and hyperfocus of an Internet search, the hours seemed to aggregate and swell like a wave, swallowing huge chunks of her day. At the other extreme, when her attention was disengaged and fractured, she experienced time at its most granular, wherein moments hung around like particles, diffused and suspended in standing water. There used to be a middle way, too, when her attention was focused but vast, and time felt like a limpid pool, ringed by sunlit ferns. An underground spring fed the pool from deep below, creating a gentle current of words that bubbled up, while on the surface, breezes shimmered and played.
Anonymous
Time interacts with attention in funny ways. At one extreme, when Ruth was gripped by the compulsive mania and hyperfocus of an Internet search, the hours seemed to aggregate and swell like a wave, swallowing huge chunks of her day. At the other extreme, when her attention was disengaged and fractured, she experienced time at its most granular, wherein moments hung around like particles, diffused and suspended in standing water. There used to be a middle way, too, when her attention was focused but vast, and time felt like a limpid pool, ringed by sunlit ferns. An underground spring fed the pool from deep below, creating a gentle current of words that bubbled up, while on the surface, breezes shimmered and played.
Ruth Ozeki (A Tale for the Time Being)
Every topic gets to unfurl completely, never forced or rushed. Sometimes I like to sit back in the group and observe the magic of The Group Hiking Conversation. No matter what the mix of ages, sex or backgrounds, everyone in a walking conversation eventually arrives together in the one lovely pool of mutualism. Or perhaps a field, the one beyond right and wrong, is a better metaphor. It generally only takes about an hour or so. But after that initial hour you do adjust to the primitive rhythm, like you’re dialed into our ancestral way of keeping company and bearing mindful witness to each other. It feels like home. A day of walking will dislodge all kinds of deep truths. They will surface through the fatigue as you sink into the couch; after a day of walking off our barky layers, we reveal the trauma rings in our trunks
Sarah Wilson (This One Wild and Precious Life: A Hopeful Path Forward in a Fractured World)
You look at the history of any sentient species and what do you find but tableaux of violence and slaughter. It’s finger-painted on the ceilings of caves and engraved into the walls of temples. Dig a hole deep enough on any world and you’ll find the skulls and bones of adults and children fractured by crude weapons. All of us were fighting long before we were farming and raising livestock.” He held up a hand before anyone could voice an objection. “All of you are exceedingly well educated, and you’re going to start rattling off the names of species and societies where that isn’t the case. And my answer is that those aren’t the beings or the star systems we need to worry about. It’s the rest of them. Violence is hardwired into most of us and there’s no eliminating the impulse—not with an army of stormtroopers or a fleet of Star Destroyers. That’s why we’ve embarked on a path to a different solution. We have a chance to forge a peace that will endure for longer than the Republic was in existence.” “Peace through fear,” Reeva said. “Yes,” Krennic told her, and let it go at that.
James Luceno (Catalyst: A Rogue One Novel)
Counting, This New Year's Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me - 1953- The world asks, as it asks daily: And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured? I count, this first day of another year, what remains. I have a mountain, a kitchen, two hands. Can admire with two eyes the mountain, actual, recalcitrant, shuffling its pebbles, sheltering foxes and beetles. Can make black-eyed peas and collards. Can make, from last year's late-ripening persimmons, a pudding. Can climb a stepladder, change the bulb in a track light. For four years, I woke each day first to the mountain, then to the question. The feet of the new sufferings followed the feet of the old, and still they surprised. I brought salt, brought oil, to the question. Brought sweet tea, brought postcards and stamps. For four years, each day, something. Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace. Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, bewilder. Today, I woke without answer. The day answers, unpockets a thought from a friend don't despair of this falling world, not yet didn't it give you the asking
Jane Hirshfield
I'm renowned within the ton as being cool under fire- around you, I'm never cool. I'm heated- I seethe- I burn with desire. If I'm in the same room, all I can think about is heat- your heat- and how you'll feel around me." Patience felt the heat rise, a real force between them. "I've gained the reputation of being the soul of discretion- now look at me. I've seduced my godmother's niece- and been seduced by her. I share her bed openly, even under my godmother's roof." His lips twisted wryly. "So much for discretion." He drew a deep breath; his chest brushed her breasts. "And as for my vaunted, up-until-you 'legendary' control- the instant I'm inside you that evaporates like water on hot steel." What prompted her Patience never knew. His lips were so close- with her teeth, she nipped the lower. "I told you to let go- I won't break." The tension, pouring off him in waves, eased, just a little. He sighed, and rested his forehead on hers. "I don't like losing control- it's like losing myself- in you." She felt him gather himself, felt the tension swell and coalesce about them. "It's giving myself to you- so that I'm in your keeping." The words, low and gravelly, rolled through her; closing her eyes, she drew in a shallow breath. "And you don't like doing that." "I don't like it- but I crave it. I don't approve of it, yet I yearn for it." His words feathered her cheek, then his lips touched hers. "Do you understand? I haven't any choice." Patience felt his chest swell as he drew a deep breath. "I love you." She shivered, eyes shut tight, and felt the world shift about her. "Losing myself in you- giving my heart and soul into your keeping- is part of that." His lips brushed hers in an inexpressibly tender caress. "Trusting you is part of that. Telling you I love you is part of that." His lips touched hers; Patience didn't wait for more. She kissed him. Letting go of the post, she slid her hands up, framing his face, so she could let him know- let him feel- her response to all he'd said. He felt it, sensed it- and reacted; his arms locked tight about her. She couldn't breathe, but she didn't care. All she cared about was the emotion that held them, that flowed so effortlessly between them. Silver and gold, it wound about them, investing each touch with its magic. Silver and gold, it shimmered about them, and quivered in their fractured breaths. It was immediate compulsion and future promise, heavenly delight and earthly pleasure. It was here and now- and forever.
Stephanie Laurens (A Rake's Vow (Cynster, #2))
Ohio Geologists in Ohio have for the first time linked earthquakes in a geologic formation deep under the Appalachians to hydraulic fracturing, leading the state to issue new permit conditions Friday in certain areas that are among the nation’s strictest. A state investigation of five small tremors last month in the Youngstown area, in the Appalachian foothills, found the injection of sand and water that accompanies hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in the Utica Shale may have increased pressure on a small, unknown fault,
Anonymous
That was diverse.” Poppy looks surprised as she slides down the wall like a bird that’s forgotten how to fly, landing in a crumpled heap on the curb. “Positively Dionysian,” I manage to slur. The world is a crazed kaleidoscope. Colors fight for space, desperate to steal each other’s names. “They’re just labels!” I yell at the untidy bundle of shades and bones near my foot. “Are you talking to me?” Patterns birthed by multiple reflections coalesce into Poppy’s face. “Maybe. I think other people’s musical chi has saturated my cells.” Myriad venues and tonal flavors are scattered through my memory, like broken harmonies. “Why did I feed on so many tunes?” “You wanted filtered sounds to rain down and seep clean through, beyond blood, to the soul.” A lone streetlight flickers behind her and for a few alienating seconds she shimmers in and out of existence. “Too much.” My stomach turns over, but I manage to keep everything down. If I throw up now, nothing will come out but music. “Tonight’s orgy of sound has left us in a pure, concentrated haze of other people’s emotions,” Poppy announces proudly, unperturbed by the fact I’m squatting in a gutter. She holds out her arms to me, palms turned up. “Look, I’m full of music.” I stare at the small woman, posed like a crazed Messiah. The cat mask is still caught in her hair. A cracking sound fills the air and her face starts to fracture into pieces, like shards of a broken mirror. Closing my eyes, I take deep breaths till my head calms down. When I open them again, Poppy is gone.
Gil Liane
The heady scent of him filled her nostrils, that particular blend of salt and sea and musk that was his alone. Just the smell of him made the blood rush to her core; the feel of his strong arms, the sweet taste of his mouth made her whole body pulse with need and longing. Marcus made a groaning noise deep in his throat and started to pull away. "Don't you dare," she breathed in his ear. "If you stop kissing me, I'll... I'll bite you.
Deborah Blake (Wickedly Wonderful (Baba Yaga, #2))
I pulled him close, kissing his mouth firmly. Hard. Deep. Devouring and taking everything he had to give. Tears tasted salty on cracked, unforgiving lips. Fingers dug into skin. Nails scrapping flesh. Heavy breaths. Fractured hearts. We were healing. Or trying to. But can two people like us ever truly mend? I gathered his broken pieces and I held them tight. Yoss wasn’t the only one who wouldn’t be able to let go. ~Imogen Connor
A Meredith Walters
The following injuries need senior review or referral : * Wounds with involvement of deep structures , e.g. tendons . * Wounds in cosmetically sensitive areas , e.g. face . * Wounds in functionally sensitive areas , e.g. hands , genitals . * Wounds with loss of skin tissue . * displaced fractures . * Unstable fractures . * Open fractures . * Fractures with skin tenting or associated dislocation . * Dislocation of major joints , i.e. hip , knee , ankle , shoulder , elbow . * Injuries with neurovascular compromise .
Tim Raine
Between those who sold the Republican majority on a massive tax cut in 1981 and the professional critics of Keynesianism there were deep rifts and rivalries. A striking number of the leading organizers of the "supply-side" movement were economic innocents: Robert Bartley, who assumed direction of the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal in 1972 with ambitions to make it (as he did) the most sharply conservative editorial page in mainstream journalism; Jude Wanniski, the flamboyant journalist who was Bartley's first associate editor; George Gilder, the self-taught sociobiologist; Jack Kemp, the maverick congressman eager to put a populist face on the Republican party; and Irving Kristol, dean of neoconservative journalism and matchmaker to the new conservative foundations. Robert Lucas dismissed the linchpin of supply-side economics-the Kemp-Roth bill calling for a 30 percent across-the-board cut in federal individual income tax rates-as a "crackpot proposal.
Daniel T. Rodgers (Age of Fracture)
Romney had tried to explain his reasoning to this chorus of confidants, but they were still urging him not to shut the door. They contended that even if he didn’t want to launch a formal campaign right now, it would be a mistake to take himself entirely out of the running. They laid out a vivid, detailed scenario in which a fractured Republican Party—divided by a wide field of niche presidential candidates—fails to unite behind a single nominee in 2016, and ends up with a chaotic, historic floor fight at the national convention. Facing a televised descent into disarray, the GOP delegates would naturally turn to Romney—the fully vetted, steady-handed Republican statesman—for salvation. Your party might still need you, Mitt’s loyalists insisted. The country might still need you!
McKay Coppins (The Wilderness: Deep Inside the Republican Party's Combative, Contentious, Chaotic Quest to Take Back the White House)
They climbed through the fog, trusting their guide, whose sheepdog ran ahead of them, unearthing a hedgehog among the crags. As they got higher, ‘the ground appeared to brighten’. A flash of light illuminated the turf and, all of a sudden, the moon was out. Wordsworth looked down. They were above the mist, which now resembled a sea with the peaks of the surrounding mountains emerging like the backs of whales. In the distance, they saw the mist dipping and swirling into the real sea. And somewhere between the mountains and the sea, they spotted ‘a blue chasm, a fracture in the vapour’, A deep and gloomy breathing-place thro’ which Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams Innumerable, roaring with one voice. ‘In that breach’, Wordsworth writes in The Prelude, ‘Through which the homeless voice of waters rose’, Nature had lodged ‘The soul, the imagination of the whole’.37 This idea of the imagination filling a gap, emerging from an abyss of emptiness, and indeed of homelessness, is at the core of Wordsworth’s vocation. His poetry, the work of his imagination, filled the void of the losses – of parents, of home, of political ideals, and later of friends, siblings and children – that afflicted him.
Jonathan Bate (Radical Wordsworth: The Poet Who Changed the World)
She’s good at small talk, she excels at it, but when you pair up one small talker to two deep ones, it doesn’t work.
Krystalle Bianca (Perfectly Fractured (The Imperfect, #1).)
discovered that you can’t simply invite brokenness into your home and not to some degree be broken by it. You can’t hold abused innocence in your arms and not on some level lose a sense of your own innocence as a result. You can’t hear stories of the deep fractures in others’ lives and not see the cracks in your own and understand that on some level we’re all the same—broken humans in need of redemption.
Jason Johnson (Reframing Foster Care: Filtering Your Foster Parenting Journey Through the Lens of the Gospel)
To come to Christ is not merely an individual affair. It will fracture deep ties among people who have become so close that they are felt to be family.
Rachel Gilson (Born Again This Way)
I want everyone to know exactly who I am and where I’m coming from. But sometimes people bury that shit deep and put on a façade. Those around them can’t see the dark part of their soul they hide because it’s not something they wear on their skin. It’s a fracture that’s deep and invisible. Why don’t you show me what you’ve got.
Dannika Dark (Five Weeks (Seven, #3; Mageriverse #9))
Share? All right, how about I keep the pin and you have the grenade? Sound fair?
Suzanne Wright (Fractured (Deep in Your Veins, #5))
That little device had got me through some crappy times; given me the escape I occasionally needed. I’d taken it with me pretty much everywhere; I admittedly had an unhealthy attachment to it.
Suzanne Wright (Fractured (Deep in Your Veins, #5))
Every avid reader knew you didn’t fuck with a girl’s Kindle.
Suzanne Wright (Fractured (Deep in Your Veins, #5))
For some reason, whenever I found the girls drunk, it was almost always the same: they’d all kicked their heels off, they were all convinced they weren’t drunk, and they were all acting weird.
Suzanne Wright (Fractured (Deep in Your Veins, #5))
consider the common practice of setting up regularly occurring meetings for projects. These meetings tend to pile up and fracture schedules to the point where sustained focus during the day becomes impossible. Why do they persist? They’re easier.
Cal Newport (Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World)
Today, some farms actually collect fleece without using any shears at all by injecting a protein growth factor into the sheep’s skin. This factor causes the hair to fracture in the deep follicle, allowing the fleece to peel off without scissors or clippers—a very high-tech approach.
Kurt Stenn (Hair: A Human History)
Later, after Rasheed had dropped them off and taken a bus to work, Laila watched Aziza wave good-bye and scuff along the wall in the orphanage back lot. She thought of Aziza's stutter, and of what Aziza had said earlier about fractures and powerful collisions deep down and how sometimes all we see on the surface is a slight tremor.
Khaled Hosseini (A Thousand Splendid Suns)
The game spools on.” Deep in her abyss, Circe spun a finger, and a whirlpool circled here. Ever since my grandmother had told me to look for symbols, I’d been seeing them everywhere. Infinity symbols. A bow. A jagged fracture of rock like a lightning bolt. A vortex. I recalled my dreams: When the Magician had created that infinity symbol for Fauna, there’d already been one in that scene. Behind the two of them, the lions’ long tails had curved over each other, making two perfect loops. Patterns continued to appear before my eyes. Circe’s whirlpool was like a helicopter’s tailspin on its way down. Or a carousel that would never spin backward again. Like a tourniquet twisting. “But for how long?” she murmured, and her whirlpool tightened.
Kresley Cole (Arcana Rising (The Arcana Chronicles, #4))
have a boyfriend, I told her in my head, a small part of me hoping the pieces of her that had been passed down in the blood now rapidly carrying oxygen out of my brain might overhear. I would never tell Mother Bhūmi I was queer aloud. By then, I had imagined that she was sealed off by her own carceral ways of thinking—punitive ideas she heeded that encouraged harming those who did not fit this society’s norms around gender, even if they were family. It wasn’t that she couldn’t understand my queerness or love me if she knew, but I believed that the parts of her that would understand and love me were buried so deep beneath her own pain that they would take years to excavate. Years I knew she didn’t have. Years that had been stolen from her, just like my childhood had been pried away from me. How much could I blame her for what she replaced them with? How much could I blame myself for internalizing self-hatred while trying to find what about me was worth saving in an anti-Black, anti-queer world that hated me, too? How much could I blame Mata? And how much should I hold accountable the world that separated us from our childhoods in the first place and told us that blaming each other was all we could ever do about it? Was it my, my mother’s, or my grandmother’s fault that we were too fractured ourselves to hold every aspect of one another, or did the problem stem from an anti-Black society that wouldn’t allow any of us to exist as fully whole people within it?
Hari Ziyad (Black Boy Out of Time)
That’s the point of terrorism; it’s not only the tragedy of those killed and injured, it’s the deep-rooted anxiety that is born of fear, and how it causes fractures in society. It reinforces divisions and creates an atmosphere of distrust. That was the intention of ISIS all along: to generate isolationism among the Muslim communities of the West. To stop them being accepted by the rest of society and to create a sense of us and them. In doing so, Muslims everywhere would be forced to choose between integration into their host communities, or going over to the side of extremism
Levison Wood (Arabia: A Journey Through The Heart of the Middle East)
I’m sorry!” I shouted, sucking in large, gulping breaths as something fractured. I heaved as sadness, self-pity, and lostness asphyxiated. “You hurt me, you torment me—” Sobs stopped my words; I wrapped arms around myself. “But I need you!” I couldn’t do this. I can’t! Q didn’t offer comfort; he didn’t give me what I needed—he stood there with his aura of power and ruthlessness, watching me dissolve. Where had the man gone who carried me upstairs? That was the man I needed. Not this bastard. This owner. Q crouched, trying to unlatch my arms from round my ribcage, but I fought him and huddled in the corner. Blonde hair tangled around me, offering protection from his livid gaze. “Je suis un salaud,” he muttered, pulling me into his lap. His suit oozed with liquid as he leaned against the wall, rocking me. I wanted to agree, he was a bastard, but the ache in his voice hurt me deep. He truly believed it, on a much deeper level.
Pepper Winters (Tears of Tess (Monsters in the Dark, #1))
I see what Gabe sees in her, the fracturing brilliance of intellect concealed beneath that quiet exterior. There’s someone in there, someone as deep as Lake Ontario and sharp as a switchblade, unconventional and oddly ruthless.
Elizabeth Bear (Hammered (Jenny Casey, #1))
In a safe, globalized world such a hybridization model can limp along so long as the commodities flow out and the money flows in. But in an unsafe, fractured world where trade is sharply circumscribed, outright national collapse will by far not be the biggest problem these peoples face. In these countries the very population is vulnerable to changes farther abroad. The industrial technologies that reduce mortality and raise standards of living cannot be uninvented, but if trade collapses, these technologies can be denied. Should anything impact these countries’ commodity outflows or the income or product inflows, the entire place will break down while experiencing deep-rooted famine on a biblical scale. Economic development, quality of life, longevity, health, and demographic expansion are all subject to the whims of globalization. Or rather, in this case, deglobalization
Peter Zeihan (The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization)
It wasn’t going to be okay. It had once been Alan’s job to imagine all the ways a thing might break, but he’d never thought of this: a quiet, painful fracture, so deep you only realized it was there when it was already too late to hold everything together.
Olivia Hawker (Landing (A Point in Time, #3))
Here's a thing or two I've learned about memories. They are like seeds; love can grow from them. They look different depending on the day when they are remembered. They are slippery, malleable things, apt to be altered. They can be clutched too tightly. Their absence can cause fractures that run deep between people, towns, whole countries. They are meant sometimes, to be let go.
Jodi Lynn Anderson (The Memory Thief (Thirteen Witches, #1))
It means everything that you let me stay here. I’ll never forget it. I know I can’t repay you--” I took her hand in mine, weaving our fingers together. Her breath hitched, and I saw her pulse quicken. “I like having you here. I think I needed it just as much as you did.” The truth of those words hit somewhere deep in my chest, burning. But it was a beautiful kind of pain. One I welcomed. One that belonged only to Shiloh.
Catherine Cowles (Fractured Sky (Tattered & Torn, #5))
Never enlist friends or loved ones to crew for you.” Why? Because when deep fatigue and lack of sleep take hold, one’s inner beast emerges, causing fracture of even the best of relationships. I never gave this much credence, particularly after experiencing such a bonding experience with my wife and kids at Ultraman in 2009. But now, for the first time, I was beginning to understand. I wasn’t just cranky. I was becoming intolerable.
Rich Roll (Finding Ultra: Rejecting Middle Age, Becoming One of the World's Fittest Men, and Discovering Myself)
wasn’t going to be okay. It had once been Alan’s job to imagine all the ways a thing might break, but he’d never thought of this: a quiet, painful fracture, so deep you only realized it was there when it was already too late to hold everything together.
Olivia Hawker (Landing (A Point in Time, #3))
Heart racing, Nesta lifted the lantern in one hand and gazed at the darkness, untouched by the light from the library high, high above. The heart of the world, of existence. Of self. The heart of the House. 'This...' Her fingers tightened on the lantern. 'This darkness is your heart.' As if in answer, the House laid a little evergreen sprig at her feet. 'A Winter Solstice present. For me. She could have sworn warm hands brushed her neck in answer. 'But your darkness...' Wonder softened her voice. 'You were trying to show me. Show others. Who you are, down deep. What haunts you. You were trying to show them all those dark, broken pieces because the priestesses, and Emerie, and I... We're the same as you.' Her throat constricted at what the House had gifted her. This knowledge. She lifted the lantern higher and blew out its flame. Let the darkness sweep in. Embraced it. 'I'm not afraid,' she whispered into it. 'You are my friend, and my home. Thank you for sharing this with me.' Again, Nesta could have sworn that phantom touch caressed her neck, her cheek, her brow. 'Happy Solstice,' she said into the beautiful, fractured darkness.
Sarah J. Maas (A ​Court of Silver Flames (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #4))
We are born homesick, every one of us. We who live in this fractured world have eternity written on our hearts; we are longing to be home and are digging the tent pegs of our lives in as deep as we can get them until we arrive on eternity’s shores.
Lisa Whittle (Jesus Over Everything: Uncomplicating the Daily Struggle to Put Jesus First)
what’s down deep remains amazingly similar. It’s not whom you hate, but rather that the system is designed for you to hate someone.
Marc MacYoung (Violence, Blunders, and Fractured Jaws: Advanced Awareness Techniques and Street Etiquette)
By the early 2000s, was it even possible to separate “cultural Christianity” from a purer, more authentic form of American evangelicalism? What did it mean to be an evangelical? Did it mean upholding a set of doctrinal truths, or did it mean embracing a culture-wars application of those truths—a God-and-country religiosity that championed white rural and working-class values, one that spilled over into a denigration of outsiders and elites, and that was organized around a deep attachment to militarism and patriarchal masculinity?
Kristin Kobes Du Mez (Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation)
I think sometimes we keep coming back to the same person. The one that's always right there, lingering in the back of our mind. The one who some part of us is screaming out for deep inside.
R. Phillips (Fractured (A Twisted Tale #3))
Mortarion was still the greater of them. He was still the stronger, the more steeped in preternatural gifts, but now all that he felt was doubt, rocked by the remorseless fury of one who had never been anything more than flighty, self-regarding and unreliable. All Mortarion could see just then was one who wished to kill him - who would do anything, sacrifice anything, fight himself beyond physical limits, destroy his own body, his own heart, his own soul, just for the satisfaction of the oaths he had made in the void. 'If you know what I did,' Mortarion cried out, fighting on now through that cold fog of indecision, 'then you know the truth of it, brother - I can no longer die.' It was as if a signal had been given. The Khan's bloodied head lifted, the remnants of his long hair hanging in matted clumps. 'Oh, I know that,' he murmured, with the most perfect contempt he had ever mustered. 'But I can.' Then he leapt. His broken legs still propelled him, his fractured arms still bore his blade, his blood-filled lungs and perforated heart still gave him just enough power, and he swept in close. If he had been in the prime of condition, the move might have been hard to counter, but he was already little more than a corpse held together by force of will, and so Silence interposed itself, catching the Khan under his armour-stripped shoulder and impaling him deep. But that didn't stop him. The parry had been seen, planned for, and so he just kept coming, dragging himself up the length of the blade until the scythe jutted out of his ruptured back and the White Tiger was in tight against Mortarion's neck. For an instant, their two faces were right up against one another - both cadaverous now, drained of blood, drained of life, existing only as masks onto pure vengeance. All their majesty was stripped away, scraped out across the utilitarian rockcrete, leaving just the desire, the violence, the brute mechanics of despite. It only took a split second. Mortarion's eyes went wide, realising that he couldn't wrench his brother away in time. The Khan's narrowed. 'And that makes the difference,' Jaghatai spat. He snapped his dao across, severing Mortarion's neck cleanly in an explosion of black bile, before collapsing down into the warp explosion that turned the landing stage, briefly, into the brightest object on the planet after the Emperor's tormented soul itself.
Chris Wraight (Warhawk (The Siege of Terra #6))
You don't know how dark the night is until you're lost in it, or how deep the heart can fracture until you're plumbing the crevasse left behind.
Tal Bauer (How to Say I Do)
To name another example, consider the common practice of setting up regularly occurring meetings for projects. These meetings tend to pile up and fracture schedules to the point where sustained focus during the day becomes impossible. Why do they persist? They’re easier. For many, these standing meetings become a simple (but blunt) form of personal organization. Instead of trying to manage their time and obligations themselves, they let the impending meeting each week force them to take some action on a given project and more generally provide a highly visible simulacrum of progress.
Cal Newport (Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World)
Will you lock the door behind me?” he asked. Iris nodded, hugging the trench coat to her chest. Roman finally shut the door. She continued to stand in the empty flat. As if she had grown roots. The minutes flowed, but she hardly sensed time. Everything felt distorted, like she was looking at her life through fractured glass. Dust motes spun in the air around her. A deep breath unspooled from her as she went to lock the door, and then she thought better of it, and looked through the peephole again. He was still standing there, hands shoved into his coat pockets, his dark hair windblown. Waiting. Her annoyance flared until she bolted the door. As soon as he heard the locks slide, Roman Kitt turned and left.
Rebecca Ross (Divine Rivals (Letters of Enchantment #1))
The world asks, as it asks daily: And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured? I count, this first day of another year, what remains. I have a mountain, a kitchen, two hands.
Jane Hirshfield (The Asking: New and Selected Poems)
For me, when I read deep, I am immediately reconnected with a shared knowingness – in a group soul kind of way. To see that what you’ve been feeling has had words put to it triggers a sense of congruence. Also, to see that an artist has turned your perplexing pain into a thing of beauty . . . well, that can see me air-punch in celebration. I also love that deep reading improves us at a biological level. Neuroscience shows that when we learned to read 6,000 years ago, particular circuits were formed. These circuits sparked vital processes, such as internalized knowledge (which I take to mean “knowingness”), fair reasoning, the ability to be empathetic and to have insight. As one of the researchers noted, our inability to deep read is seeing us fail to “grasp complexity, to understand another’s feelings, to perceive beauty, and to create thoughts of [our] own.” Studies show young people now struggle to be able to read university texts, as well as life-affecting contracts and information relating to their political responsibilities (um, Brexit!). In essence, skimming has made us sleepy, with all the now-familiar repercussions. As one researcher put it, “It incentivizes a retreat to the most familiar silos of unchecked information, which require and receive no analysis, leaving us susceptible to false information and demagoguery.” Reading deep articles and nonfiction, as well as good literature, cultivates focus and reprograms our neurons. The stillness and time required for a long read (anything over 3,000 words) also allows our minds to formulate our moral position. This is like building a muscle.
Sarah Wilson (This One Wild and Precious Life: A Hopeful Path Forward in a Fractured World)
the impulse to act like a man in order to be heard risks reinscribing precisely those structures that perpetuate gender inequality. A better approach, Beard argues, is to think critically and self-reflexively about our rhetorical operations. “We need,” she argues, “to go back to some first principles about the nature of spoken authority, about what constitutes it, and how we have learned to hear authority where we do. And rather than push women into voice training classes to get a nice, deep, husky and entirely artificial tone, we should be thinking more about the faultlines and fractures that underlie dominant male discourse.”39
Whitney Phillips (This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture)
We must live life in the present as shaped by the past. The option to begin afresh does not exist. The past days and nights were the sacrificial coals that fired an internal furnace. The dying embers fueled my present being. I need to locate new nutrients to revitalize an unfulfilled soul. I seek to unearth fresh energy sources and forge a renewed resoluteness to slog through the remainder of this gaseous and hard-pressed sojourn. Any prior personal inspiration for living righteously was lost on a remote outpost somewhere along the fractured trail. I go on because I must. I trust that if I industrially seek, I shall ascertain a purpose in life that currently eludes me. If I tread long enough, if I assiduously track sufficient true miles, I shall discover a purpose that fits me. I continue to push forward with an unbowed determination, navigate into the deep unknown with the confidence of an experienced admiral who knows that if he endures the gale forces of self-doubt and persist despite all setbacks that he will discover what he seeks. A person must rely upon personal consciousness as a guiding compass into penetrating the unalleviated obscurity that shrouds the way. I shall always resist the easy path, because it leads to an apocalyptic demise.
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
When they reached the house, Wally took a box of crackers up to his room and sat on the floor to eat them, his back against his bed. He still couldn’t believe that he was the one who had officially declared war on the Malloys. How had it happened? Only a week before he was lying on his back in the grass, and now here he was: Number One on their Most-Wanted list. He was on bad terms already with his teacher, had almost broken Caroline’s nose, and had made everything worse by calling her sisters stupid. Well, they were stupid. And deep down, seven layers beneath his skin, Wally knew he was glad that he had thrust his head back and bumped Caroline. He’d just wanted her to stop bugging him, that’s all. But her nose sure looked peculiar by the end of the day—a lot redder and fatter than it had looked that morning. Then he had another thought: What if it really was broken, she had to have an operation, and he had to pay for it? His hands began to sweat, and he swallowed the piece of cracker in his mouth without chewing. Was there such a thing as just a sprained nose? A bruised nose? A slightly but not completely fractured nose? A bent nose, maybe?
Phyllis Reynolds Naylor (The Boys Start the War (Boy/Girl Battle, #1))
Mother once said I’d marry a quarryman. She looked at me as we washed clothes in the giant steel washtub, two pairs of water-wrinkled hands scrubbing and soaking other people’s laundry. We were elbow-deep in dirty suds and our fingers brushed under the foamy mounds. “Some mistakes are bound to be repeated,” she murmured We lived in Stony Creek, a granite town at a time when granite was going out of fashion. There were only three types of men here: Cottagers, rich, paunchy vacationers who swooped into our little Connecticut town in May and wiled away time on their sailboats through August; townsmen, small-time merchants and business owners who dreamed of becoming Cottagers; and quarrymen, men like my father, who worked with no thought to the future. The quarrymen toiled twelve hours a day, six days a week. They didn’t care that they smelled of granite dust and horses, grease and putty powder. They didn’t care about cleaning the crescents of grime from underneath their fingernails. Even when they heard the foreman’s emergency signal, three sharp shrieks of steam, they scarcely looked up from their work. In the face of a black powder explosion gone awry or the crushing finality of a wrongly cleaved stone, they remained undaunted. I knew why they lived this way. They did it for the granite. Nowhere else on earth did such stone exist—mesmerizing collages of white quartz, pink and gray feldspar, black lodestone, winking glints of mica. Stony Creek granite was so striking, it graced the most majestic of architecture: the Battle Monument at West Point, the Newberry Library in Chicago, the Fulton Building in Pittsburgh, the foundations of the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge. The quarrymen of Stony Creek would wither and fall before the Cottagers, before the townsmen. But the fruits of their labor tethered them to a history that would stand forever. “You’ll marry one, Adele—I’m sure of it. His hands will be tough as buckskin, but you’ll love him regardless,” Mother told me, her breath warm in my ear as the steam of the wastewater rose around us. I didn’t say that she was wrong, that she couldn’t know what would happen. I’d learned that from the quarry. Pa was a stonecutter and he cut the granite according to rift and grain, to what he could feel with his fingertips and see with his eyes. But there were cracks below the surface, cracks that betrayed the careful placement of a chisel and the pounding of a mallet. The most beautiful piece of stone could shatter into a pile of riprap. It all depended on where those cracks teased and wound, on where the stone would fracture when forced apart. “Keep your eyes open, Adele. I don’t know who it will be—a steam driller, boxer, derrickman, powderman? Maybe a stonecutter like your father?” I turned away from her, feigning disinterest. “There’s no predicting, I told her.
Chandra Prasad
Mother once said I’d marry a quarryman. She looked at me as we washed clothes in the giant steel washtub, two pairs of water-wrinkled hands scrubbing and soaking other people’s laundry. We were elbow-deep in dirty suds and our fingers brushed under the foamy mounds. “Some mistakes are bound to be repeated,” she murmured We lived in Stony Creek, a granite town at a time when granite was going out of fashion. There were only three types of men here: Cottagers, rich, paunchy vacationers who swooped into our little Connecticut town in May and wiled away time on their sailboats through August; townsmen, small-time merchants and business owners who dreamed of becoming Cottagers; and quarrymen, men like my father, who worked with no thought to the future. The quarrymen toiled twelve hours a day, six days a week. They didn’t care that they smelled of granite dust and horses, grease and putty powder. They didn’t care about cleaning the crescents of grime from underneath their fingernails. Even when they heard the foreman’s emergency signal, three sharp shrieks of steam, they scarcely looked up from their work. In the face of a black powder explosion gone awry or the crushing finality of a wrongly cleaved stone, they remained undaunted. I knew why they lived this way. They did it for the granite. Nowhere else on earth did such stone exist—mesmerizing collages of white quartz, pink and gray feldspar, black lodestone, winking glints of mica. Stony Creek granite was so striking, it graced the most majestic of architecture: the Battle Monument at West Point, the Newberry Library in Chicago, the Fulton Building in Pittsburgh, the foundations of the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge. The quarrymen of Stony Creek would wither and fall before the Cottagers, before the townsmen. But the fruits of their labor tethered them to a history that would stand forever. “You’ll marry one, Adele—I’m sure of it. His hands will be tough as buckskin, but you’ll love him regardless,” Mother told me, her breath warm in my ear as the steam of the wastewater rose around us. I didn’t say that she was wrong, that she couldn’t know what would happen. I’d learned that from the quarry. Pa was a stonecutter and he cut the granite according to rift and grain, to what he could feel with his fingertips and see with his eyes. But there were cracks below the surface, cracks that betrayed the careful placement of a chisel and the pounding of a mallet. The most beautiful piece of stone could shatter into a pile of riprap. It all depended on where those cracks teased and wound, on where the stone would fracture when forced apart. “Keep your eyes open, Adele. I don’t know who it will be—a steam driller, boxer, derrickman, powderman? Maybe a stonecutter like your father?” I turned away from her, feigning disinterest. “There’s no predicting, I told her.
Chandra Prasad (On Borrowed Wings)
Cocking a brow, she rose. “What’s all this about?” she asked the House, following the trail it had left. Down the hall, along the stairs, all the way down to the library itself. “Where are we going?” Nesta asked the warm air. Mercifully, even the night owls amongst the priestesses had gone to sleep, leaving no one to see her hurrying after the trail of branches. Around the levels of the library they twined, deeper and deeper, until they reached the seventh level. Nesta drew up short as the trail stopped at the edge of the wall of darkness. A light flickered beyond it. Several lights. As if to say, Come. Don’t be afraid. So Nesta sucked in a breath as she stepped into the gloom. Little tea lights wended into a familiar darkness. She and Feyre had once ventured down here—had faced horrors here. No evidence remained of that day. Only the firelit dimness, the candles leading her to the lowest levels of the library. To the pit itself. Nesta followed them, spiraling to the bottom of the pit, where one small lantern glowed, faintly illuminating the rows of books veiled in permanent shadow around it. Heart racing, Nesta lifted the lantern in one hand and gazed at the darkness, untouched by the light from the library high, high above. The heart of the world, of existence. Of self. The heart of the House. “This …” Her fingers tightened on the lantern. “This darkness is your heart.” As if in answer, the House laid a little evergreen sprig at her feet. “A Winter Solstice present. For me.” She could have sworn a warm hand brushed her neck in answer. “But your darkness …” Wonder softened her voice. “You were trying to show me. Show others. Who you are, down deep. What haunts you. You were trying to show them all those dark, broken pieces because the priestesses, and Emerie, and I … We’re the same as you.” Her throat constricted at what the House had gifted her. This knowledge. She lifted the lantern higher and blew out its flame. Let the darkness sweep in. Embraced it. “I’m not afraid,” she whispered into it. “You are my friend, and my home. Thank you for sharing this with me.” Again, Nesta could have sworn that phantom touch caressed her neck, her cheek, her brow. “Happy Solstice,” she said into the beautiful, fractured darkness.
Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Silver Flames (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #4))
The sunken gray sky seemed to be closing in on the ground. The edges of the world on which they stood crumbled into the abyss. They could hear it fracture around them like glaciers splintering off into the frigid deep. "What do you three want?" Eros asked with flippant annoyance. Loki chimed in, "We don't want any of your Girl Scout Cookies…" Eros closed his eyes and pressed his lips together. "-unless you have Samoas,” Loki amended.
Kaylin R. Boyd (The Netherworlds: Curse of Fate)