Gentleman's Guide To Vice And Virtue Quotes

God bless the book people for their boundless knowledge absorbed from having words instead of friends.

We are not broken things, neither of us. We are cracked pottery mended with laquer and flakes of gold, whole as we are, complete unto each other. Complete and worthy and so very loved.

We're not courting trouble," I say. "Flirting with it, at most.

Just thinking about all that blood." I nearly shudder. "Doesn't it make you a bit squeamish?" "Ladies haven't the luxury of being squeamish about blood," she replies, and Percy and I go fantastically red in unison.

The stars dust gold leafing on his skin. And we are looking at each other, just looking, and I swear there are whole lifetimes lived in those small, shared moments.

It's beginning to feel like he's shuffling his way through the seven deadly sins, in ascending order of my favourites.

Love may be a grand thing, but goddamn if it doesn't take up more than its fair share of space inside a man.

It is remarkable how much courage it takes to kiss someone, even when you are almost certain that person would very much like to be kissed by you. Doubt will knock you from the sky every time.

Ugh. Feelings.

Against the sky, the stars crown him, marking the edges of his silhouette like he is a constellation of himself.

I swear, you would play the coquette with a well-upholstered sofa." "First, I would not. And second, how handsome is this sofa?

What’s the use of temptations if we don’t yield to them?

And then Jesus says, 'Well, watch this' - " "Really? Well, watch this?" "That's biblical language." "If your Bible is written by Henry Montague.

It occurs to me then that perhaps getting my little sister drunk and explaining why I screw boys is not the most responsible move on my part.

it’s hard not to see. You’re the kind of pair that makes everyone around them feel as though they’re missing out on a private joke.

I have lived most of my life as a devotee of the philosophy that a man should not see two sevens in one day,

I’m sorry,” she says. “What for?” “You’ve had a rough go.” “Everyone has a rough go. I’ve had it far easier than most people.” “Maybe. But that doesn’t mean your feelings matter less.

I've always been of the mind that subtlety is a waste of time. Fortune favors the flirtatious.

The great tragic love story of Percy and me is neither great nor truly a love story, and is tragic only for its single-sidedness. It is also not an epic monolith that has plagued me since boyhood, as might be expected. Rather, it is simply the tale of how two people can be important to each other their whole lives, and then, one morning, quite without meaning to, one of them wakes to find that importance has been magnified into a sudden and intense desire to put his tongue in the other's mouth. A long, slow slide, then a sudden impact.

Oh no." Percy looks sideways at me. "Oh no what?" I swallow. "I'd first like it to be noted that I am most certainly not a smuggler." "Monty..." he says, my name sopping with dread. "And," I continue overtop him, "I'd like you to both remember just how much you adore me and how dull and gloomy your lives would be without me in them." "What did you do?

If the Good Lord didn't want men to play with themselves, we'd have hooks for hands.

In the east," she says after a time, her gaze still downcast, "there is a tradition known as kintsukuroi. It is the practice of mending broken ceramic pottery using lacquer dusted with gold and silver and other precious metals. It is meant to symbolize that things can be more beautiful for having been broken." "Why are you telling me this?" I ask. At last she looks at me. Her irises are polished obsidian in the moonlight. "Because I want you to know," she says, "that there is life after survival.

I love you, but I don’t know how to help you. I still don’t! I’m an emotional delinquent and I say wrong things all the time, but I want to be better for you. I promise that. It doesn’t matter to me that you’re ill and it doesn’t matter if I have to give up everything, because you’re worth it. You’re worth it all because you are magnificent, you are. Magnificent and gorgeous and brilliant and kind and good and I just . . . love you, Percy. I love you so damn much.

Because I want you to know,” she says, “that there is life after survival.

I have become a veritable scholar in seemingly innocent ploys to get his skin against mine.

and the person I most want to run away from is me.

There is nothing good about watching another man claim your ship because your skin is too dark to do it yourself," he says, each word a glancing wound. "So in future, you needn't demand apologies on my behalf.

I wish I could be better for you." She looks over at me, and I duck my head, shame sinking its teeth in. "I'm older and I know I'm supposed to be... an example, I don't know. At least someone you aren't embarrassed of." "You do fine." "I don't" "You're right, you don't. But you're getting better. And that isn't nothing.

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.

I am somehow stuck with an obstinate mount that resembles less a horse and more a leggy sausage, and seems fond of ingesting my commands and then ignoring them in their entirety.

A small shift in the gravity between us and suddenly all my stars are out of alignment, planets knocked from their orbits, and I'm left stumbling, without map or heading, through the bewildering territory of being in love with your best friend.

Can’t seal up a conversation with a casual Oh, by the way, could you perhaps not touch me the way you always have because each time it puts fresh splinters in my heart? Particularly when what I’d really like to say is Oh, by the way, could you please keep touching me, and perhaps do it all the time, and while we’re at it, would you like to take off all your clothes and climb in bed? They’re both weighted alike.

Ugh. Feelings.” I take a long drink, then pass her the bottle. She has another delicate sip. “You were right—it’s less horrid now.

He raises his head. "You're nothing like your father, Monty. For a start, you're far more decent than he is." I'm not sure how, after all the terrible things I've done, he can possibly mean that. "You might be the only person left on earth who thinks me decent." Between us, I feel his knuckles brush mine. Perhaps it's by chance, but it feels more like a question, and when I spread my fingers in answer, his hand slides into mine. "Then everyone else doesn't know you.

And I begin to cry. Though cry seems far too gentle a word. I begin to abso-bloody-lutely sob. Felicity is kind enough to look away. Percy is kind enough not to.

It’s a strange feeling, realizing that other people you don’t know have their own full lives that don’t touch yours. I

Don’t drink too much.” “Could I get an absolute value on too much?

Yes, for education. An actual education, not finishing school—they’re going to squeeze me into corsets and bully me into silence.

Lucky for me as well, or else we might never have met, and then what would have been the point of my life?

Are you going to be sick?” I raise my head. The duke is gone, but Helena is on the window seat, twisting her necklace around her fingers. I don’t answer, because I don’t believe a prisoner owes his captors any sort of report on his health. That, and if I’m going to be sick, I’d prefer to do it all over her, and I’d prefer it to be a stealth attack.

There’s really nothing to do but pretend I’m fully clothed and in control of the situation. So I walk up to Percy and say, “There you are. I think we should be going.” They’re

So long as you don’t go falling in love with me.” I don’t know why I say it. Call it battlements around my helpless heart. Percy looks away from me fast, shoulders curling up. It almost looks like a flinch. But then he says, “I’ll try my best.” He

Ladies haven’t the luxury of being squeamish about blood,” she replies, and Percy and I go fantastically red in unison.

He seems like he wants to touch me, but we've lost any sense of how men who haven't kissed each other do that.

Love may be a grand thing, but goddamn if it doesn’t take up more than its fair share of space inside a man.

I’m not sure how we are in the middle of a pirate siege and I’m arguing with this bigot about Percy’s nationality.

It is impossible to explain how you can love someone so much that it’s difficult to be around him. And

I want to touch him abso-bloody-lutely evrywhere.

Has that been your leg all this while?” “What?” He unhooks his foot from around my calf. “I thought it was the chair. Sorry about that. Dear Lord, why didn’t you say something?” Before

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. “May I kiss you?” I ask. “Abso-bloody-lutely you may,” he says. And so I do.

The stars dust gold leafing on his skin. And we are looking at each other, just looking, and I swear there are whole lifetimes lived in those small, shared seconds. It

From my first sighting, I fall in immediate and passionate love with Venice.

My head's higher than his, but we're close enough that I can see the freckles beneath his eyes. If I had to pick a favorite part of Percy's face - which would be impossible, really, but if held at gunpoint and forced to make a selection - it would be that small star-map across his skin. A part of him it feels as though no one else but me is ever close enough to see.

but God bless the book people for their boundless knowledge absorbed from having words instead of friends.

When I look back on it now, I realize that must have been the first time, in all the while we’d known each other, it occurred to me that Percy might actually be rather handsome. Perspective is a goddamn son of a bitch.

And then he leaves us to our own devices beside a store of gunpowder and flint and a cannon, thereby solidifying our captors’ reputation as the worst pirates in the history of the Mediterranean.

What do you want me to say? Yes, I’m ill. I’m an epileptic—that’s my lot. It isn’t easy and it isn’t very enjoyable but this is what I’ve got to live with. This is who I am, and I don’t think I’m insane. I don’t think I should be locked up and I don’t think I need to be cured of it for my life to be good. But no one seems to agree with me on that, and I was hoping you’d be different, but apparently you think just the same as my family and my doctors and everyone else.

Dear. Lord. Fortune has well and truly vomited down my front in the form of Mr. Lockwood. As

Between the near-kiss with Percy and now goddamned pirates, my heart is certainly being put through its paces today.

have lost years of my life loving him from afar and I’ll be damned if I’m robbed of him as soon as we realize we’ve both been admiring each other from a distance all this while.

Percy, I could say,I think you are the most beautiful creature on God's green earth and I would very much like to find a hidden corner of this opera house and engage in some behavior that could only be termedsinful.Percy, I could say, I am almost certain that I am in love with you.

The important bit was that if you go behind my back, I swear to God, I’ll skin you alive—” “I won’t—” “—murder you, then alchemically raise you from the dead so I can murder you again—

It wasn’t the first time I’d thought it—wouldn’t be the last either, though I didn’t know that then—but it was the first time I’d said it aloud, to anyone. It’s a strange thing, to want to die. Stranger still when you don’t feel you deserve to get away so easily.

Perhaps fashion is just a reinforcement of a lady’s chastity, in hopes that the interested party may lose interest and abandon any deflowering attempts simply for all the clothing in the way.

Monty's the thief,' Felicity says. 'No, I am the second thief. Which I think cancels out my thievery.

brushes his mouth against the corner of mine, and Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, it takes every ounce of the not-inconsiderable restraint I’ve spent years exercising around Percy not to rip all my clothes off right then, passersby be damned. But I am nothing if not a gentleman, and a gentleman does not take his trousers off in a public place, particularly if the great love of his life is asking him to refrain.

Do you know how horrid it feels to watch my brother get tossed out of the best boarding school of England, then get to travel the Continent as a reward, while I’m stuck behind, not permitted to study the same things or read the same books or even visit the same places while we’re abroad, just because I had the bad luck to be born a girl?

You can’t, I am thinking. You can’t be ill because I need you and you can’t go away to die in some asylum because what am I supposed to do without you?

Lucky for me as well, or else we might never have met, and then what would have been the point of my life? My

I understand less than half the words in that sentence, but God bless the book people for their boundless knowledge absorbed from having words instead of friends.

Be a little less honest and a little more tactful.

It took several thousand miles for me to begin believing that I am better than the worst things I’ve done. But I’m starting.

It’s hard for me to think of anything other than what he might be thinking, and what this night means to him, and if it’s the same as for me.

They likely would not have been able to be open about it. But the optimist in me likes to believe that the twenty-first century is not the first time in history that queer people have been able to live full romantic and sexual lives with the people they love. And if that makes me anachronistic,

It is remarkable how much courage it takes to kiss someone, even when you are almost certain that person would very mush like to be kissed by you. Doubt will knock you from the sky every time.

Blackmail is aggravating in normal circumstances, but far worse when it's coming from a younger sister.

Perspective is a goddamn son of a bitch.

Which is how I come to be running through the gardens of the Palace of Versailles, dressed only as Nature intended.

Somehow nothing's changed, and everything has.

A small shift in the gravity between us and suddenly all my stars are out of alignment, planets knocked from their orbits, and I’m left stumbling, without map or heading, through the bewildering territory of being in love with your best friend.

Percy leans in suddenly, and I think he’s going to tell me something in confidence, but instead he touches his lips to my cheek, so light and fast I doubt it happened as soon as he steps back.

Fortune favors the flirtatious.

You’ve had a rough go.' 'Everyone has a rough go. I’ve had it far easier than most people.' 'Maybe. But that doesn’t mean your feelings matter less.

It's a strange feeling, realising that other people you don't know have their own, full lives that don't touch yours.

There´s nothing good about watching another man claim your ship because your skin is to dark to do it yourself.

Why didn’t you tell me?” He clenches his hands into fists around the blankets, face set, then says, “Fine, you want to know why? Because at the end of this year, I’m not going to law school, I’m going into an asylum.

Well, one is illegal. And a sin. And the other is also a sin, if you aren’t married to her.

The bricks tear at my coat like briars as I pull his hips to mine so I can feel him going stiff.

There are bodies buried beneath the flagstones of my parents' estate, and some graves never green.

have a history of reacting poorly when shouted at,

When he speaks again, his tone is nearer to reverence, a voice for saints and sacred places.

clean up, sober up, stop letting lads climb in through your bedroom window at night or else—

I don’t think he was allowed to take supper with them when they had company, but, with some exceptions of that sort, they’ve been first-rate to him.

Though I would hang on because I’d likely wash up in France, and from what I remember from the summer my family spent there when Felicity and I were young, there are some lovely women in France. Some handsome boys as well, many of whom wear their breeches very tight, though I wasn’t clear where I stood on that when I was eleven.

The great tragic love story of Percy and me is neither great nor truly a love story, and is tragic only for its single-sidedness. It is also not an epic monolith that has plagued me since boyhood, as might be expected. Rather, it is simply the tale of how two people can be important to each other their whole lives, and then, one morning, quite without meaning to, one of them wakes to find that importance has been magnified into a sudden and intense desire to put his tongue in the other’s mouth.

The truth is that Percy has always been important to me, long before I fell so hard for him there was an audible crash. It's only lately that his knee bumping mine under a narrow pub table leaves me fumbling for words. A small shift in the gravity between us and suddenly all my stars are out of alignment, planets knocked from their orbits, and I’m left stumbling, without map or heading, through the bewildering territory of being in love with your best friend.

I wish I could be better for you." She looks over at me, and I duck my head, shame sinking its teeth in. "I'm older and I know I'm supposed to be... an example, I don't know. At least someone you aren't embarrassed of." "You do fine." "I don't." "You're right, you don't. But you're getting better. And that isn't nothing.

It’s a Venetian name—Baseggio. A patronymic from a Venetian diminutive of the surname Basile. Perhaps you might begin your search there.” “A patronymic diminutive of . . . that, yes.” I understand less than half the words in that sentence, but God bless the book people for their boundless knowledge absorbed from having words instead of friends. “Yes, thank you. I’ll try that.

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.

Let's get one thing straight," I interrupt, jerking my arm out of his grip with such force that I nearly knock out the woman standing behind me. "You are not my father, I am not your responsibility, and I did not come here to have a list of my faults related from him or be condemned for who I associate with-not by you or that damned duke. So while it's been a jolly good time, being treated like a child all evening, I think I've just about had enough and I can make my own way from here.