Mirrors Are Just Glass Quotes

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The thing about the Mirror is that no one knows where it is. In fact, no one knows what it is.” "It’s a mirror,” Simon said. “You know – reflective, glass. I’m just assuming.
Cassandra Clare (City of Glass (The Mortal Instruments, #3))
I want you to tell me about every person you’ve ever been in love with. Tell me why you loved them, then tell me why they loved you. Tell me about a day in your life you didn’t think you’d live through. Tell me what the word home means to you and tell me in a way that I’ll know your mother’s name just by the way you describe your bedroom when you were eight. See, I want to know the first time you felt the weight of hate, and if that day still trembles beneath your bones. Do you prefer to play in puddles of rain or bounce in the bellies of snow? And if you were to build a snowman, would you rip two branches from a tree to build your snowman arms or would leave your snowman armless for the sake of being harmless to the tree? And if you would, would you notice how that tree weeps for you because your snowman has no arms to hug you every time you kiss him on the cheek? Do you kiss your friends on the cheek? Do you sleep beside them when they’re sad even if it makes your lover mad? Do you think that anger is a sincere emotion or just the timid motion of a fragile heart trying to beat away its pain? See, I wanna know what you think of your first name, and if you often lie awake at night and imagine your mother’s joy when she spoke it for the very first time. I want you to tell me all the ways you’ve been unkind. Tell me all the ways you’ve been cruel. Tell me, knowing I often picture Gandhi at ten years old beating up little boys at school. If you were walking by a chemical plant where smokestacks were filling the sky with dark black clouds would you holler “Poison! Poison! Poison!” really loud or would you whisper “That cloud looks like a fish, and that cloud looks like a fairy!” Do you believe that Mary was really a virgin? Do you believe that Moses really parted the sea? And if you don’t believe in miracles, tell me — how would you explain the miracle of my life to me? See, I wanna know if you believe in any god or if you believe in many gods or better yet what gods believe in you. And for all the times that you’ve knelt before the temple of yourself, have the prayers you asked come true? And if they didn’t, did you feel denied? And if you felt denied, denied by who? I wanna know what you see when you look in the mirror on a day you’re feeling good. I wanna know what you see when you look in the mirror on a day you’re feeling bad. I wanna know the first person who taught you your beauty could ever be reflected on a lousy piece of glass. If you ever reach enlightenment will you remember how to laugh? Have you ever been a song? Would you think less of me if I told you I’ve lived my entire life a little off-key? And I’m not nearly as smart as my poetry I just plagiarize the thoughts of the people around me who have learned the wisdom of silence. Do you believe that concrete perpetuates violence? And if you do — I want you to tell me of a meadow where my skateboard will soar. See, I wanna know more than what you do for a living. I wanna know how much of your life you spend just giving, and if you love yourself enough to also receive sometimes. I wanna know if you bleed sometimes from other people’s wounds, and if you dream sometimes that this life is just a balloon — that if you wanted to, you could pop, but you never would ‘cause you’d never want it to stop. If a tree fell in the forest and you were the only one there to hear — if its fall to the ground didn’t make a sound, would you panic in fear that you didn’t exist, or would you bask in the bliss of your nothingness? And lastly, let me ask you this: If you and I went for a walk and the entire walk, we didn’t talk — do you think eventually, we’d… kiss? No, wait. That’s asking too much — after all, this is only our first date.
Andrea Gibson
Ty: Just words I like. If I say them to myself, it makes my mind - quieter. Does it bother you? Kit: No. I was just curious what words you liked. Ty: It's not the meaning, just the sound. Glass, twin, apple, whisper, stars, crystal, shadow, lilt. Kit: Whisper would be one of mine, too. Cloud, secret, highway, hurricane, mirror, castle, thorns. Ty: Blackthorns.
Cassandra Clare (Lord of Shadows (The Dark Artifices, #2))
She was a very pretty woman. She had dark red hair and her eyes -- her eyes are just like mine, Harry thought, edging a little closer to the glass. Bright green -- exactly the same shape, but then he noticed that she was crying; smiling, but crying at the same time. The tall, thin, black-haired man standing next to her put his arm around her. He wore glasses, and his hair was very untidy. It stuck up at the back, just like Harry's did. Harry was so close to the mirror now that his nose was nearly touching that of his reflection. "Mum?" he whispered. "Dad?" They just looked at him, smiling. And slowly, Harry looked into the faces of the other people in the mirror and saw other pairs of green eyes like his, other noses like his, even a little old man who looked as though he had Harry's knobbly knees -- Harry was looking at his family, for the first time in his life. The Potters smiled and waved at Harry and he stared hungrily back at them, his hands pressed flat against the glass as though he was hoping to fall right through it and reach them. He had a powerful kind of ache inside of him, half joy, half terrible sadness.
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Harry Potter, #1))
Villains were wonderful. They got to be cruel and selfish, to preen in front of mirrors and poison apples, and trap girls on mountains of glass. They indulged all their worst impulses, revenged themselves for the least offense, and took every last thing they wanted. And sure, they wound up in barrels studded with nails, or dancing in iron shoes heated by fire, not just dead, but disgraced and screaming. But before they got what was coming to them, they got to be the fairest in all the land.
Holly Black (How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories (The Folk of the Air, #3.5))
Tohrment spoke. "Bella's brother called. He's tabled the sehelusion request and asked that she stay here for a couple of days." Z jacked his head up. "Why?" "He didn't give a reason-" Tohr's eye's narrowed on Z's face. "Oh... my God." "What the fuck are you looking at?" Phury pointed to the antique mirror hanging on the wall next to the double doors. "See for yourself." Zsadist marched across the room, ready to give them all hell. Bella was what mattered- His mouth went lax at his reflection. With a shaky hand he reached out to the eyes in the old-fashioned leaded glass. His irises were no longer black. They were yellow. Just like his twin's. "Phury?" he said softly. "Phury... what happened to me?" As the male came up behind him, his brother's face appeared right beside Z's. And then Wrath's dark reflection showed up in the mirror, all long hair and sunglasses. Then Rhage's star-fallen beauty. And Vishous's Sox cap. And Tohrment's brush cut. And Butch's busted nose. One by one they reached out and touched him, their big hands gently on his shoulders. "Welcome back, my brother," Phury whispered. Zsadist stared at the males who were behind him. And the oddest thought that if he were to let himself go limp and fall backward... they would catch him.
J.R. Ward (Lover Awakened (Black Dagger Brotherhood, #3))
I want you to tell me about every person you've ever been in love with. Tell me why you loved them, then tell me why they loved you. Tell me about a day in your life you didn't think you’d live through. Tell me what the word “home” means to you and tell me in a way that I’ll know your mothers name just by the way you describe your bed room when you were 8. See, I wanna know the first time you felt the weight of hate and if that day still trembles beneath your bones. Do you kiss your friends on the cheek? Do you think that anger is a sincere emotion or just the timid motion of a fragile heart trying to beat away its pain? See, I wanna know what you think of your first name. And if you often lie awake at night and imagine your mothers joy when she spoke it for the very first time. I want you tell me all the ways you've been unkind. Tell me all the ways you've been cruel.Do you believe that Mary was really a virgin? Do you believe that Moses really parted the sea? And if you don’t believe in miracles, tell me, how would you explain the miracle of my life to me? And for all the times you've knelt before the temple of yourself, have the prayers you've asked come true? And if they didn't did you feel denied? And if you felt denied, denied by who[m]? I wanna know what you see when you look in the mirror on a day you’re feeling good. I wanna know what you see in the mirror on a day a day you’re feeling bad. I wanna know the first person who ever taught you your beauty could ever be reflected on a lousy piece of glass. If you ever reach enlightenment, will you remember how to laugh? Have you ever been a song? See, I wanna know more than what you do for a living. I wanna know how much of your life you spend just giving. And if you love yourself enough to also receive sometimes. I wanna know if you bleed sometimes through other people’s wounds. And if you dream sometimes that this life is just a balloon that if you wanted to you could pop—but you never would because you’d never want it to stop.
Andrea Gibson
Before you came, things were as they should be: the sky was the dead-end of sight, the road was just a road, wine merely wine. Now everything is like my heart, a color at the edge of blood: the grey of your absence, the color of poison, of thorns, the gold when we meet, the season ablaze, the yellow of autumn, the red of flowers, of flames, and the black when you cover the earth with the coal of dead fires. And the sky, the road, the glass of wine? The sky is a shirt wet with tears, the road a vein about to break, and the glass of wine a mirror in which the sky, the road, the world keep changing. Don’t leave now that you’re here— Stay. So the world may become like itself again: so the sky may be the sky, the road a road, and the glass of wine not a mirror, just a glass of wine.
Faiz Ahmad Faiz (100 Poems by Faiz Ahmed Fiza)
People think that good and bad are opposites but they're wrong, they're just mirror images of one another in broken glass.
Alice Feeney (Sometimes I Lie)
It is as hard to explain how this sunlit land was different from the old Narnia as it would be to tell you how the fruits of that country taste. Perhaps you will get some idea of it if you think like this. You may have been in a room in which there was a window that looked out on a lovely bay of the sea or a green valley that wound away among mountains. And in the wall of that room opposite to the window there may have been a looking-glass. And as you turned away from the window you suddenly caught sight of that sea or that valley, all over again, in the looking glass. And the sea in the mirror, or the valley in the mirror, were in one sense just the same as the real ones: yet at the same time they were somehow different - deeper, more wonderful, more like places in a story: in a story you have never heard but very much want to know. The difference between the old Narnia and the new Narnia was like that. The new one was a deeper country: every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more.
C.S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia (The Chronicles of Narnia, #1-7))
I like bars just after they open for the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny and the barkeep is giving himself that last look in the mirror to see if his tie is straight and his hair is smooth. I like the neat bottles on the bar back and the lovely shining glasses and the anticipation. I like to watch the man mix the first one of the evening and put it down on a crisp mat and put the little folded napkin beside it. I like to taste it slowly. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar—that's wonderful.
Raymond Chandler (The Long Goodbye (Philip Marlowe, #6))
Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created or recreated by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of a larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books.
Rudine Sims Bishop
The physical body is an agent of the spirit and its mirror. It is an engine and a reflection of the spirit. It is the spirit's ingenious memorandum to itself and the spirit sees itself in my body, just as I see my own face in a looking glass. My nerves reflect this. The earth is literally a mirror of thoughts. Objects themselves are embodied thoughts. Death is the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything.
Saul Bellow (Humboldt's Gift)
Dear Die-ary, I stared, motionless, before the mirror. As always, I stayed until I'm convinced that there is no glass, nothing, separating me from the room I see on the other side. I imagine that everything is different over there. Better. There are people, in that world, who I would like. But, like always, my hand hits the glass. I know that if I'd only waited just one more second... Shit. I'm gonna go kill a party clown.
Jhonen Vásquez
L'union libre [Freedom of Love]" My wife with the hair of a wood fire With the thoughts of heat lightning With the waist of an hourglass With the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger My wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of stars of the last magnitude With the teeth of tracks of white mice on the white earth With the tongue of rubbed amber and glass My wife with the tongue of a stabbed host With the tongue of a doll that opens and closes its eyes With the tongue of an unbelievable stone My wife with the eyelashes of strokes of a child's writing With brows of the edge of a swallow's nest My wife with the brow of slates of a hothouse roof And of steam on the panes My wife with shoulders of champagne And of a fountain with dolphin-heads beneath the ice My wife with wrists of matches My wife with fingers of luck and ace of hearts With fingers of mown hay My wife with armpits of marten and of beechnut And of Midsummer Night Of privet and of an angelfish nest With arms of seafoam and of riverlocks And of a mingling of the wheat and the mill My wife with legs of flares With the movements of clockwork and despair My wife with calves of eldertree pith My wife with feet of initials With feet of rings of keys and Java sparrows drinking My wife with a neck of unpearled barley My wife with a throat of the valley of gold Of a tryst in the very bed of the torrent With breasts of night My wife with breasts of a marine molehill My wife with breasts of the ruby's crucible With breasts of the rose's spectre beneath the dew My wife with the belly of an unfolding of the fan of days With the belly of a gigantic claw My wife with the back of a bird fleeing vertically With a back of quicksilver With a back of light With a nape of rolled stone and wet chalk And of the drop of a glass where one has just been drinking My wife with hips of a skiff With hips of a chandelier and of arrow-feathers And of shafts of white peacock plumes Of an insensible pendulum My wife with buttocks of sandstone and asbestos My wife with buttocks of swans' backs My wife with buttocks of spring With the sex of an iris My wife with the sex of a mining-placer and of a platypus My wife with a sex of seaweed and ancient sweetmeat My wife with a sex of mirror My wife with eyes full of tears With eyes of purple panoply and of a magnetic needle My wife with savanna eyes My wife with eyes of water to he drunk in prison My wife with eyes of wood always under the axe My wife with eyes of water-level of level of air earth and fire
André Breton (Poems of André Breton: A Bilingual Anthology)
It could be yesterday when I was less in love I think For I didn’t see you in the mirror behind me while getting dressed. The way your hands couldn’t stay away and our bodies always found their ways back to each other as if they were meant to be together Close. But then it was today and I saw you again in the mirror behind me while getting dressed So I go to sleep tonight alone without actually falling asleep because I’m scared of the moment I will wake up and realise it was just a dream You’re actually gone. Now all I can do is get through to another tomorrow hoping that I will be less in love again Like yesterday But not today. I was never really well with things at all.
Charlotte Eriksson
Or perhaps we should just ask Todd." I pound the glass right at his face. He doesn't even flinch. And then she says, "Todd would never tell you. Never." And the Mayor just looks at me. And he smiles My stomach sinks, my heart drops, my head feels so light I feel like I'm going to drop right to the ground. Oh, Viola- Viola, please- Forgive me. "Captain Hammar," the Mayor says and Viola's plunged into the water again, unable to not scream out in fright as down she goes. "NO!" I shout, pressing myself against the mirror. But the Mayor ain't even looking at her. He's looking right at me, as if he could see me even if I was behind a brick wall. "STOP IT!" I shout as she's thrashing again- And more- And more- "VIOLA!" And I'm pounding even tho my hands are breaking- And Mr. Hammar is grinning and holding her there- "VIOLA!" And her wrist are starting to bleed from where she's pulling- "I'LL KILL YOU!"- I'm shouting into the Mayor's face- With all my Noise- "I'LL KILL YOU!"- And still holding her there- "VIOLA! VIOLA!"- But it's Davy- Of all people- It's Davy who stops it.
Patrick Ness (The Ask and the Answer (Chaos Walking, #2))
I wonder from these thousand of "me's", which one am I? Listen to my cry, do not drown my voice I am completely filled with the thought of you. Don't lay broken glass on my path I will crush it into dust. I am nothing, just a mirror in the palm of your hand, reflecting your kindness, your sadness, your anger. If you were a blade of grass or a tiny flower I will pitch my tent in your shadow. Only your presence revives my withered heart. You are the candle that lights the whole world and I am an empty vessel for your light. Rumi - "Hidden Music
Rumi (Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi)
My name is Llian. I've come to save you." Said to Karan just before Llian falls flat on his face in front of her.
Ian Irvine (A Shadow on the Glass (The View from the Mirror, #1))
The idea of love walked along the water and her gaze was full of absence and her eyes spat lighting. The impressionable evening received by turns the imprints of grasses, clouds, bodies, and wore crazy astronomical designs. The idea of love walked straight ahead without seeing anything; she was wearing tiny isosceles mirrors whose perfect assemblage was amazing. They were so many images of fish tails, when, by their angelic nature, they answer the promise one might make of always finding each other again. Finding each other again even in the depths of a forest, where the thread of a star is an articulation more silent than life, the dawn a liquor stronger than blood. Who is lost, who truly wanders off when a cup of coffee is steaming in the fog and waiters dressed in snow circulate patiently on the surface of floors whose desired height can be indicated with one's hands? Who? A solitary man whom the idea of love has just left and who tucks in his spirit like an imaginary bed. The man falls all the same and in the next room, under the moon-white verandah, a woman rises whom the idea of love has abandoned. The gravel weeps outside, a rain of glass is falling in which we recognize small chains, tears in which we have time to see ourselves, mirror tears, shards of windows, singular crystals like the ones we witness in our hand on awakening, leaves and the faded petals of those roses that once embelished certain distillery bottles. It's just that the idea of love, it seems angry with love. This is how it began.
André Breton
fairy godmother says if you can no longer recognize the face reflected in the bathroom mirror, remember this: you are ever-changing. ever-spinning, too, just like mother earth. when you fall from the pure exhaustion of it all, you have every means to get back up & start over again.  keep going, little dancer.  keep going.
Amanda Lovelace (Break Your Glass Slippers (You Are Your Own Fairy Tale, #1))
I used to think love was two people sucking on the same straw to see whose thirst was stronger, but then I whiffed the crushed walnuts of your nape, traced jackals in the snow-covered tombstones of your teeth. I used to think love was a non-stop saxophone solo in the lungs, till I hung with you like a pair of sneakers from a phone line, and you promised to always smell the rose in my kerosene. I used to think love was terminal pelvic ballet, till you let me jog beside while you pedaled all over hell on the menstrual bicycle, your tongue ripping through my prairie like a tornado of paper cuts. I used to think love was an old man smashing a mirror over his knee, till you helped me carry the barbell of my spirit back up the stairs after my car pirouetted in the desert. You are my history book. I used to not believe in fairy tales till I played the dunce in sheep’s clothing and felt how perfectly your foot fit in the glass slipper of my ass. But then duty wrapped its phone cord around my ankle and yanked me across the continent. And now there are three thousand miles between the u and s in esophagus. And being without you is like standing at a cement-filled wall with a roll of Yugoslavian nickels and making a wish. Some days I miss you so much I’d jump off the roof of your office building just to catch a glimpse of you on the way down. I wish we could trade left eyeballs, so we could always see what the other sees. But you’re here, I’m there, and we have only words, a nightly phone call - one chance to mix feelings into syllables and pour into the receiver, hope they don’t disassemble in that calculus of wire. And lately - with this whole war thing - the language machine supporting it - I feel betrayed by the alphabet, like they’re injecting strychnine into my vowels, infecting my consonants, naming attack helicopters after shattered Indian tribes: Apache, Blackhawk; and West Bank colonizers are settlers, so Sharon is Davey Crockett, and Arafat: Geronimo, and it’s the Wild West all over again. And I imagine Picasso looking in a mirror, decorating his face in war paint, washing his brushes in venom. And I think of Jenin in all that rubble, and I feel like a Cyclops with two eyes, like an anorexic with three mouths, like a scuba diver in quicksand, like a shark with plastic vampire teeth, like I’m the executioner’s fingernail trying to reason with the hand. And I don’t know how to speak love when the heart is a busted cup filling with spit and paste, and the only sexual fantasy I have is busting into the Pentagon with a bazooka-sized pen and blowing open the minds of generals. And I comfort myself with the thought that we’ll name our first child Jenin, and her middle name will be Terezin, and we’ll teach her how to glow in the dark, and how to swallow firecrackers, and to never neglect the first straw; because no one ever talks about the first straw, it’s always the last straw that gets all the attention, but by then it’s way too late.
Jeffrey McDaniel
Mom?” he whispered. “Dad?” They just looked at him, smiling. And slowly, Harry looked into the faces of the other people in the mirror, and saw other pairs of green eyes like his, other noses like his, even a little old man who looked as though he had Harry’s knobbly knees—Harry was looking at his family, for the first time in his life. The Potters smiled and waved at Harry and he stared hungrily back at them, his hands pressed flat against the glass as though he was hoping to fall right through it and reach them. He had a powerful kind of ache inside him, half joy, half terrible sadness.
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Harry Potter, #1))
I like bars just after they open for the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny and the barkeep is giving himself that last look in the mirror to see if his tie is straight and his hair is smooth. I like the neat bottles on the bar back and the lovely shining glasses and the anticipation. I like to watch the man mix the first one of the evening and put it down on a crisp mat and put the little folded napkin beside it. I like to taste it slowly. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar—that’s wonderful.
Raymond Chandler (The Long Goodbye (Philip Marlowe, #6))
[S]he came up suddenly beside me so I saw her reflection in a mirror. At the sight of her I was paralyzed with happiness; … [S]he was smiling at me, … not a dream but a presence that filled the whole room … I knew I couldn’t turn around, that to look at her directly was to violate the laws of her world and mine; … our eyes met in the glass for a long moment; but just as she seemed about to speak … — a vapor rolled between us and I woke up.
Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch)
An ordinary mirror is silvered at the back but the window of the night train has darkness behind the glass. My face and the faces of other travellers were now mirrored on this darkness in a succession of stillnesses. Consider this, said the darkness: any motion at any speed is a succession of stillnesses; any section through an action will show just such a plane of stillness as this dark window in which your seeking face is mirrored. And in each plane of stillness is the moment of clarity that makes you responsible for what you do.
Russell Hoban (The Medusa Frequency)
When you get what you want in your struggle for self And the world makes you king for a day Just go to the mirror and look at yourself And see what that man has to say. For it isn’t your father, or mother, or wife Whose judgment upon you must pass The fellow whose verdict counts most in your life Is the one staring back from the glass. He’s the fellow to please – never mind all the rest For he’s with you, clear to the end And you’ve passed your most difficult, dangerous test If the man in the glass is your friend. You may fool the whole world down the pathway of years And get pats on the back as you pass But your final reward will be heartache and tears If you’ve cheated the man in the glass.
Peter Dale Wimbrow Sr.
The mirror had no power. The mirror was just a piece of silvered glass; the enchantment was all in me.
Maya Panika (Entanglement)
In Italy you learned cunning, but in Antwerp, flexibility. And besides, the shopping! Just step out of your door and you can get a diamond or a broom, you can get knives, candlesticks and keys, ironwork to suit the expert eye. They make soap and glass, they cure fish and they deal in alum and promissory notes. You can buy pepper and ginger, aniseed and cumin, saffron and rice, almonds and figs; you can buy vats and pots, combs and mirrors, cotton and silk, aloes and myrrh.
Hilary Mantel (The Mirror & the Light (Thomas Cromwell, #3))
I watched him as he lined up the ships in bottles on his deck, bringing them over from the shelves where they usually sat. He used an old shirt of my mother's that had been ripped into rags and began dusting the shelves. Under his desk there were empty bottles- rows and rows of them we had collected for our future shipbuilding. In the closet were more ships- the ships he had built with his own father, ships he had built alone, and then those we had made together. Some were perfect, but their sails browned; some had sagged or toppled over the years. Then there was the one that had burst into flames in the week before my death. He smashed that one first. My heart seized up. He turned and saw all the others, all the years they marked and the hands that had held them. His dead father's, his dead child's. I watched his as he smashed the rest. He christened the walls and wooden chair with the news of my death, and afterward he stood in the guest room/den surrounded by green glass. The bottle, all of them, lay broken on the floor, the sails and boat bodies strewn among them. He stood in the wreckage. It was then that, without knowing how, I revealed myself. In every piece of glass, in every shard and sliver, I cast my face. My father glanced down and around him, his eyes roving across the room. Wild. It was just for a second, and then I was gone. He was quiet for a moment, and then he laughed- a howl coming up from the bottom of his stomach. He laughed so loud and deep, I shook with it in my heaven. He left the room and went down two doors to my beadroom. The hallway was tiny, my door like all the others, hollow enough to easily punch a fist through. He was about to smash the mirror over my dresser, rip the wallpaper down with his nails, but instead he fell against my bed, sobbing, and balled the lavender sheets up in his hands. 'Daddy?' Buckley said. My brother held the doorknob with his hand. My father turned but was unable to stop his tears. He slid to the floor with his fists, and then he opened up his arms. He had to ask my brother twice, which he had never to do do before, but Buckley came to him. My father wrapped my brother inside the sheets that smelled of me. He remembered the day I'd begged him to paint and paper my room purple. Remembered moving in the old National Geographics to the bottom shelves of my bookcases. (I had wanted to steep myself in wildlife photography.) Remembered when there was just one child in the house for the briefest of time until Lindsey arrived. 'You are so special to me, little man,' my father said, clinging to him. Buckley drew back and stared at my father's creased face, the fine bright spots of tears at the corners of his eyes. He nodded seriously and kissed my father's cheek. Something so divine that no one up in heaven could have made it up; the care a child took with an adult. 'Hold still,' my father would say, while I held the ship in the bottle and he burned away the strings he'd raised the mast with and set the clipper ship free on its blue putty sea. And I would wait for him, recognizing the tension of that moment when the world in the bottle depended, solely, on me.
Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones)
In the other train, looking at me through the window, is the most beautiful boy I’ve ever seen. He has golden hair and bright blue eyes. His skin seems to glow softly, like he carries the sun inside him. One of his paint-stained hands is clutching his chest, like he just got punched, and the other is pressed flat against the glass of the window. I raise my hand and press it against my window, mirroring him. He looks so confused. Stunned. Like he’s just seen a ghost.
Josephine Angelini
I think that must be a lot like how God has it--not to sound as if I think I'm anything like God, mind you. But the whole idea--sitting up there behind glass you can't be seen through. The person down below looks up and it's just a reflection of themselves, a mirror is what they see. But behind the glass, somebody who loves you more than anything is watching, and is hoping for the best for you, and cheering you on, and is loving you even when you are doing something you shouldn't be.
Suzanne Strempek Shea (Lily Of The Valley)
I want you to tell me about every person you’ve ever been in love with. Tell me why you loved them, then tell me why they loved you. I wanna know what you see when you look in the mirror on a day you’re feeling good. I wanna know what you see when you look in the mirror on a day you’re feeling bad. I wanna know the first person who taught you your beauty could ever be reflected on a lousy piece of glass. See, I wanna know more than what you do for a living. I wanna know how much of your life you spend just giving, and if you love yourself enough to also receive sometimes. I wanna know if you bleed sometimes from other people’s wounds, and if you dream sometimes that this life is just a balloon — that if you wanted to, you could pop, but you never would ‘cause you’d never want it to stop. If a tree fell in the forest and you were the only one there to hear — if its fall to the ground didn’t make a sound, would you panic in fear that you didn’t exist, or would you bask in the bliss of your nothingness?
Andrea Gibson
Suddenly the sun rose – like a burst of hope. The dark autumn water mirrored the sky; it began to breathe and the sun seemed to cry out in the waves. The steep banks had been salted by the night’s frost and the red-brown trees looked very gay. The wind rose, the mist vanished and the world grew cool and glass-like, piercingly transparent. There was no warmth in the sun, nor in the blue sky and water. The earth was vast: even the vast forest had both a beginning and an end, but the earth just stretched on for ever . . . And grief was something equally vast, equally eternal.
Vasily Grossman (Life and Fate (Stalingrad, #2))
Disasterology The Badger is the thirteenth astrological sign. My sign. The one the other signs evicted: unanimously. So what? ! Think I want to read about my future in the newspaper next to the comics? My third grade teacher told me I had no future. I run through snow and turn around just to make sure I’ve got a past. My life’s a chandelier dropped from an airplane. I graduated first in my class from alibi school. There ought to be a healthy family cage at the zoo, or an open field, where I can lose my mother as many times as I need. When I get bored, I call the cops, tell them there’s a pervert peeking in my window! then I slip on a flimsy nightgown, go outside, press my face against the glass and wait… This makes me proud to be an American where drunk drivers ought to wear necklaces made from the spines of children they’ve run over. I remember my face being invented through a windshield. All the wounds stitched with horsehair So the scars galloped across my forehead. I remember the hymns cherubs sang in my bloodstream. The way even my shadow ached when the chubby infants stopped. I remember wishing I could be boiled like water and made pure again. Desire so real it could be outlined in chalk. My eyes were the color of palm trees in a hurricane. I’d wake up and my id would start the day without me. Somewhere a junkie fixes the hole in his arm and a racing car zips around my halo. A good God is hard to find. Each morning I look in the mirror and say promise me something don’t do the things I’ve done.
Jeffrey McDaniel
She was a very pretty woman. She had dark red hair and her eyes- her eyes are just like mine, Harry thought, edging a little closer to the glass. Bright green- exactly the same shape, but then he noticed that she was crying; smiling, but crying at the same time. The tall, thin, black-haired man standing next to her put his arm around her. He wore glasses, and his hair was very untidy. It stuck up at the back, just as Harry's did. Harry was so close to the mirror now that his nose was nearly touching that of his reflection. "Mom?" he whispered. "Dad?" They just looked at him, smiling. And slowly, Harry looked into the faces of the other people in the mirror, and saw other pairs of green eyes like his, other noses like his, even a little old man who looked as though he had Harry's knobbly knees- Harry was looking at his family, for the first time in his life. The Potters smiled and waved at Harry and he stared hungrily back at them, his hands pressed flat against the glass as though he was hoping to fall right through it and reach them. He had a powerful kind of ache inside him, half joy, half terrible sadness.
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Harry Potter, #1))
People think that good and bad are opposites but they're wrong, they're just a mirror image of one another in broken glass.
Alice Feeney (Sometimes I Lie)
He put his head down and charged at the mirror. Perhaps it was a teleportation door to another section of the city, perhaps a simple doorway to a room beyond. Or perhaps, Alton dared to imagine in those few desperate seconds, this was some interplanar gate that would being him into a strange and unknown plane of existence! He felt the tingling excitement of adventure pulling him on as he neared the wonderer thing - then he felt only the impact, the shattering glass, and the unyielding stone wall behind it. Perhaps it was just a mirror.
R.A. Salvatore (Homeland (Forgotten Realms: The Dark Elf Trilogy, #1; Legend of Drizzt, #1))
Colored like a sunset tide is a gaze sharply slicing through the reflective glass. A furrowed brow is set much too seriously, as if trying to unfold the pieces of the face that stared back at it. One eyebrow is raised skeptically, always calculating and analyzing its surroundings. I tilt my head trying to see the deeper meaning in my features, trying to imagine the connection between my looks and my character as I stare in the mirror for the required five minutes. From the dark brown hair fastened tightly in a bun, a curl as bright as woven gold comes loose. A flash of unruly hair prominent through the typical browns is like my temper; always there, but not always visible. I begin to grow frustrated with the girl in the mirror, and she cocks her hip as if mocking me. In a moment, her lips curve in a half smile, not quite detectable in sight but rather in feeling, like the sensation of something good just around the corner. A chin was set high in a stubborn fashion, symbolizing either persistence or complete adamancy. Shoulders are held stiff like ancient mountains, proud but slightly arrogant. The image watches with the misty eyes of a daydreamer, glazed over with a sort of trance as if in the middle of a reverie, or a vision. Every once and a while, her true fears surface in those eyes, terror that her life would amount to nothing, that her work would have no impact. Words written are meant to be read, and sometimes I worry that my thoughts and ideas will be lost with time. My dream is to be an author, to be immortalized in print and live forever in the minds of avid readers. I want to access the power in being able to shape the minds of the young and open, and alter the minds of the old and resolute. Imagine the power in living forever, and passing on your ideas through generations. With each new reader, a new layer of meaning is uncovered in writing, meaning that even the author may not have seen. In the mirror, I see a girl that wants to change the world, and change the way people think and reason. Reflection and image mean nothing, for the girl in the mirror is more than a one dimensional picture. She is someone who has followed my footsteps with every lesson learned, and every mistake made. She has been there to help me find a foothold in the world, and to catch me when I fall. As the lights blink out, obscuring her face, I realize that although that image is one that will puzzle me in years to come, she and I aren’t so different after all.
K.D. Enos
In spite of all my aches and pains, and I've got plenty. Inside I go on feeling just a chit like Gina. Perhaps everyone does. The glass shows them how old they are and they just don't believe it. It seems only a few months ago that we were at Florence. Do you remember Fräulein Schweich and her boots?” The two elderly women laughed together at events that had happened nearly half a century ago.
Agatha Christie (They Do It With Mirrors (Miss Marple, #6))
I pretend to reach for them, but before he can guess my intentions, I catch one of his wings instead. He flutters, trying to break loose, his one free wing batting my hand. I draw out the decanter and stuff him into it, careful to fold his wings. I don’t want to hurt him. I just want to better him. Once he’s settled inside, I shove a paper towel into the bottle’s neck. No need to worry that he’ll smother. After all, he spent that night in a bug trap last year and survived. “Looks like you’re going to have some turbulence on your flight,” I tell him through the glass. His voice fills my head, an angry, scolding growl. When I don’t respond, he yells Chessie’s name. Chessie flits over to the car and sits on the side mirror, licking his paw, amused and uninterested in taking sides. I hold the decanter up to get a closer look at Morpheus. “Game, set, match, luv. You do realize that my human side defeated you, right? No magic required.” Unlike a real moth that would beat itself against the glass walls until exhausted, he hangs under the curved neck, dignified, glaring with his bulbous eyes. If he had a mouth instead of a proboscis, I’d be able to tell if he’s snarling or beaming with pride. Knowing him, it could be either. Most likely, it’s both.
A.G. Howard (Unhinged (Splintered, #2))
The Greenland fjords are peculiar for the spells of completely quiet weather, when there is not enough wind to blow out a match and the water is like a sheet of glass. The kayak hunter must sit in his boat without stirring a finger so as not to scare the shy seals away. Actually, he can only move his eyes, as even the slightest move otherwise might mean game lost. The sun, low in the sky, sends a glare into his eyes, and the landscape around moves into the realm of the unreal. The reflex from the mirror-like water hypnotizes him, he seems to be unable to move, and all of a sudden it is as if he were floating in a bottomless void, sinking, sinking, and sinking.... Horror-stricken, he tries to stir, to cry out, but he cannot, he is completely paralyzed, he just falls and falls.
Peter Freuchen (Book of the Eskimos)
The charm of a city, now we come to it, is not unlike the charm of flowers. It partly depends on seeing time creep across it. Charm needs to be fleeting. Nothing could be less palatable than a museum-city propped up by prosthetic devices of concrete. Paris is not in danger of becoming a museum-city, thanks to the restlessness and greed of promoters. Yet their frenzy to demolish everything is less objectionable than their clumsy determination to raise housing projects that cannot function without the constant presence of an armed police force… All these banks, all these glass buildings, all these mirrored facades are the mark of a reflected image. You can no longer see what’s happening inside, you become afraid of the shadows. The city becomes abstract, reflecting only itself. People almost seem out of place in this landscape. Before the war, there were nooks and crannies everywhere. Now people are trying to eliminate shadows, straighten streets. You can’t even put up a shed without the personal authorization of the minister of culture. When I was growing up, my grandpa built a small house. Next door the youth club had some sheds, down the street the local painter stored his equipment under some stretched-out tarpaulin. Everybody added on. It was telescopic. A game. Life wasn’t so expensive — ordinary people would live and work in Paris. You’d see masons in blue overalls, painters in white ones, carpenters in corduroys. Nowadays, just look at Faubourg Sainte-Antoine — traditional craftsmen are being pushed out by advertising agencies and design galleries. Land is so expensive that only huge companies can build, and they have to build ‘huge’ in order to make it profitable. Cubes, squares, rectangles. Everything straight, everything even. Clutter has been outlawed. But a little disorder is a good thing. That’s where poetry lurks. We never needed promoters to provide us, in their generosity, with ‘leisure spaces.’ We invented our own. Today there’s no question of putting your own space together, the planning commission will shut it down. Spontaneity has been outlawed. People are afraid of life.
Robert Doisneau (Paris)
I saw her reflection behind me, in the mirror. I was speechless. Somehow I knew I wasn’t allowed to turn around—it was against the rules, whatever the rules of the place were—but we could see each other, our eyes could meet in the mirror, and she was just as glad to see me as I was to see her. She was herself. An embodied presence. There was psychic reality to her, there was depth and information. She was between me and whatever place she had stepped from, what landscape beyond. And it was all about the moment when our eyes touched in the glass, surprise and amusement, her beautiful blue eyes with the dark rings around the irises, pale blue eyes with a lot of light in them: hello! Fondness, intelligence, sadness, humor. There was motion and stillness, stillness and modulation, and all the charge and magic of a great painting. Ten seconds, eternity. It was all a circle back to her. You could grasp it in an instant, you could live in it forever: she existed only in the mirror, inside the space of the frame, and though she wasn’t alive, not exactly, she wasn’t dead either because she wasn’t yet born, and yet never not born—as somehow, oddly, neither was I. And I knew that she could tell me anything I wanted to know (life, death, past, future) even though it was already there, in her smile, the answer to all questions
Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch)
I don't know for sure what ever became of Hatsumomo. A few years after the war, I heard she was making a living as a prostitute in the Miyagawa-cho district. She couldn't have been there long, because on the night I heard it, a man at the same party swore that if Hatsumomo was a prostitute, he would find her and give her some business of his own. He did go looking for her, but she was nowhere to be found. Over the years, she probably succeeded in drinking herself to death. She certainly wouldn't have been the first geisha to do it. In just the way that a man can grow accustomed to a bad leg, we'd all grown accustomed to having Hatsumomo in our okiya. I don't think we quite understood all the ways her presence had afflicted us until long after she'd left, when things that we hadn't realized were ailing slowly began to heal. Even when Hatsumomo had been doing nothing more than sleeping in her room, the maids had known she was there, and that during the course of the day she would abuse them. They'd lived with the kind of tension you feel if you walk across a frozen pond whose ice might break at any moment. And as for Pumpkin, I think she'd grown to be dependent on her older sister and felt strangely lost without her. I'd already become the okiya's principal asset, but even I took some time to weed out all the peculiar habits that had taken root because of Hatsumomo. Every time a man looked at me strangely, I found myself wondering if he'd heard something unkind about me from her, even long after she was gone. Whenever I climbed the stairs to the second floor of the okiya, I still kept my eyes lowered for fear that Hatsumomo would be waiting there on the landing, eager for someone to abuse. I can't tell you how many times I reached that last step and looked up suddenly with the realization that there was no Hatsumomo, and there never would be again. I knew she was gone, and yet the very emptiness of the hall seemed to suggest something of her presence. Even now, as an older woman, I sometimes lift the brocade cover on the mirror of my makeup stand, and have the briefest flicker of a thought that I may find her there in the glass, smirking at me.
Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)
I say is someone in there?’ The voice is the young post-New formalist from Pittsburgh who affects Continental and wears an ascot that won’t stay tight, with that hesitant knocking of when you know perfectly well someone’s in there, the bathroom door composed of thirty-six that’s three times a lengthwise twelve recessed two-bevelled squares in a warped rectangle of steam-softened wood, not quite white, the bottom outside corner right here raw wood and mangled from hitting the cabinets’ bottom drawer’s wicked metal knob, through the door and offset ‘Red’ and glowering actors and calendar and very crowded scene and pubic spirals of pale blue smoke from the elephant-colored rubble of ash and little blackened chunks in the foil funnel’s cone, the smoke’s baby-blanket blue that’s sent her sliding down along the wall past knotted washcloth, towel rack, blood-flower wallpaper and intricately grimed electrical outlet, the light sharp bitter tint of a heated sky’s blue that’s left her uprightly fetal with chin on knees in yet another North American bathroom, deveiled, too pretty for words, maybe the Prettiest Girl Of All Time (Prettiest G.O.A.T.), knees to chest, slew-footed by the radiant chill of the claw-footed tub’s porcelain, Molly’s had somebody lacquer the tub in blue, lacquer, she’s holding the bottle, recalling vividly its slogan for the past generation was The Choice of a Nude Generation, when she was of back-pocket height and prettier by far than any of the peach-colored titans they’d gazed up at, his hand in her lap her hand in the box and rooting down past candy for the Prize, more fun way too much fun inside her veil on the counter above her, the stuff in the funnel exhausted though it’s still smoking thinly, its graph reaching its highest spiked prick, peak, the arrow’s best descent, so good she can’t stand it and reaches out for the cold tub’s rim’s cold edge to pull herself up as the white- party-noise reaches, for her, the sort of stereophonic precipice of volume to teeter on just before the speaker’s blow, people barely twitching and conversations strettoing against a ghastly old pre-Carter thing saying ‘We’ve Only Just Begun,’ Joelle’s limbs have been removed to a distance where their acknowledgement of her commands seems like magic, both clogs simply gone, nowhere in sight, and socks oddly wet, pulls her face up to face the unclean medicine-cabinet mirror, twin roses of flame still hanging in the glass’s corner, hair of the flame she’s eaten now trailing like the legs of wasps through the air of the glass she uses to locate the de-faced veil and what’s inside it, loading up the cone again, the ashes from the last load make the world's best filter: this is a fact. Breathes in and out like a savvy diver… –and is knelt vomiting over the lip of the cool blue tub, gouges on the tub’s lip revealing sandy white gritty stuff below the lacquer and porcelain, vomiting muddy juice and blue smoke and dots of mercuric red into the claw-footed trough, and can hear again and seems to see, against the fire of her closed lids’ blood, bladed vessels aloft in the night to monitor flow, searchlit helicopters, fat fingers of blue light from one sky, searching.
David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest)
Mine was just an ordinary general hospital: the Lutheran, in a suburb of Chicago called Park Ridge. It was a big, grey, monolithic building, with mirrored glass windows. It didn’t seem much like a place that offered yoga classes by the pool. The only thing it had a view of was a shopping centre car park.
Elton John (Me)
The mirror doesn't lie. For all the bad things we tend to see about ourselves, there are good things too. We just have to bring them to the front. And when we see them, other people do too. And they come to appreciate them and respect them, despite our imperfections. Sometimes they come to love them. But only if we love ourselves first.
H.L. Sudler, The Looking Glass
I only slept a few hours when I went to bed, and feeling that I could not sleep any more, got up. I had hung my shaving glass by the window, and was just beginning to shave. Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder, and heard the Count’s voice saying to me, “Good-morning.” I started, for it amazed me that I had not seen him, since the reflection of the glass covered the whole room behind me. In starting I had cut myself slightly, but did not notice it at the moment. Having answered the Count’s salutation, I turned to the glass again to see how I had been mistaken. This time there could be no error, for the man was close to me, and I could see him over my shoulder. But there was no reflection of him in the mirror!
Bram Stoker (Dracula)
Hello..." "Hello Who are you?" "Take a moment to reflect." "And how did you get here from there, Mrs. Hall?" "I don't know. I really don't. I was such a together person. And I didn't make decisions. I mean, I never did anything in my whole life that wasn't someone else's idea. Like a girl in a mirror. Like I was watching, sitting, brushing my hair, while my life went by on the glass. When my mother deserted me. When Hector died. When Hector died again. When Daniel was killed, it was like the mirror was broken. There were only two things I could have done. And one of them would have been just to lie down and never get up again. It's like how many times can life hit you? When do the blows start to hurt? When do you just... stop?
Neil Gaiman (The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones)
And then I saw it. The mirror fogged over as I squinted at my reflection, and I scrubbed it with the heel of my palm. My skin squeaked against the glass, I turned my head to the side. I peered at my reflection from the corner of my eye. Toothmarks. Jesus. "You left a bite mark on my neck!" Jacob opened the shower curtain just far enough to look out at me. He knuckled water out of his eyes and grinned at me. "Good thing you don't have to woke tomorrow." "You shit." He grinned wider and whisked the curtain shut. Way to go. I'd look real slick reporting for duty at the Fifth Precinct covered in hickeys like a slutty teenaged girl. Damn it. I rubbed at the toothmarks, which raised a pinkish blotch around them. "It better be gone by Thursday," I said. I'm sure Jacob felt very chastised. Not.
Jordan Castillo Price (Secrets (PsyCop, #4))
La Mort des Amants Nous aurons des lits pleins d'odeurs légères, Des divans profonds comme des tombeaux, Et d'étranges fleurs sur des étagères, Ecloses pour nous sous des cieux plus beaux. Usant à l'envi leurs chaleurs dernières, Nos deux coeurs seront deux vastes flambeaux, Qui réfléchiront leurs doubles lumières Dans nos deux esprits, ces miroirs jumeaux. Un soir fait de rose et de bleu mystique, Nous échangerons un éclair unique, Comme un long sanglot, tout chargé d'adieux; Et plus tard un Ange, entr'ouvrant les portes, Viendra ranimer, fidèle et joyeux, Les miroirs ternis et les flammes mortes. We will have beds which exhale odours soft, We will have divans profound as the tomb, And delicate plants on the ledges aloft, Which under the bluest of skies for us bloom. Exhausting our hearts to their last desires, They both shall be like unto two glowing coals, Reflecting the twofold light of their fires Across the twin mirrors of our two souls. One evening of mystical azure skies, We'll exchange but one single lightning flash, Just like a long sob — replete with good byes. And later an angel shall joyously pass Through the half-open doors, to replenish and wash The torches expired, and the tarnished glass.
Charles Baudelaire
Villains were wonderful. They got to be cruel and selfish, to preen in front of mirrors and poison apples, and trap girls on mountains of glass. They indulged all their worst impulses, revenged themselves for the least offense, and took every last thing they wanted. And sure, they wound up in barrels studded with nails, or dancing in iron shoes heated by fire, not just dead, but disgraced and screaming. But before they got what was coming to them, they got to be the fairest in all the land.
Holly Black (How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories (The Folk of the Air, #3.5))
The student was silent. Soen-sa said, “What color is this?” The student said, “You have eyes.” Soen-sa said, “Eyes? These are not eyes. They are holes in my face.” (Laughter.) “I ask you once again—what color is this door?” The student was silent. Soen-sa said, “It is brown.” “But if I'd said brown, you would've said I'm attached to color!” Soen-sa said, “Brown is only brown.” Then, pointing to a glass of water, “What is this?” “Water.” “Yah. Water is water. This is not thinking. When you said ‘water’—this mind. This mind is very important. It is a clear mirror. Red comes, the mirror is red. Yellow comes, the mirror is yellow. Water comes, there is water. A door comes, there is a door. If you are not thinking, your mind is the same as a mirror. It is only like this. So true emptiness is clear mind. In original clear mind there is no name and no form. Nothing appears or disappears. All things are just as they are. If you are thinking, you are in a dream. You must cut off all your thinking and wake up.
Stephen Mitchell (Dropping Ashes on the Buddha: The Teachings of Zen Master Seung Sahn)
She blushed softly as she viewed herself in the mirror, suddenly aware that he was once more behind her eyes, seeing her just as she did. “You could at least warn me,” she said aloud, cocking a scolding brow at her reflection. And deprive myself of this side of you? I would not dream of it. Legna smiled, moving closer to her looking glass. She gasped when she got a closer look at herself, her hand coming up to her cheek in shock as she looked into her eyes. “My eyes!” she exclaimed. My eyes, he said. He couldn’t have spoken a clearer truth. It was his mercury-colored irises that had become part of her reflection, the multicolored gray and green gone from their familiar place. She sighed with resignation, supposing to herself that since it wasn’t likely she could do anything about it, she would have to get used to it. “I do not suppose you will show up here suddenly sprouting coffee-colored hair?” she asked hopefully. No, sweet, that is not likely. “Well, this is a highly unfair situation!” she cried with exaggerated petulance. “An exchange historically indicates one thing being swapped for another. So far I only see you in me, but none of me in you. It feels terribly high-handed. How typical of you.” He did not respond, only a soft impression of laughter flitting through her mind. Odd, but she realized then that she had hardly ever heard him laugh before. She was surprised by how comfortable it sounded on him. He had always been so serious, so . . . Self-possessed. “If you do not mind, do refrain from editing my personal thoughts,” she scolded, her arching tone taunting and haughty.
Jacquelyn Frank (Gideon (Nightwalkers, #2))
But what kind of addict would need all these coconut husks and crushed honeydew rinds? Would the presence of junkies account for all these uneaten french fries? These puddles of glazed catsup on the bureau? Maybe so. But then why all this booze? And these crude pornographic photos, ripped out of pulp magazines like Whores of Sweden and Orgies in the Casbah, that were plastered on the broken mirror with smears of mustard that had dried to a hard yellow crust … and all these signs of violence, these strange red and blue bulbs and shards of broken glass embedded in the wall plaster … No; these were not the hoofprints of your normal, godfearing junkie. It was far too savage, too aggressive. There was evidence, in this room, of excessive consumption of almost every type of drug known to civilized man since 1544 A.D. It could only be explained as a montage, a sort of exaggerated medical exhibit, put together very carefully to show what might happen if twenty-two serious drug felons—each with a different addiction—were penned up together in the same room for five days and nights, without relief. Indeed. But of course that would never happen in Real Life, gentlemen. We just put this thing together for demonstration purposes …
Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)
With Nicasia by his side, Cardan drew others to him until he formed a malicious little foursome who prowled the isles of Elfhame looking for trouble. They unravelled precious tapestries and set fire to part of the Crooked Forest. They made their instructors at the palace school weep and made courtiers terrified to cross them. Valerian, who loved cruelty the way some Folk loved poetry. Locke, who had a whole empty house for them to run amok in, along with an endless appetite for merriment. Nicasia, whose contempt for the land made her eager to have all of Elfhame kiss her slipper. And Cardan, who modelled himself on his eldest brother and learned how to use his status to make Folk scrape and grovel and bow and beg, who delighted in being a villain. Villains were wonderful. They got to be cruel and selfish, to preen in front of mirrors and poison apples, and trap girls on mountains of glass. They indulged all their worst impulses, revenged themselves for the least offense, and took every last thing they wanted. And sure, they wound up in barrels studded with nails, or dancing in iron shoes heated by fire, not just dead, but disgraced and screaming. But before they got what was coming to them, they got to be the fairest in the land.
Holly Black (How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories (The Folk of the Air, #3.5))
Rey had Begged The Vision to Reveal her parents, and 2 dark shadows had approached the mirror and merged into one figure, which matched it's hand to hers. but when the frost over the glass cleared. She saw only... herself. "i thought i'd find answers here" She said, forlorn I Was Wrong" 'I'd never felt so alone". 'you're not alone" Kylo whispered. "neither are you" She told Him, 'it isn't too late". She held out a hand and he removed his glove and reached for her. their fingers's touched and a Tear Slipped down Rey's cheek. just then, Luke burst through the door of her hut, Saw the Force Vision of Kylo and Yelled 'Stop"!!!
Delilah S. Dawson
Completely confused as to who the real criminals were in this case, the jury had voted to wash their hands of everybody and they let him off. That had been the meaning of the conversation I'd had with him that afternoon, but I hadn't understood what was happening at all. There were many moments in the Vine like that one—where you might think today was yesterday, and yesterday was tomorrow, and so on. Because we all believed we were tragic, and we drank. We had that helpless, destined feeling. We would die with handcuffs on. We would be put a stop to, and it wouldn't be our fault. So we imagined. And yet we were always being found innocent for ridiculous reasons. ...We bought heroin with the money and split the heroin down the middle. Then he went looking for his girlfriend, and I went looking for mine, knowing that when there were drugs around, she surrendered. But I was in a bad condition—drunk, and having missed a night's sleep. As soon as the stuff entered my system, I passed out. Two hours went by without my noticing. I felt I'd only blinked my eyes, but when I opened them my girlfriend and a Mexican neighbor were working on me, doing everything they could to bring me back. The Mexican was saying, "There, he's coming around now." We lived in a tiny, dirty apartment. When I realized how long I'd been out and how close I'd come to leaving it forever, our little home seemed to glitter like cheap jewelry. I was overjoyed not to be dead. Generally the closest I ever came to wondering about the meaning of it all was to consider that I must be the victim of a joke. There was no touching the hem of mystery, no little occasion when any of us thought—well, speaking for myself only, I suppose— that our lungs were filled with light, or anything like that. I had a moment's glory that night, though. I was certain I was here in this world because I couldn't tolerate any other place. As for Hotel, who was in exactly the same shape I was and carrying just as much heroin, but who didn't have to share it with his girlfriend, because he couldn't find her that day: he took himself to a rooming house down at the end of Iowa Avenue, and he overdosed, too. He went into a deep sleep, and to the others there he looked quite dead. The people with him, all friends of ours, monitored his breathing by holding a pocket mirror under his nostrils from time to time, making sure that points of mist appeared on the glass. But after a while they forgot about him, and his breath failed without anybody's noticing. He simply went under. He died. I am still alive.
Denis Johnson (Jesus’ Son)
When you get what you want in your struggle for self, and the World makes you king for a day; Just go to the mirror and look at yourself, and see what that man has to say. For it isn't your father or mother or wife whose judgment upon you must pass; The fellow whose verdict counts most in your life is the one staring back from the glass. Some people might think you're a straight-shootin' chum and call you a wonderful guy; But the Man in the Glass says you're only a bum if you can't look him straight in the eye. He's the fellow to please -- never mind all the rest! -- for he's with you all the way to the end; And you've already passed your most dangerous test if the guy in the glass is your friend. You may fool the whole World down the pathway of years and get pats on-the-back as you pass; But your final reward will be heartache and tears ... if you've cheated the Man in the Glass !
Dale Wimbrow
ghost. No way am I gonna get bullied by anyone or anything—especially ghosts. “Mattie, you okay?” Mrs. Olson is eyeballing me with concern. I haven’t moved to get out of the car. “All good, Mrs. O,” I smile weakly at her. “Just tired.” Taking a deep breath, I open the door and force myself out. I am not afraid, I chant over and over. The other kids are still at school, so the house is pretty empty. Mrs. O had told me earlier we had a new foster kid in the house, but I’m betting he’s at school too. She sends me upstairs with the promise to bring me a sandwich and a glass of milk. The doctors said no caffeine for a while, so my favorite drink in the world, Coke, is off limits. At least until I can escape and get to a gas station. I need it like an addict needs crack. My room is exactly as I left it, the bed turned down and my clothes thrown into a corner. A simple white dresser and mirror, desk, and a twin bed covered in my worn out quilt decorate the room.
Apryl Baker (The Ghost Files (The Ghost Files, #1))
It was late; I’d been sleeping. I woke up to the sound of him crying. The ward was dark, with only the light from the nurses’ station bleeding in. ‘Kid,’ he said to me, and his voice… his voice was like a ghost. Like that part of him had already died and had come back for the rest. ‘Kid, this is worse than Topeka.’ He told me that once, in the war, he’d come upon a German soldier in the grass with his insides falling out; he was just lying there in agony. The soldier had looked up at Sergeant Leonard, and even though they didn’t speak the same language, they understood each other with just a look. The German lying on the ground; the American standing over him. He put a bullet in the soldier’s head. He didn’t do it with anger, as an enemy, but as a fellow man, one soldier helping another. ‘One soldier helping another.’ That’s how he put it.” Again, Jericho fell quiet for a moment. “He told me what he needed me to do. Told me I didn’t have to. Told me that if I did, he’d make sure God would forgive me, if that’s what I was worried about. One soldier helping another.” Jericho fell quiet. Evie held so still she thought she might break. “I found his belt in the dresser and helped him into the wheelchair. The hall was quiet on the way to the shower. I remember how clean the floor was, like a mirror. I had to make a new hole in the leather to tighten it around his neck. Even without his arms and legs, he was heavy. But I was strong. Just before, he looked at me, and I’ll never forget his face as long as I live—like he’d just realized some great secret, but it was too late to do anything about it. ‘Some craps game, this life, kid. Don’t let ’em take you without a fight,’ he said.” Silence. A dog barking in the distance. A puff of wind against the glass, wanting to be let in. “After, I took the wheelchair back and parked it in the same spot. Then I slipped under the covers and pretended to sleep until it was morning and they found him. Then I did sleep. For twelve hours straight.
Libba Bray (The Diviners (The Diviners, #1))
Who is that in the glass? She sees herself for the first time. She doesn't require soft light, not at her age, not with her looks, so the effect of three candles is excessively ravishing. Her hair sparks at every brush stroke. The candlelight carves a grotto in the gloom around her. The mirror is a sacred pool, in it she sees the future: her lips swollen with kissing, eyes caressing, come with me to my home beneath the sea and I will love you. She unbuttons her nightgown. My beautiful throat. Bares a white shoulder, ohh. Parts the fabric to reveal her breasts, sailor take warning. Her image floating just beneath the twilight surface, tempting herself overboard. She hovers her hand above a nipple that gathers and pleats to a point seeking heat. Kisses her palm with one eye on the mirror. Again, this time with her tongue. Experiments with the creation of cleavage. Arranges her hair: Gibson girl, milkmaid, madwoman, dryad. And leaves it there, spilling over her shoulders. It's a self-portrait and the artist is in love.
Ann-Marie MacDonald (Fall on Your Knees)
Will you never forgive me for what I did so long ago, Jane?” The soft question caught her off guard. “Would you do it again if you had the chance?” She could hardly breathe, awaiting his answer. With a low oath, he glanced away. Then his features hardened into those of the rigid and arrogant Dom he had become. “Yes. I did the only thing I could to keep you happy.” Her breath turned to ice in her throat. “That’s the problem. You still really believe that.” His gaze swung to her again, but before he could say anything more, noises in the hall arrested them both. “It’s gone very quiet in there.” It was the duke’s voice, remarkably clear, sounding as if it came from right outside the door. “Perhaps we should knock first.” Oh no! As Jane frantically set her gown to rights, she heard Lisette say, “Don’t you dare bother them, Max. I’m sure everything’s fine. Let’s come back later.” With panic growing in her belly, Jane glanced around for her tucker. Wordlessly, Dom plucked it from the back of a chair and handed it to her. Without meeting his gaze, she pinned it into her bodice, hoping to hide the tiny holes where Dom had unwittingly ripped it free of its pins. “Besides,” drawled Tristan, “it’s not as if Dom will seduce her or anything. That’s not his vice.” Sweet Lord, were they all right outside the door? “I’m not worried about that,” Max answered. “Miss Vernon isn’t the sort to let him seduce her.” As Jane tensed, Dom hissed under his breath, “Do the blasted idiots not realize we can hear them?” “Apparently not.” Dom furtively adjusted his trousers, which seemed to be rather…oddly protruding just now. Ohhh. Right. This was one time she wished Nancy hadn’t been so forthcoming about what happened to a man’s body when he was aroused. So that, not his pistol, had been the odd bulge digging into her. Definitely not a pistol. Her cheeks positively flamed. Faith, how could she even face his family after this and not give away what she and Dom had been doing? Mortified, she hurried to the looking glass to fix her hair. While she stuffed tendrils back into place and repinned drooping curls, Dom came up behind her to meet her gaze in the mirror. “Before we let them in, I want an answer to my question about Blakeborough.” Curse the stubborn man. How could she tell Dom she was so pathetic that she hadn’t even managed to find another man to love in all the years they’d spent apart? That she’d been foolish enough to wait around for Dom all this time, when he’d happily gone on living his life without her? Her pride couldn’t endure having him know that. To her relief, Tristan said, “Well, whatever they’re up to, we have to get moving.” A knock sounded at the door. “Dom? Jane? Are you done talking?” She met Dom’s gaze with a certain defiance, and he arched one eyebrow in question. So she took matters into her own hands and strode for the door. Caught off guard, Dom swore behind her and snatched up his greatcoat just as she opened the door and said, “Please come in. We’re quite finished.” In more ways than one. Their companions trooped in, casting her and Dom wary glances. Jane looked over to see Dom holding his greatcoat looped over his arm as if to shield the front of him. That brought the blushes back to her cheeks. She caught Lisette furtively watching her, and she cursed herself for wearing her emotions on her sleeve. Better shift her attention elsewhere before Lisette guessed just how shameless she’d been.
Sabrina Jeffries (If the Viscount Falls (The Duke's Men, #4))
Bring the mind back. Try again. Don’t look away. What do I spy now? Heavy bags under my eyes, saggy, slightly puffy, baggage from my dad. I first started noticing them in my late thirties and they horrified me. I didn’t want to look like my dad. Didn’t want to see his reproachful, drooping, disappointing gaze staring back at me every time I looked in the mirror. But there was nothing I could do about it. The bags were there. They were the most conspicuous part of my face. It’s possible no one else noticed them but I couldn’t look at my face and not see them. I think I started wearing thick-frame glasses around then. Twenty-four minutes, thirty-two seconds. Strange. I just realized I haven’t paid much attention to the bags for several years now. I mean, I see them when I look, but I don’t obsess about them anymore. What’s changed? Certainly not the bags themselves. If anything, they’ve only gotten worse. Have I just gotten used to them? Or is it that my feelings about my dad have changed? He’s been dead for more than fifteen years now. The grief and anguish I felt at his death have softened. And when I see his eyes in mine, I don’t see reproach or disappointment anymore. Instead of judgment, I see concern, watchfulness, maybe even a kind of compassionate discernment. So, this is better, an improvement. I don’t mind meeting him here in the mirror. It’s kinda nice. Hey, dad, how you doing?
Ruth Ozeki (Timecode of a Face)
Years ago, he shaved off his beard, without telling her, just appeared at the breakfast table one morning with half his face missing, or so it seemed to her in the first, shocked moment of seeing him. If she had met him in the street she would not have recognised him, except for his eyes. How strange he looked, grotesque, almost, with those indecently naked cheeks and the chin flat and square like the blunt edge of a stone axe. It was as if the top part of his head had been taken off and carved and trimmed and jammed down into the scooped-out jaws of a stranger. She almost wept, but he went on eating his toast as if nothing had happened. He had bought a cut-throat razor with an ivory handle, an antique thing from the last century; he showed it to her in its black velvet box lined with scarlet satin. She could not look at it without a shiver. He liked to show off his skill with it, and would leave the bathroom door open so she could admire the deft way he wielded the dangerous, gleaming thing, holding it at an elegant angle between fingertips and thumb, his little finger fastidiously crooked, and sweeping the blade raspingly through the snow-like foam. Harsh light above the bath and the steely shine of the mirror and one dark, humorously cocked eye glancing at her sideways from the glass. Where is it now, she wonders, that razor? In a week or two he got tired of using it and let his beard grow back.
John Banville (The Infinities)
And when I looked away for a second and then looked back, I saw her reflection behind me, in the mirror. I was speechless. Somehow I knew I wasn't allowed to turn around--it was against the rules, whatever the rules of the place were--but we could see each other, our eyes could meet in the mirror, and she was just as glad to see me as I was to her.... She was between me and whatever place she had stepped from, what landscape beyond. And it was all about the moment when our eyes touched in the glass, surprise and amusement, her beautiful blue eyes with the dark rings around the irises, pale blue eyes with a lot of light in them: hello! Fondness, intelligence, sadness, humor. There was a motion and stillness, stillness and modulation, and all the charge and magic of a great painting. Ten seconds, eternity. It was all a circle back to her. You could grasp it in an instant, you could live in it forever: she existed only in the mirror, inside the space of the frame, and though she wasn't alive, not exactly, she wasn't dead either because she wasn't yet born, and yet never not born--as somehow, oddly, neither was I. And I knew that she could tell me anything I wanted to know (life, death, past, future) even though it was already there, in her smile, the answer to all questions, the before-Christmas smile of someone with a secret too wonderful to let slip, just yet: well, you'll just have to wait and see, won't you? But just as she was about to speak--drawing an affectionate exasperated breath I knew very well, the sound of which I can hear even now--I woke up.
Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch)
I adjust the mirror so I can see reflections or reflections, miles and miles of me and my new jeans. I hook my hair behind my ears. I should have washed it. My face is dirty. I lean into the mirror. Eyes after eyes after eyes stare back at me. Am I in there somewhere? A thousand eyes blink. No makeup. Dark circles. I pull the side flaps of the mirror in closer, folding myself into the looking glass and blocking out the rest of the store. My face becomes a Picasso sketch, my body slicing into dissecting cubes. I saw a movie once where a woman was burned over eighty percent of her body and they had to wash all the dead skin off. They wrapped her in bandages, kept her drugged, and waited for skin grafts. They actually sewed her into a new skin. I push my ragged mouth against the mirror. A thousand bleeding, crusted lips push back. What does it feel like to walk in a new skin? Was she completely sensitive like a baby, or numb, without any nerve endings, just walking in a skin bag? I exhale and my mouth disappears in a fog. I feel like my skin has been burned off. I stumble from thornbush to thornbush - my mother and father who hate each other, Rachel who hates me, a school that gags on my like I'm a hairball. And Heather. I just need to hang on long enough for my new skin to graft. Mr. Freeman thinks I need to find my feelings. How can I not find them? They are chewing me alive like an infestation of thoughts, shame, mistakes. I squeeze my eyes shut. Jeans that fit, that's a good start. I have to stay away from the closet, go to all my classes. I will make myself normal. Forget the rest of it.
Laurie Halse Anderson (Speak)
A shudder went through me at the thought of what I should still learn in this hour. How awry, altered and distorted everything and everyone was in these mirrors, how mockingly and unattainably did the face of truth hide itself behind all these reports, counter-reports and legends! What was still truth? What was still credible? And what would remain when I also learned about myself, about my own character and history from the knowledge stored in these archives? I must be prepared for anything. Suddenly I could bear the uncertainty and suspense no longer. I hastened to the section Chattorum res gestas, looked for my sub-division and number and stood in front of the part marked with my name. This was a niche, and when I drew the thin curtains aside I saw that it contained nothing written. It contained nothing but a figure, an old and worn-looking model made from wood or wax, in pale colours. It appeared to be a kind of deity or barbaric idol. At first glance it was entirely incomprehensible to me. It was a figure that really consisted of two; it had a common back. I stared at it for a while, disappointed and surprised. Then I noticed a candle in a metal candlestick fixed to the wall of the niche. A match-box lay there. I lit the candle and the strange double figure was now brightly illuminated. Only slowly did it dawn upon me. Only slowly and gradually did I begin to suspect and then perceive what it was intended to represent. It represented a figure which was myself, and this likeness of myself was unpleasantly weak and half-real; it had blurred features, and in its whole expression there was something unstable, weak, dying or wishing to die, and looked rather like a piece of sculpture which could be called "Transitoriness" or "Decay," or something similar. On the other hand, the other figure which was joined to mine to make one, was strong in colour and form, and just as I began to realise whom it resembled, namely, the servant and President Leo, I discovered a second candle in the wall and lit this also. I now saw the double figure representing Leo and myself, not only becoming clearer and each image more alike, but I also saw that the surface of the figures was transparent and that one could look inside as one can look through the glass of a bottle or vase. Inside the figures I saw something moving, slowly, extremely slowly, in the same way that a snake moves which has fallen asleep. Something was taking place there, something like a very slow, smooth but continuous flowing or melting; indeed, something melted or poured across from my image to that of Leo's. I perceived that my image was in the process of adding to and flowing into Leo's, nourishing and strengthening it. It seemed that, in time, all the substance from one image would flow into the other and only one would remain: Leo. He must grow, I must disappear. As I stood there and looked and tried to understand what I saw, I recalled a short conversation that I had once had with Leo during the festive days at Bremgarten. We had talked about the creations of poetry being more vivid and real than the poets themselves. The candles burned low and went out. I was overcome by an infinite weariness and desire to sleep, and I turned away to find a place where I could lie down and sleep.
Hermann Hesse (The Journey To The East)
And when I looked away for a second and then looked back, I saw her reflection behind me, in the mirror. I was speechless. Somehow I knew I wasn't allowed to turn around--it was against the rules, whatever the rules of the place were--we could see each other, our eyes could meet in the mirror, and she was just as glad to see me as I was to see her. She was herself. An embodied presence. There was psychic reality to her, there was depth and information. She was between me and whatever place she had stepped from, what landscape beyond. And it was all about the moment when our eyes touched in the glass, surprise and amusement, her beautiful blue eyes with the dark rings around the irises, pale blue eyes with a lot of light in them: hello! Fondness, intelligence, sadness, humor. There was motion and stillness, stillness and modulation, and all the charge and magic of a great painting. Ten seconds, eternity. It was all a circle back to her. You could grasp it in an instant, you could live in it forever: she existed only in the mirror, inside the space of the frame, and through she wasn't alive, not exactly, she wasn't dead either because she wasn't yet born, and yet never not born--as somehow, oddly, neither was I. And I knew that she could tell me anything I wanted to know (life, death, past, future) even though it was already there, in her smile, the answer to all questions, the before-Christmas smile of someone with a secret too wonderful to let slip, just yet: well, you'll just have to wait and see, won't you? But just as she was about to speak--drawing an affectionate exasperated breath I knew very well, the sound of which I can hear even now--I woke up.
Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch)
And whatever you do, do not break the mirror.” Without looking away from Mari, Bowe asked, “Why no’?” This seemed an ideal solution to him. Jillian murmured, “The shock could . . . it could kill her.” No’ ideal. “I want to be alone with her,” Bowe said. She nodded. “We’re going to the binding ceremony. Good luck, Bowen.” After they closed the door, Bowe could still hear Mari’s father say, “Jill, why are you so confident in MacRieve?” “Because he won’t ever rest until he has her back with him,” she replied before they descended the stairs. Alone with Mari, Bowe said, “Lass, we’re about to take a break from the mirror for a bit. How am I to marry you in front of all those witches in an eerie, embarrassing ceremony if you will no’ look away?” No reaction. He put his arms around her waist and leaned down to kiss her neck, closing his eyes with pleasure just to be close to her once more. “Doona wish to turn from your glass? Verra well. Then ask it some questions while you’re here. Ask it how much your Lykae’s missed you.” Had she blinked? At her other ear, he murmured, “Ask it who Bowe loves.” Her lips parted. Her body seemed to begin thrumming, as if she was struggling with everything she had in her to be free. “Aye, that’s right. Ask it who’s the only one Bowe’s ever been in love with.” He brushed the back of his fingers down her cheek, willing her to meet his gaze in the mirror. “And the last question we’re goin’ tae have before you come away with me . . . ask it how damned good our lives are goin’ tae be together, just as soon as you turn tae kiss me.” Her brows drew together, and her stiff posture tightened, then relaxed. Her eyelids slid closed. “There now, that’s it, beautiful girl,” he asked, easing her face toward him. Behind her, he pressed the mirror until it flipped over, revealing the back of the frame. “Now, kiss me, witch.
Kresley Cole (Wicked Deeds on a Winter's Night (Immortals After Dark, #3))
Mirrors I have been horrified before all mirrors not just before the impenetrable glass, the end and the beginning of that space, inhabited by nothing but reflections, but faced with specular water, mirroring the other blue within its bottomless sky, incised at times by the illusory flight of inverted birds, or troubled by a ripple, or face to face with the unspeaking surface of ghostly ebony whose very hardness reflects, as if within a dream, the whiteness of spectral marble or a spectral rose. Now, after so many troubling years of wandering beneath the wavering moon, I ask myself what accident of fortune handed to me this terror of all mirrors– mirrors of metal and the shrouded mirror of sheer mahogany which in the twilight of its uncertain red softens the face that watches and in turn is watched by it. I look on them as infinite, elemental fulfillers of a very ancient pact to multiply the world, as in the act of generation, sleepless and dangerous. They extenuate this vain and dubious world within the web of their own vertigo. Sometimes at evening they are clouded over by someone's breath, someone who is not dead. The glass is watching us. And if a mirror hangs somewhere on the four walls of my room, I am not alone. There's an other, a reflection which in the dawn enacts its own dumb show. Everything happens, nothing is remembered in those dimensioned cabinets of glass in which, like rabbits in fantastic stories, we read the lines of text from right to left. Claudius, king for an evening, king in a dream, did not know he was a dream until the day on which an actor mimed his felony with silent artifice, in a tableau. Strange, that there are dreams, that there are mirrors. Strange that the ordinary, worn-out ways of every day encompass the imagined and endless universe woven by reflections. God (I've begun to think) implants a promise in all that insubstantial architecture that makes light out of the impervious surface of glass, and makes the shadow out of dreams. God has created nights well-populated with dreams, crowded with mirror images, so that man may feel that he is nothing more than vain reflection. That's what frightens us.
Jorge Luis Borges
The farther back the bed, the older the child looked. The last few didn’t even look like children anymore, but petite senior citizens. Their faces were wrinkled and their hair was gray. “These must be the missing children!” Red gasped. “What’s happening to them?” Tootles asked. Red noticed that the walls were lined with empty coffins. She covered her mouth, and her eyes filled with tears. “Morina is draining their youth and beauty to make potions!” Red said. “She’s a monster!” Red and the Lost Boys stared around at the cursed children in disbelief. They wanted to free them from whatever enchantment was draining their life force, but they didn’t know how. They were too afraid to touch any of them. “Why are there empty beds?” Nibs asked. “Because they died,” said a voice that didn’t belong to Red or the Lost Boys. They looked around the basement to see where it was coming from. Propped up in the corner of the basement was a tall mirror with a silver frame, and to Red’s horror, Froggy was standing inside of it. “Charlie!” Red yelled, and ran to it. She placed both of her hands on the glass and Froggy put his webbed hands against hers. “Our dad’s a giant frog?” Nibs asked. “Hooray, our dad’s a frog!” “Red, who are these children?” Froggy asked. “And why are they calling me Dad?” “These are the Lost Boys of Neverland. I’ve adopted them for the time being—it’s a long story,” Red said. “Charlie, what are you doing inside a mirror?” “Morina put me in here so I would have to watch the children,” Froggy said sadly. “So how do we get you out?” Red asked. Froggy shook his head. “Magic mirrors are irreversible, my darling” he said. “I’m trapped just like the Evil Queen’s lover, but since the wishing spell doesn’t exist anymore, I’ll most likely be in here… forever.” Red fell to her knees and shook her head. She thought her heart was broken before, but it had shattered into so many pieces now, it might never heal again. “No…,” she whispered. “No, no, no…” Froggy became emotional at the sight of her. “I am so sorry, my love,” he cried. “You must take these children and leave before Morina gets back.” “I can’t leave you…,” Red cried. “There’s nothing we can do.” Froggy wept. “Morina wanted to separate us, and I’m afraid she has for good. The
Chris Colfer (Beyond the Kingdoms (The Land of Stories, #4))
Flynn lived in a shiny glass apartment tower on the water in Melbourne. The building looked like hundreds of mirrors reflecting the bright blue sky. He lived at the top of the high-rise. Kope and I stepped off the elevator and looked down the hall at Flynn’s door. We’d been silent. Nodding to each other, we sent our hearing into the apartment. With a quiet gasp, I yanked my auditory sense back to normal. Flynn was busy with company at the moment. Very busy. Kope made a low sound and closed his eyes, shaking his head as if to clear away the sounds he’d heard. My face heated and I shifted from foot to foot, fighting back the nervous smile that always wanted to surface at inappropriate times. I found a small sitting area around the corner with glass walls overlooking the city. We sat, taking in the view. When my stupid urge to smile finally settled, I braved another look at Kope and pointed to myself, using my new, limited sign-language skills to tell him I’d listen. Given the new information about his inclination for lust, it was only fair. I quickly looked away, embarrassed by the crassness of the situation. I wasn’t going to listen the whole time. I’d just pop in for a quick check. Ten minutes passed. Still busy. Half an hour passed. Busy. Forty-five minutes passed. I shook my head to let Kope know they were still at it. He fidgeted and paced, out of his normal, calm comfort zone. An hour and ten minutes passed, and I took a turn at stretching my legs. I was getting hungry. I thought we’d be through with our talk by this time. We could interrupt Flynn, but I didn’t want him to freak out in front of somebody. We needed his guest to leave so we could talk alone. At the hour and a half mark, Kope checked his watch and looked at me. I sent my hearing into the room. Oh, they weren’t in the bedroom anymore. Finally! I wiggled my hearing around until it hit the sound of running water. A shower. This was a good sign. But wait . . . nope. I shook my head, eyes wide. Was this normal? Kope did something uncharacteristic then. He grinned, giving a little huff through his nose. This elicited a small giggle from me and I pressed both hands over my mouth. It was too late, though. At this point, I wouldn’t be able to stop myself. I could feel the crazy, unfortunate amusement rising. I jumped up and ran as spritely as I could to the stairwell with Kope on my heels. We sprinted down several flights before I fell back against the wall, laughter bubbling out. It went on and on, only getting worse when Kope joined in with his deep chuckling, a joyful rumble.
Wendy Higgins (Sweet Peril (Sweet, #2))
Now there is this song on the saxophone. And I am ashamed. A glorious little suffering has just been born, an exemplary suffering. Four notes on the saxophone. They come and go, they seem to say: You must be like us, suffer in rhythm. All right! Naturally, I’d like to suffer that way, in rhythm, without complacence, without self-pity, with an arid purity. But is it my fault if the beer at the bottom of my glass is warm, if there are brown stains on the mirror, if I am not wanted, if the sincerest of my sufferings drags and weighs, with too much flesh and the skin too wide at the same time, like a sea-elephant, with bulging eyes, damp and touching and yet so ugly? No, they certainly can’t tell me it’s compassionate—this little jewelled pain which spins around above the record and dazzles me. Not even ironic: it spins gaily, completely self-absorbed; like a scythe it has cut through the drab intimacy of the world and now it spins and all of us, Madeleine, the thick-set man, the patronne, myself, the tables, benches, the stained mirror, the glasses, all of us abandon ourselves to existence, because we were among ourselves, only among ourselves, it has taken us unawares, in the disorder, the day to day drift: I am ashamed for myself and for what exists in front of it. It does not exist. It is even an annoyance; if I were to get up and rip this record from the table which holds it, if I were to break it in two, I wouldn’t reach it. It is beyond—always beyond something, a voice, a violin note. Through layers and layers of existence, it veils itself, thin and firm, and when you want to seize it, you find only existants, you butt against existants devoid of sense. It is behind them: I don’t even hear it, I hear sounds, vibrations in the air which unveil it. It does not exist because it has nothing superfluous: it is all the rest which in relation to it is superfluous. It is. And I, too, wanted to be. That is all I wanted; this is the last word. At the bottom of all these attempts which seemed without bonds, I find the same desire again: to drive existence out of me, to rid the passing moments of their fat, to twist them, dry them, purify myself, harden myself, to give back at last the sharp, precise sound of a saxophone note. That could even make an apologue: there was a poor man who got in the wrong world. He existed, like other people, in a world of public parks, bistros, commercial cities and he wanted to persuade himself that he was living somewhere else, behind the canvas of paintings, with the doges of Tintoretto, with Gozzoli’s Florentines, behind the pages of books, with Fabrizio del Dongo and Julien Sorel, behind the phonograph records, with the long dry laments of jazz. And then, after making a complete fool of himself, he understood, he opened his eyes, he saw that it was a misdeal: he was in a bistro, just in front of a glass of warm beer. He stayed overwhelmed on the bench; he thought: I am a fool. And at that very moment, on the other side of existence, in this other world which you can see in the distance, but without ever approaching it, a little melody began to sing and dance: “You must be like me; you must suffer in rhythm.
Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea)
They were both comparative mirrors of each other. It was clear to her now more than he had used her and she was outraged that she had someone allowed it if not instigated it. Kitty retreated; she bit her lips to hold back the tears. She was a strong woman. The car purred to life and the tall shadowy figure of the boy she had the most earthshaking sex with a few nights ago gaped at her with contempt from behind the glass. She raced into traffic and a push cart man swung his arms at her motor car belting out expletives, scolding Kitty for her reckless driving. She wanted to go home but first she wanted to be at one with the wind. She listened to the sound of the cars whooshing by and the bubbly nature of the people heading into the Chinese owned supermarkets and knew she was finally home. It always found her. It found her in the men she fell in love with. Tom was a good man but he was safe and Kitty never liked safe, she was reckless and risqué like the malefactor blood that ran in her veins. She could not run from it. The Ghetto was not just a place; it was a state of mind. She always thought she was running from the Ghetto but the Ghetto was with her even to the deepest corners of the earth for the Ghetto was her. You could not run away from yourself.
Crystal Evans (Ghetto Slam)
I feel free. Like some whimsical child in an enchanted forest, I feel free. Amazed at the power of the colors that surround me, I feel free. The cool water that quenches my thirst also warms my skin as I bathe, my pores opening to the pleasure of the clear pools embracing my soul. The colors reflect on the mirrored glass that supports me. I can see beauty all around. Here I float, effortlessly, and here I will remain. I feel free. I make my commitments and my agreements in complete liberation. I love freely, openly, within the bounds of my own moral compass. I give, and I take, learning to do each with equal excitement, with equal vigor. The odd thing about receiving is how hard it can be. Yet, we owe it to those we love, who love us back, to do just that. Then, we can explore the vibrant colors of our enchanted forests together, and bathe one another in the refreshing springs of nature's own charity. I love, and therefore am safe in all things.
Tom Grasso
After they left, Emma returned to her Jasper-burger consumption with gusto. She’d asked Lisa once to find out the recipe for their seasoning mix, but Kevin wouldn’t give it up. Plus, as Lisa had pointed out, it wouldn’t do Emma any good to have it since she couldn’t cook worth a damn, anyway. “So about what I said before,” Sean said after he’d wolfed down his food, “about not wanting them to know we’ve had sex. It’s not that I’m trying to hide it, I just…” “Don’t want them to know.” “Yeah.” “That makes sense.” His face brightened. “Really?” “No.” “Damn.” He’d finished his beer, so he took a swig off the glass of water she’d requested with her meal. “Under normal circumstances, I’d want everybody to know we’re sleeping together. Trust me. I’d put a sign on my front lawn.” “But these aren’t normal circumstances.” “Not even in the ballpark. I have this bet with my brothers I’d last the whole month and I don’t want to listen to them gloat.” Of course he’d have a bet with his brothers. Such a guy thing to do. “But it’s more about the women.” “The women?” “In my family, I mean. Aunt Mary, especially. They might start thinking it’s more than it is. Getting ideas about us, if you know what I mean.” Emma ate her last French fry and pushed her plate away. “So we have to pretend we’re madly in love and engaged…while pretending we’re not having sex.” “Told you it complicates things.” “I’m going to need a color-coded chart to keep track of who thinks what.” He grinned and pulled his Sharpie out of his pocket. “I could make Sticky notes.” The man loved sticky notes. He stuck them on everything. A note on the front of the microwave complaining about the disappearance of the last bag of salt-and-vinegar chips. (Emma had discovered during a particularly rough self-pity party that any chips will do, even if they burn your tongue.) A note on the back of the toilet lid telling her she used girlie toilet paper, whatever that meant. He liked leaving them on the bathroom mirror, too. Stop cleaning my sneakers. I’m trying to break them in. Her personal favorite was If you buy that cheap beer because it’s on sale again, I’ll piss in your mulch pile. But sometimes they were sweet. Thank you for doing my laundry. And…You make really good grilled cheese sandwiches. That one had almost made her cry.
Shannon Stacey (Yours to Keep (Kowalski Family, #3))
Tell me—or anyone else—something thatis personal to you, Coach had said. Seiji couldn’t talk to just anyone, but Nicholas had said they were friends. “I was… Jesse’s mirror,” said Seiji slowly. “I reflected his—glow, his glories and his victories. I used to think it was an honor. We were similar, I told myself, in all the ways that really mattered.” Jesse was left-handed like Nicholas, so facing him sometimes felt like looking into a mirror. Like seeing yourself through the glass, a better, golden self in a different world. A self who fenced just as well but didn’t have to work as hard for it. A Seiji who did everything in life with the same skill as he fenced. “You’re not a mirror,” said Nicholas. “You’re real.” “It’s a metaphor, Nicholas.” Nicholas shrugged. “You’re still not a mirror. Mirrors break. You never do.” Seiji thought of his moment of defeat against Jesse. The moment that Aiden had seen, and taunted Seiji with, making Seiji lose again. Seiji had trained his whole life to be strong, but somehow, he was still weak. Jesse had taken his sword, and Seiji hadn’t been able to stop him. The bitterness of that defeat sent Seiji to Kings Row. Always keep moving toward your target, his dad’s voice said, but somehow Seiji had ended up getting his target wrong. He’d moved toward loss and pain he still didn’t entirely understand. “I lost,” confessed Seiji. “Badly.” “Doesn’t make you a loser,” said Nicholas, having another lapse where he didn’t understand what words—let alone metaphors—meant. “You didn’t burst into tears and give up fencing. And you didn’t follow Jesse to Exton like a little lamb, the way he was expecting. You came to Kings Row, and you came to fence. You came to fight.” This view of the matter was so shocking that Seiji said something he’d thought he would never say to Nicholas Cox. “I suppose…,” said Seiji, “… you’re right.” Nicholas’s gaze remained fixed on the floor. “Being rivals shouldn’t be about being someone’s mirror. Both of you get to be real. Neither of you has to break.” “Sometimes you’re insightful, Nicholas,” said Seiji. Nicholas looked pleased before Seiji added: “I think it’s mainly by accident.” At that point, Nicholas rolled his eyes and stepped into his side of the room, yanking the curtain closed between them.
Sarah Rees Brennan (Striking Distance (Fence, #1))
What a coincidence ! To get drunk you and I, I disappear in clouds of memories And dreams with my whole body Where you just drink that bitter water In a glass bottle, sitting on the sofa In your room and in those clouds My whole body, slowly slowly flies, Like a feather, like a free bird Wherever she wants to fly. - A Thought - You And I (I) - Maninder Singh writer
Maninder Singh (Mirror Thoughts)
Emotions and feelings are like this sand. Circumstances are like the beach. You, my dear, are like your sunglasses. If you are in a dire circumstance, emotions and feelings, the less pleasurable ones, perhaps, the more painful ones will cling to you. On the other hand, if the circumstances you are in are the best, perhaps, the one with a lover or family, a pleasant set of emotions and feelings cling to your personality. Just like the sand clinging to your glasses is natural on a beach, emotions and feelings clinging to your personality are natural products of diverse circumstances.
Shukla Ji (Buddha's House of Mirrors)
Piers Morgan Piers Morgan is a British journalist best known for his editorial work for the Daily Mirror from 1995 through 2004. He is also a successful author and television personality whose recent credits include a recurring role as a judge on NBC’s America’s Got Talent. A controversial member of the tabloid press during Diana’s lifetime, Piers Morgan established a uniquely close relationship with the Princess during the 1990s. Lunch with Diana. A big day--a massive, humongous day, in fact. I got there ten minutes early, feeling decidedly nervous. The Kensington Palace front door was opened by her beaming butler. He walked me up the stairs, chatting cheerfully about the weather and my journey, as if a tabloid editor prowling around Diana’s home was a perfectly normal occurrence. He said that the “Boss” was running a bit late, joking that “she’ll be furious you are here first!” and invited me to have a drink. “What does she have?” I asked. “Water, usually,” he replied, “but wouldn’t you rather have a nice glass of wine? She won’t mind in the slightest.” I readily agreed, if only to calm my racing heartbeat. He then left me alone in the suitably regal sitting room. Diana had a perfectly normal piano covered in perfectly normal family snaps. It’s just that this family was the most photographed on the planet. Lots of pictures of her boys, the young heirs, perhaps the men who will kill off, or secure, the very future of the monarchy. To us, they were just soap opera stars, semi-real figments of tabloid headlines and the occasional palace balcony wave. But here they were, her boys, in picture frames, like any other adored sons. Just sitting in her private room was fascinating. Her magazines lay on the table, from Vogue to Hello, as well as her newspapers--the Daily Mail at the top of the pile, obviously, if distressingly. After I had spent ten minutes on my own, she swept in, gushing: “I’m so sorry to have kept you, Piers. I hope Paul has been looking after you all right.” And then came what was surely one of the most needless requests of all time: “Would you mind awfully if William joins us for lunch? He’s on an exeat from Eton, and I just thought that given you are a bit younger than most editors, it might be good for both of you to get to know each other.” “I’m sorry, but that would be terribly inconvenient,” I replied sternly. Diana blushed slightly and started a stuttering “Yes, of course, I’m so sorry…” apology, when I burst out laughing. “Yes, ma’am, I think I can stretch to allowing the future king to join us for lunch.” The absurdity of this conversation held no apparent bounds.
Larry King (The People's Princess: Cherished Memories of Diana, Princess of Wales, From Those Who Knew Her Best)
Bel Air (music) Fresh Prince". About how My life upside down backwards. I would like to take a moment. Sitting there I can tell you that I was a prince of a town called Bel Air. Born in West Philadelphia. I spent most of my court date. All is well for fun "Relaxin" Maxi. And every school to take some balls B-. When a few good ones. The problem started in my field. I had to struggle a little afraid of my mother. He said: "You went to live with her aunt and uncle in Bel Air.". I confess and diary But boxed me on my way. He kissed me and I gave him my card. I put my Walkman and said. "I can" I first layer is bad. Champagne glass of orange juice consumption. This is what people who live in Bel Air? Ah, this could be good But wait, I hear you're a prude, all middle class. This is a place where you just need to write a cool cat? I do not I do not know, but I do not understand. I hope you're ready for Prince of Bel-Air. Good landing, and I A police man at my name. However, any attempt to stop. I just moved here I grew up at a high speed, I lost. I whistled for a cab and asked him to come. Put the dice "live" and a mirror. If what I say in the cab are small. But I thought, "No, we must not forget.". -. "I'm home Bel Air". I went to the house about seven or eight. The taxi driver where I wanted to scream. "I do not smell it.". I looked at my kingdom. Eventually, I was able When he sat on the throne, Prince of Bel Air.
te fesh pince of blair
Abalone stared into the fizzing glass. “My father served yours.” “Yeah. Very well, I might add.” “Through your blood’s generosity, mine has prospered.” Abalone took another sip, his shaking hand making the ice tinkle. “May I say something about your father?” The King seemed to stiffen. “Yeah.” Abalone looked up to the sunglasses. “The night he and your mother were killed, a part of my father died, too. He was never the same thereafter. I can remember our house being in mourning for a full seven years, the mirrors draped in black cloth, the incense burning, the threshold marked with a black jamb.” Wrath rubbed his face. “They were good people, my parents.” Abalone put the soda aside and shifted off the armchair, getting on his knees before his King. “I will serve you just as my father did, down to the bone and marrow.” Abalone was dimly aware that others had filed into the room and were looking at him. He cared naught. History had come full circle . . . and he was prepared to carry forward with pride. Wrath nodded once. “I’m making you my chief cleric. Right here and now. Saxton,” he barked out. “What do I need to do?” A cultured voice answered smoothly, “You just did it all. I’ll draw up the paperwork.” The King smiled and put out his palm. “You’re the first member of my court. Boom!
J.R. Ward (The King (Black Dagger Brotherhood, #12))
A light brown eyebrow rose, followed by a deep, easy chuckle. “You like what you see?” “Yes. I’m not blind. But I prefer a stronger jaw, someone a little darker.” Furi smirked right back. Where the hell had he gotten all this bravado from? He usually wasn’t so blunt, but it felt good. He was finally coming into his own. The way his dad had urged him to before he’d passed. “Stronger and darker, huh? No shit.” The man looked behind him into the one-way mirror, smiling broadly, making Furi wonder who was behind it. “I’m Detective Ronowski. I’m the First Officer of a narcotics task force based in this precinct. Thank you for coming down tonight.” “Well it wasn’t by choice. I will say your errand boys could use a refresher course in charm and courtesy,” Furi said with little venom. “Errand boys? Oh, you mean Green and Ruxs.” Ronowski laughed again. It was a melodic sound that had Furi leaning back and enjoying it. “Those errand boys are very skilled men, maybe not in charm, but definitely in hand-to-hand combat. Just in case someone doesn’t want to come willingly. But I’m sure you didn’t give them any trouble.” “No, I didn’t. Anyway, how long is this going to take?” Furi asked, checking his watch again. Damnit. “Got a hot date?” Ronowski smiled, looking at the window again. “Something like that. Who’s behind that glass?” “My boss.” Ronowski shot him that sexy grin again. “Well this is fun, but can we move it along?” “Of course.
A.E. Via
Furi’s breath caught at the sound of Syn’s voice. He came into the room looking like he was going to hurt Ronowski. Was he the one behind the glass all this time? Asshole. “Let’s go Furious.” Syn stood at the door glaring at Ronowski. “Do you not want your husband contacted?” Ronowski continued ignoring Syn’s glare. Furi turned around at the door. “It doesn’t matter. He’s already been contacted … with divorce papers.” Furi left the room and took long strides through the precinct until he was outside. He knew Syn was behind him, though his steps were light, he could sense him there. Furi was so angry he wanted to round on Syn and punch him in the face. This meant Syn knew everything about him. About his husband, how he made additional money, about every fucking thing. He’d taken away Furi’s control. That just wouldn’t do. ‘Nectar of the Most Forbidden Fruit’ Damnit. Furi was mad, and not just a little bit. He was like a man on a mission. Syn watched him fling the doors open and head around the corner. “Furi, can I talk to you?” Syn asked as calmly as he could. Furi turned down a side street and rounded on him fast, his long hair flying over his left shoulder. He grabbed Syn by the collar of his jacket and threw him hard up against the wall. “Ugh, fuck! Furi relax, I can explain,” Syn said, using a soothing tone. “You knew I was going to be picked up. You stood outside that mirror watching me. Did I entertain you? You think I give a fuck about you judging me because I jerk off on camera for money?” Furi growled in his face. “First: I didn’t know you were going to be picked up tonight. Ronowski is my first officer and he deals with that. He reports to me whenever he feels he has something worth investigating further. Second: he didn’t talk to me about you until after I left you this evening. Third: I didn’t even know you worked at Illustra, but now that I do, read my lips; I. Don’t. Give. A. Fuck.” He watched Furi’s eyes, saw them land on Syn's mouth. His face just mere inches from his own. He saw Furi’s anger turn to arousal just as his did. Syn brought his hands up slowly, desperately wanting to bury them in Furi’s hair.
A.E. Via
There was a short silence before Isabelle answered. “The thing about the Mirror is that no one knows where it is. In fact, no one knows what it is.” “It’s a mirror,” Simon said. “You know—reflective, glass. I’m just assuming.” “What
Cassandra Clare (City of Glass (The Mortal Instruments, #3))
I walked the short distance to Nogizaka, then strolled up and down Gaienhigashi-dori. It took awhile, but I finally spotted it. There was no sign, only a small red rose on a black awning. The entrance was flanked by two black men, each of sufficient bulk to have been at home in the sumo pit. Their suits were well tailored and, given the size of the men wearing them, must have been custom-made. Nigerians, I assumed, whose size, managerial acumen, and relative facility with the language had made them a rare foreign success story, in this case as both middle management and muscle for many of the area’s entertainment establishments. The mizu shobai, or “water trade” of entertainment and pleasure, is one of the few areas in which Japan can legitimately claim a degree of internationalization. They bowed and opened the club’s double glass doors for me, each issuing a baritone irasshaimase as they did so. Welcome. One of them murmured something into a microphone set discreetly into his lapel. I walked down a short flight of stairs. A ruddy-faced, prosperous-looking Japanese man whom I put at about forty greeted me in a small foyer. Interchangeable J-Pop techno music was playing from the room beyond. “Nanmeisama desho ka?” Mr. Ruddy asked. How many? “Just one,” I said in English, holding up a finger. “Of course.” He motioned that I should follow him. The room was rectangular, flanked by dance stages on either end. The stages were simple, distinguished only by mirrored walls behind them and identical brass poles at their centers. One stage was occupied by a tall, long-haired blonde wearing high heels and a green g-string and nothing more. She was dancing somewhat desultorily, I thought, but seemed to have the attention of the majority of the club’s clientele regardless. Russian, I guessed. Large-boned and large-breasted. A delicacy in Japan. Harry hadn’t mentioned floorshows. Probably he was embarrassed. My sense that something was amiss deepened.
Barry Eisler (A Lonely Resurrection (John Rain #2))
The last night of his sojourn in Paris is given up to "the fucking business." He has had a full program all day---conferences, cablegrams, interviews, photographs for the newspapers, affectionate farewells, advice to the faithful, etc., etc. At dinner time, he decides to lay aside his troubles. He orders champagne with the meal, he snaps his fingers at the garcon and behaves in general like the boorish little peasant that he is. And since he has had a bellyful of all the good places he suggests now that I show him something more primitive. He would like to go to a very cheap place, order two or three girls at once. I steer him along the Boulevard de la Chapelle, warning him all the while to be careful of his pocketbook. Around Aubervilliers we duck into a cheap dive and immediately we've got a flock of them on our hands. In a few minutes, he's dancing with a naked wench, a huge blonde with creases in her jowls. I can see her ass reflected a dozen times in the mirrors that line the room---and those dark, bony fingers of his clutching her tenaciously. The table is full of beer glasses, the mechanical piano is wheezing and gasping. The girls who are unoccupied are sitting placidly on leather benches, scratching themselves peacefully just like a family of chimpanzees. There is a sort of subdued pandemonium in the air, a note of repressed violence, as if the awaited explosion required the advent of some utterly minute detail, something microscopic but thoroughly unpremeditated, completely unexpected. In that sort of half-reverie which permits one to participate in an event and yet remain quite aloof, the little detail which was lacking began obscurely but insistently to coagulate, to assume a freakish, crystalline form, like the frost which gathers on the windowpane. And like those frost patterns which seem so bizarre, so utterly free and fantastic in design, but which are nevertheless determined by the most rigid laws, so this sensation which commenced to take form inside me seemed also to be giving obedience to ineluctable laws. My whole being was responding to the dictates of an ambiance which it had never before experienced; that which I could call myself seemed to be contracting, condensing, shrinking from the stale, customary boundaries of the flesh whose perimeter knew only the modulations of the nerve ends.
Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer (Tropic, #1))
Graham went to the gym to work out, as he does almost every day. There's a pile of unfolded clothes on the couch beside me and a bag of cheese puffs in my lap. I love it when he goes to the gym, if only because I can be the massive sloth I naturally am in peace. If he were here, he'd be eyeing up my laundry and staring at the edible garbage in my lap and on my fingers, internally freaking out over the possibility of powdery cheese getting on the furniture. One hand in the bag, one hand wrapped around the stem of my wine glass—this is my idea of perfection. 'Girls Chase Boys' by Ingrid Michaelson is presently keeping me company from the stereo system. When my phone rings from where it resides on the back of the couch, I jump and send the bag flying. Orange confetti falls to the floor and I swallow, knowing I am so dead if Graham walks in the door right now. “What?” is my less than friendly greeting. “What'd you do?” How does he know me so well? I guess because he made me. “I just let off a bomb of cheese puffs. Although, technically, I'm blaming it on you since it was your phone call that scared me into dumping the bag over.” “Your mother is knitting again.” Eyes glued to the orange blobs on the pale carpet, I reply, “Oh? I'm sure it's marvelous, whatever it is.” Are they seeping into the carpet as I watch, even now becoming an irremovable part of it? Graham is going to majorly freak out over this. “Looks like a yellow condom.” I choke on nothing. “I have to go, Dad.” He grunts a goodbye. I fling the phone away and dive to my knees, hurriedly scooping up the abused deliciousness into my hands. Of course this is when Graham decides to come home—when my ass is in the air facing the door and I look like I'm eating processed food off the floor. I groan and let my head fall forward, smashing a cheese puff with my forehead. He doesn't say anything for a really, really long time, and I refuse to move or look at him, so it gets sort of awkward. “Never thought I'd come home to this scene. Ever.” Just to rile him up, I shove a cheese puff in my mouth and chomp away. “I can't believe you just ate that!” I get to my feet as I pop another into my mouth. “Mmm.” Graham's face is twisted with horror, his backpack dropping to the floor. Sweat clings to him in a delicious way, his hair damp with it. “Do you know how dirty the carpet is?” “You clean it almost every day. It can't be that dirty.” “I don't get everything out of it!” he exclaims, slapping the remaining puffs from my hands. “Go brush your teeth. No. Wait. Induce vomiting. Immediately.” I look at him and laugh. “You're crazy.” “Just...go drink water or something. I'll clean this up.” “I am perfectly capable of cleaning up my own messes.” He just looks at me. “Okay, so not as well as you, but still.” He remains mute. “Fine.” I toss my hands in the air and carefully walk over the splotches of orange beneath me. As I leave the living room, I pause by a framed photograph of a lemon tree, sliding it off-center on the wall. “I saw that,” he calls after me. “Just giving you something to do!” I smirk as I saunter into the bathroom. “I'll give you something to do.” I cock my head at that, wondering if that was meant to be sexual or not. I'm thinking not. I flip the light switch up in the bathroom and scream. Even with the distance between us, I can hear him laughing. The mirror is covered in what looks like blood, spelling out R – E – D. I put my face close to it and sniff. Ketchup. What a waste of a good condiment. “Not funny!” “So funny!
Lindy Zart (Roomies)
I realized that small class sizes were not just beneficial for the obvious reason -- that larger classrooms ignored, worsened, and evicted the problem student. For a student like Aaron, who lived on the borderline of success and failure, the small classroom provided a magnifying glass with which to evaluate his peers. What did they want, what ticked them off, how did they lose their tempers, what help did they take or choose not to take? Seeing these possible mirrors of himself allowed him to realize he wanted to be different.
Michelle Kuo
And a very good thing (he used to say), an excellent thing, the very best of practices, is to write a little every day. Just a little scrap, but cultivate the habit of doing it every day. I don't mean what is called keeping a diary, you know. Don't write what you do. There's no benefit in that. We do things for all kinds of reasons and it's the reasons, not the things, that matter. Let your little daily scrap be something you've thought. What you've done belongs partly to some one else; often you're made to do it. But what you think is you yourself: you write it down and there it is, a tiny little bit of you that you can look at and say, 'Well, really!' You see, a little bit like that, written every day, is a mirror in which you can see your real self and correct your real self. A looking-glass shows you your face is dirty or your hair rumpled, and you go and polish up. But it's ever so much more important to have a mirror that shows you how your real self, your mind, your spirit, is looking. Just see if you can't do it. A little scrap. It's very steadying; very steadying....
A.S.M. Hutchinson (If Winter Comes)
She half stood, half floated in the water, absorbing the totality of Lance and Neal having so much shared history. So much life with each other that Roseanna knew nothing about. It felt as though someone had been watching her through one-way mirrored glass while staying safely anonymous and hidden himself. It also meant there was a great deal of her son’s life that she had missed, but that much she’d known already. It just hurt to get a good look at it in retrospect.
Catherine Ryan Hyde (Heaven Adjacent)
Merritt was about to reply, but she froze, her hand suspended in midair. The window happened to be positioned to mirror the opening of the next room with remarkable clarity. The naked form of Keir MacRae was reflected in the glass as he crossed the bedroom. She went hot and cold all over, riveted as he bent to take a pair of trousers from the leather trunk. His movements were easy, graceful with a sense of coiled power, and that body- "You're going to work through the night without any dinner at all?" she heard herself ask. -with those long, elegant expanses of tightly knit muscle and sinew- "I'll be fine," he said. -was magnificent. Fantasy wrought into flesh. And just before he fastened the trousers, she couldn't help noticing the man was incredibly endowed.
Lisa Kleypas (Devil in Disguise (The Ravenels, #7))
Then I Shall Understand Fully” St. Paul once compared our knowledge of God in this life to our knowledge of ourselves when we see our reflection in a dirty bronze mirror. At this time in history glass mirrors were just beginning to be invented and were not as popular as polished metal. He said, “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood” (1 Cor. 13:12). Because of sin and our fallen human natures, we only perceive God indirectly; our relationship with him lacks the intimacy and wonder that it will have in heaven.
Trent Horn (Why We're Catholic: Our Reasons for Faith, Hope, and Love)
It was summer, so the sun appeared in the bottom left-hand corner of the big window at quarter past six. Ish. It was hard to tell exactly until the sun rose just a little bit more, enough to send his beams through the holes carefully bored through a piece of wood, above which the hours were marked off in beautifully painted flourishes. This simple timepiece hung from the ceiling off a stick hammered sturdily in, because a string would have let it spin and therefore fail its task of tracking the sun. The wind chimes, however, assembled from more bits of wood, and pieces of metal, and shaped and dried bits of pottery, were free to swing and tinkle as they pleased. These were surrounded by celestial bric-a-brac that also dangled from the ceiling and spun with abandon when the breeze found them: paper-mâché stars, comets of hoarded glass shards and mirror, a very carefully re-created (and golden) replica of the constellation Orion, a quilted and embroidered cloth model of the sun, and several paintings on rectangular panels hung such that they faced straight down. So that the viewer, in bed, might look up at them and pretend they were windows or friends, depending on whether the subject was landscapes or faces.
Liz Braswell (What Once Was Mine)
tell my students at Princeton that it was just down the street, at a restaurant on Route 1, that Baldwin hurled a glass at a waitress and shattered a mirror after he was refused service and ended up having to run for his life.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr. (Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own)
Change the way you look at the world, and the world you’re looking at changes. Yes, it is that simple. And let me repeat—I understand that your problems are big and overwhelming and real. The High 5 Habit doesn’t change those realities. It changes YOU. How you see yourself and what you are capable of achieving. How YOU see the world and what opportunities or solutions you can create. And it’s how YOU push yourself forward grounded in faith and belief that when you do, something amazing will happen. Every single day, your brain will start to get the new message about what’s important to YOU and to your future. It will fall in line and begin to filter the world in an entirely new way to help you get what you want. Seeing things differently won’t make your problems disappear, but it will have you seeing different solutions, different opportunities, and different possibilities that you haven’t seen before. And that makes all the difference in the world. The question is, aside from that high five, how else can I train my RAS to work for me? Brace yourself, this is going to sound just as silly as high fiving yourself in the mirror. At least, that was our daughter’s reaction. So let’s get those dark glasses off, chuck those horrible things you say in the trash, and start training your brain to see you and your future in a whole new way.
Mel Robbins (The High 5 Habit: Take Control of Your Life with One Simple Habit)
This poem & its pain are both imagined & as real as we are. That is to say, through some fictions we find fact; in some fantasies we discover ourselves & then some.  Even without living it, a memory can live on in us. The past is never gone, just not yet found. Grief, like glass, can be both a mirror & a window, enabling us to look both in & out, then & now & how. In other words, we become a window pain. Only somewhere in loss do we find the grace to gaze up & out of ourselves.
Amanda Gorman (Call Us What We Carry)
There is no story. There is just the truth. Look around you. Everything you see, and far beyond, all of it was once green. Where you see buildings, thousand-year-old trees once stood. Above, where those aircar cables hang? That was once the crisscross of leafy vines. That cracked asphalt that scalds your paws? It was once rich earth, protected by a blanket of grass. And our kind did not look into glass windows to find our skinny reflections; we saw our faces mirrored in fresh streams—not one of them toxic. It was a paradise. Then the men came. They pulled up every plant. They drove off every animal. They paved over each patch of dirt. They built towers higher than the tallest tree trunks. They pumped smoke from factory chimneys, driving away the clouds. They replaced all that was green with shades of gray—steel and iron and concrete. But with time, mutations occur. Nature begins to adapt. If you don’t adapt, you don’t stand a chance in this world. And if you don’t have friends by your side, alerting you to danger and sharing their good food, it’s a very lonely world, indeed. So stick together, little ones. Stay close to your littermates, and help each other adapt. Make the world greener through your dreams. Build your own paradise.
Devon Hughes (Unnaturals: Escape from Lion's Head (Unnaturals, 2))