Noir Love Quotes

Love, whether it's friendship or more, is like a cup. It fills up drop by drop, until one last drop and the cup is full. The liquid hangs there almost above the rim, hangs there on surface tension alone and you know that one more drop and it will spill over.

Sometimes it's not the light in a person you fall in love with, but the dark. Sometimes it's not the optimist you need, but another pessimist to walk beside you and know, absolutely know, that the sound in the dark is a monster, and it really is as bad as you think.

What do you intend to do when you wake up? Will you proclaim the truth or continue to hide behind your façade?

Charlotte had been surrounded by men most of her adult life. Only one attracted her, only one had she fallen in love with – and he turned out to be cruel and broke her heart. But he was dead. She had killed him. He was a Nazi, an SS officer, dashing and charismatic … an evil person.

I loved her like a rabbit loves a rattlesnake

The coffee shop smell was strong enough to build a garage on.

A week feels like a year when you’re seventeen and in love. A twenty minute drive might as well be an ocean. But we were together again and the whole world was rejoicing, even the gravel crunched melodiously under our feet as we danced onward through the night.

It was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long way-but not as far as Velma had gone.

Bina, thank you. Bina, listen, this guy. His name wasn't Lasker. This guy-' She puts a hand to his mouth. She has not touched him in three years. It probably would be too much to say that he feels the darkness lift at the touch of her fingertips against his lips. But it shivers, and light bleeds in among the cracks.

The Bonaccorso brothers are serious muscle, though if they were any dumber they’d be dumber than rocks.

It all comes down to this: when you recognise your loneliness in another person, when you see desperation so familiar to yours written across someone else, you can’t just let them leave.

i think anyone who loves good and true stories you have to read g-spot and you will not want to put it down and you might want to read it again.

I so love the smell of hatred and revenge. It’s the headiest of concoctions. (Noir) I personally feel that way toward blood. No better smell in the universe than when it’s combined with the aroma of those fearing death. (Jericho)

Because I love you,” I said. “Because you are in my life like the music at the edge of silence.

L'Heure Exquise La lune blanche Luit dans les bois ; De chaque branche Part une voix Sous la ramée... Ô bien-aimée. L’étang reflète, Profond miroir, La silhouette Du saule noir Où le vent pleure... Rêvons, c’est l’heure. Un vaste et tendre Apaisement Semble descendre Du firmament Que l’astre irise... C’est l’heure exquise.

The short story, I should point out, is perforce a labor of love in today's literary world; there's precious little economic incentive to write one...

I wanted to tell him then how loneliness can become a tangible thing, after a while. It’s something that you carry with you on your shoulder, hold up like a friend with a twisted ankle. It sits with you and walks the streets with you. It’s a selfish thing and it refuses to let go or even split its attention. Of course, like a particularly annoying itch, you can convince yourself for a while that it’s not there. You can go to libraries and sit with friends and drink more coffee than your body can handle and you can feel surrounded and happy. But eventually you have to scratch it. Loneliness steals you away from the world, as if you’ve been cut loose and you’re lost, untethered, somewhere far above everyone else. Just you and this feeling that you just need someone to put a hand on your shoulder and turn you around, to look at you and tell you the three words that matter most: You’re not alone. Don’t be scared. I am here. It’s not about love or lust or any other inadequate word; it’s about being touched and realising that you are no longer by yourself.

That's what underwear is for, girls, so if an emergency happens you only show your cookies to the people you love.

It was her favorite story, that she remembers, but she would be hard-pressed to retell it now, faithfully, as it had been told to her. All she could recall were frayed, sleep-watered images of a forgotten castle in the middle of a wild forest, stone statues, crimson roses, and a dark, animal presence never seen, but which stained her memory of the tale, even past its edges to the daylight after.

Like art, love, and pornography, noir is hard to define, but you know it when you see it. For the purposes of the book and my longtime working understanding and definition of it, noir stories are bleak, existential, alienated, pessimistic tales about losers--people who are so morally challenged that they cannot help but bring about their own ruin.

She was a cute as a washtub.

Maybe I should stop while I'm ahead Nay, I swim with sea-demons no sweet summer tuned radio over my sunless desertscape how does it burn without the sun?

Friends can help each other. A true friend is someone who lets you have total freedom to be yourself - and especially to feel. Or, not feel. Whatever you happen to be feeling at the moment is fine with them. That's what real love amounts to - letting a person be what he really is.

Sex is one of the most personal things we do as people. To have someone who says she loves you limit how you express yourself in the bedroom is like a small death. It kills the soul.

Pinot Noir country. My grape. The one varietal that truly enchants me, both stills and steals my heart with its elusive loveliness and false promises of transcendence. I loved her, and I would continue to follow her siren call until my wallet--or liver, whichever came first--gave out.

Once, the belief that his love would heal all the wounds, and finally make me feel safe, had been true. True, and a lie. Love is real, and false, even true love. Because love alone cannot keep you safe, if there is still a trembling fear inside you. Still a knowledge of what it was like to love and believe and have it all taken away.

Among my greatest loves is the act of being pinned and invaded – not by one, or two or three, but by many, one after the other. What it is to lose yourself among many, so that your identity exists only as ‘woman’: a goddess of flesh and desire. No names, no promises, no social niceties, no conversational conventions: only lust and fulfillment.” Mademoiselle Noire - in The Gentlemen's Club

you know those people in the movies who can just stop their lives to fall in love, chase after being in love like they don’t have anything else to do?” “Yeah.” “We’re not those people. I have to get to work.

we met one strange summer in a regular tangle of sticky webs you had the air of angels sweet but I-- drowned with the damned spirits in lava oceans fearing your-- foreign static frequency and grey-green eyes (I swear they are even if you-- think otherwise): storms calm ones, calmer than my-- raging coals, empty and dead you speak of souls like you believe always an optimist in pessimistic skin of ivory and titanium mesh...

Judge for yourself. I've hated him and tried to love him for so many years I can't see him clearly.

Or if she rejected me again, then I could take pictures of her fucking in a horse costume and blackmail her into loving me like she should.

It all started when she walked into my office that night unannounced. She told me she was in trouble. So I asked what kind. She said it was of the killing kind. Wanted to know if I could be trusted. I said up to a point, depending on who got killed.

If I am capable of loving you Lord MacCaulay, of devoting myself to you, it will never be under the terms to which other women submit, for I am battle-born – a female warrior sworn to defy the bonds which enslave those of my sex. I will not, purely to follow common ideas of decency and femininity, give up my enjoyment of other men.” Mademoiselle Noire - The Gentlemen's Club

There are only really two kinds of people in the world; those who love small towns, and those who hate them.

What is history if not one endless assault on love?

Lies are so suburban...But murder is nice and clean.

Some curses fade and leave nothing but the faintest mark, a tea stain on watered silk. There are those that are so malevolent that, upon defeat, explode in a fiery burst of sulfurous flames, burning everything they touch as they die. Others dissolve like morning mist in the brightness of the midday sun. Some cannot be defeated at all, but feed upon the energy spent trying to vanquish it, growing more and more potent with each failed attempt. And then there are those ancient curses with deceptively simple antidotes that shatter like jagged shards of a vast mirror. These curses may be broken, but never completely destroyed, sharp slivers of light distorted.

Nobody lives forever, nobody stays young long enough. My past seemed like so much excess baggage, my future a series of long goodbyes, my present an empty flask, the last good drink already bitter on my tongue. She still loved Trahearne, still maintained her secret fidelity as if it were a miniature Japanese pine, as tiny and perfect as a porcelain cup, lost in the dark and tangled corner of a once-formal garden gone finally to seed.

Can you analyze our relationship in the light of Silvermanian pragmatism?” I said. “I love you because I find it compelling to be loved so entirely. You love me because as long as you do you can believe in romantic love.

In the end, there wasn’t a right thing to say, only a right thing to do. So I sat further up on the bed and put my hand on Manuelle’s cheek and our mouths did the rest, finding each other even though our eyes were closed. I ceased to care about anything that wasn’t her body or mine as we wrapped ourselves around each other on the flower patterned quilt and I was closer to her than I’d ever been before. It wasn’t that we left the rest of the world behind; it was the opposite. I could feel the world turning underneath us, I could hear birds outside and people laughing, and I felt that I was part of it at last. With no part of my skin not touching Manuelle’s, I was part of the world at last. Or maybe I’m romanticizing, and we were just two kids doing everything two kids can do in a cramped room at the back of a caravan.

He felt that he had always been there, among the apple trees, watching for the woman in the tower to come to her window. Seasons may have passed, years may have grown green on the bough, then withered and fallen, but he would stand there and wait for a chance to keep a promise he had made.

An endless scream pierced the frigid night air and shook the world with its rage and sorrow. The aged stone and brick that had withstood the great quake over a hundred years ago now trembled before its pain, and even the austere grimace of the lonely grotesque, its only witness, softened in pity.

When you love someone it feels like their blood runs through your veins, their breath fills your lungs, their heart makes yours beat, and without them everything stops.” “Fuck. That sounds tragic.” Tell me about it. “It is.” I bend to kiss him again, this time on the forehead. “But it’s worth it.

I had an eviction notice and a handgun, but I didn’t make any connection between them. Then I read about the invisible hand of the market, and it totally made sense. I wasn’t getting enough work as a musician, and I wasn’t getting hired at different jobs I applied for, so it was time to diversify.

She loves filming and taking photographs. I can imagine her making beautiful films in France or India or somewhere with a gorgeously colourful culture. She somehow reminds me of my favourite place in the world, she and Paris I can romanticize and immortalize in ceaseless poetry for the rest of my life.

Building and demolition seem to happen here within the span of a human life – so citizens can either watch their own mortal decline, or see themselves outliving their cities. This is why I miss the island. Nature. We love nature because it dies, and then comes back to life. A resurrection we can believe in.

Two weeks can seem like two years when people are in love, and no one had ever been in love the way we were in love. Or so we thought, of course, as all true lovers do. But when you wake up in paradise each morning, it is only natural to reach for more than heaven will allow. That was the mistake I made, and it changed everything…

Home? What is home? Home is where a house is that you come back to when the rainy season is about to begin, to wait until the next dry season comes around. Home is where your woman is, that you come back to in the intervals between a greater love - the only real love - the lust for riches buried in the earth, that are your own if you can find them. Perhaps you do not call it home, even to yourself. Perhaps you call them 'my house,' 'my woman,' What if there was another 'my house,' 'my woman,' before this one? It makes no difference. This woman is enough for now. Perhaps the guns sounded too loud at Anzio or at Omaha Beach, at Guadalcanal or at Okinawa. Perhaps when they stilled again some kind of strength had been blasted from you that other men still have. And then again perhaps it was some kind of weakness that other men still have. What is strength, what is weakness, what is loyalty, what is perfidy? The guns taught only one thing, but they taught it well: of what consequence is life? Of what consequence is a man? And, therefore, of what consequence if he tramples love in one place and goes to find it in the next? The little moment that he has, let him be at peace, far from the guns and all that remind him of them. So the man who once was Bill Taylor has come back to his house, in the dusk, in the mountains, in Anahuac. ("The Moon Of Montezuma")

Love? What's that? Preferring someone to someone else? If that's love, then yes, she loved you. Of course, if that's love...then I love you. At least for tonight.

Lipstick stains on a cigarette filter summons to mind noir evenings of decadence. A girl with carmine lips smoking is obviously a girl who does not intend to go home alone that night.

A lot of people say they want to leave this city to go somewhere else. Not me. I love this place for what it is. Ugly and pretty. Rough and tender. Chaotic and smooth. Loving and murderous. All of it.

I put my arms around her and closed my eyes and put my cheek against the top of her head and stood for a long time without speaking while my soul melted into her. I knew we weren’t the same person. I knew that it was good that we weren’t. I knew separateness made love possible. But there were moments, like this one, of crystalline stillness, when it felt as if we really could merge like two oceans at the bottom of the world.

In a sense, everything is magic: magic, for example, is the science of herbs and metals, which allows the physician to influence both malady and patient; magical, too, is illness itself, which imposes itself upon a body like a demonical possession of which sometimes the body is unwilling to be healed. The power of sounds, high or low, is magic, disturbing the soul, or possibly soothing it. Magic, above all, is the virulent force of words, which are almost always stronger than the things for which they stand; their power justifies what is said about them in the Sepher Yetsira, not to mention between us the Gospel According to Saint John. Magical is the prestige which surrounds a monarch, and which emanates from the ceremonies of the Church; and magical in their effect, likewise, are the scaffolds draped in black and the lugubrious roll of drums at executions; all such trappings transfix and terrify the gaping onlookers even more than they awe the victims. And finally, love is magic, as is hatred, too, imprinting as they do upon the brain the image of a being whom we allow to haunt us.

But what the hell, I thought as I lay there in the dark. It could be souls rot away with the body, too. What did anything matter in the long run anyway, except memories? And they only lived on in corpses that couldn't talk.

It was the sort of pub Alan liked, furnished with wall- to-wall forty-five-year-old gin-and-tonic drinkers. A notice on the wall behind the bar read: Please do not ask for credit, as a punch in the mouth often causes offence.

He was a scoundrel and a saint and a survivor. A tangled Celtic knot of thorns and roses. Ragged and sincere. It moved her deeply. Like a forgotten melody that suddenly struck a vibrant chord inside her heart. He was almost irresistible.

The world of French crime films is a particular place, informed by the French love for Hollywood film noir, a genre they identified and named. But the great French noirs of the 1950s are not copies of Hollywood; instead, they have a particularly French flavor.

Anne held out her arms. I don't want to say I flew into them. I wasn't in condition for flying. Or running. Or even dignified limping. Fell towards the center of gravity in my own personal universe. And if our lips met on the way down, was that any fault of mine?

The women looked naked, in a way that women never do in skin magazines. These women were real, with the fine roughening of skin here and there, the tiny sag at the breast, the small folds across the stomach that real women, and men, have. It made them more, rather than less, seductive, I thought, because it emphasized their nakedness, and in a sense their vulnerability. It also made me feel a little sadder for them. That kind of vulnerability shouldn’t be handed around. It was for someone who loved you and was vulnerable too.

Sometimes it’s not the light in a person that you fall in love with, but the dark. Sometimes it’s not the optimist you need, but another pessimist to walk beside you and know, absolutely know, that the sound in the dark is a monster, and it really is as bad as you think.

His room was a sickly dual-tone of crimson and charcoal, like an Untitled Rothko, the colours bleeding into each other horribly and then rather serenely. The overall effect was overwhelmingly unapologetic but it grew on you like a wart on your nose you didn't realise it was a part of your identity until one day it simply was. His room was his identity. Fiercely bold, avant-garde but never monotonous. He was red, he was black, he was bored, and he was fire. At least to me he seemed like fire. A tornado of fire that burned all in its wake leaving only the wretched brightness of annihilation. His room was where he charmed and disarmed us. We were his playthings. Nobody plays with fire and leaves unscarred. The fire soon seeps into chard and soot. The colours of his soul, his aura, and probably his heart if he didn't stop smoking.

Our successes and achievements, such as they are, do not remove the meaninglessness from our lives because our successes are transitory and fade, our achievements are themselves impermanent and do not last. Think of the ways in which people put countless years of effort into their loves, friendships, and family lives, their education, jobs, and careers—and for what? All of it is a Sisyphean effort leading nowhere and ending in death. Of course, one may have some good effect on the lives of others one cares about, but that serves only to illustrate the pointlessness of it all, for they too will die.

Lore is my favorite kind of story. Because it's not only historical, it's a lie everyone knows is a lie but tells anyway. I love that. Of course every story I tell is true. Completely true. Completely and utterly at least five-eighths of the way to being true, which is truer than any piece of lore and truer than most truths you'll hear.

She told me she was 17 going on 22, when she left home to find a new life in the city. She wanted to get into acting and be a big star someday. I said that was swell but a tough racket to break into. She said she knew that going in. She thought maybe she'd get a lucky break and go from there. I told her lucky breaks always came with a price.

No, the truth about love is this: if they’d missed the bus they would now be saying the same things about a person they met five minutes later on the Prom; their love was an accident; their lover just a nobody, gift-wrapped by their own imagination. There was nothing uncanny about it. They should have kept the drawbridge to their hearts closed; kept the moat free from weed.

It is one thing to be physically naked before someone you love, exposing all those perceived blemishes and misshapen contours which, in our own eyes, make us less beautiful and desirable than someone else, but quite another, after having done so, and finding love and acceptance, even adoration, to tear beyond soft flesh and brittle bone, and reveal a cancer on our soul so dark and ugly and malignant that we cannot imagine another human being not turning away in horror.

L’espace est terrifiant, putain, poursuit-il. Je suis content qu’il y ait la couche d’ozone, la force gravitationnelle de la lune et tout le bazar, mais il faudrait me ficeler comme un cochon rôti à la broche pour m’envoyer là-haut. L’univers est en expansion et ne cesse de se refroidir, des portions de notre galaxie se font absorber, des trous noirs se déplacent dans l’espace à des millions de kilomètres-heure, et des super éruptions solaires éclatent pour un oui ou pour un non.

From my friend Oleksandr, a.k.a. Z --I loved this IMMEDIATELY There is a famous speech from film noir The Third Man: After all, it’s not that awful. You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

All we can do about this nightmare we live in is to create, if we are very lucky, a few islands of love and trust to sustain us and help us forget. But love dies while the lovers go on living, and Woolrich excels at making us watch while relationships corrode. He knew the horrors that both love and lovelessness can breed, yet he created very few irredeemably evil characters; for with whoever loves or needs love, Woolrich identifies, all of that person's dark side notwithstanding. ("Introduction")

Mais, quel que soit notre degré de génie, les émotions nous rendent terriblement ordinaires. Personnellement, j'ai peur du vide, de cette sensation de néant absolu qui se love dans un poumon pour alourdir chaque respiration, la rendre pénible, impossible bientôt. Cette angoisse muette indélogeable susurre sans cesse que la vie n'a aucun sens ni intérêt, que l'on ne vient de nulle part, qu'on erre pour finalement marcher droit vers le rien. Parfois, cette crainte sourde se transforme en panique totale. Asphyxiante. Assassine.

Mad, you must see me mad; your opinion is awash to me as long as I am crazed by love. I welcome this folly that you give to me with great estate. Thief? Rascal? I did what others did and what others had me do and we are all doomed, but I do not regret for one instant the coming of events of this most splendid night. You should have seen how carefully I proceeded and how I found love in the most dreadful of streets, during my most mourning of states and on the most propitious of nights. Play samartian to the fool, champion to the underdog. So to speak, I am a hubris acolyte of love.

Whatever you did, and whoever you killed, and however you feel about it, you have to judge all of that in context. You were doing what you felt you had to do, and you were doing it for love.” “The people I killed are just as dead.” “Yes. It makes no difference to them why you did it. But it makes a difference to me and to you. What we’ve been through in the last couple of years has produced the relationship we have now, achieved love, maybe. Something we’ve earned, something we’ve paid for in effort and pain and maybe mistakes as well. I live with some.” “I know,” I said. “We aren’t who we were,” she said.

you're the fly on the wall hearing all, seeing all ears of a wall hearing all the secrets perhaps you're the vines creeping over the old abandoned mansion walls dusty, soulless and dead bringing a certain curious life to rubble and I think you're the jewel-eyed gecko sneaking around the warm summer walls between jasmine and olive branches sticky pad toes, clinging to the walls peeking in at lonely summer spicy love-making through silk curtains from the bright orient breathing in incense and tasting decadence climbing the sharply barbed walls the smooth cemented white-washed walls because walls breathe too

... it seems to me there are two schools of thought. One you find in gift shops, written on trinkets adorned with pink hearts, on little notebooks and diaries and teddies and stuff; it says, “If you love them, let them go.” And then there’s the other school of thought, the Louie Knight school, which says, “If you love someone, don’t let them go.” The first one is fine if you live in a gift shop or if your supply of happiness on this earth is as plentiful and uninterrupted as the gas that comes through the mains. But if you’re like me and you find that most of the time the gas is cut off, you can’t afford to be so prodigal.

This may not be art as art commonly goes; the lack of discipline, of control, would seem to rule it out of that category. And yet Woolrich's lack of control over emotions is a crucial element in his work, not only because it intensifies the fragility and momentariness of love but also because it tears away the comfortable belief, evident in some of the greatest works of the human imagination such as Oedipus Rex, that nobility in the face of nothingness is possible. And if Woolrich's work is not art as commonly understood, there is an art beyond art, whose form is not the novel or story but the scream; and of this art Woolrich is beyond doubt a master. ("Introduction")

The rain beat against the windows and against the tin roof of the hotel. It came down in hissing roars, then in whispers, then in loud shishes like sandpaper rubbed against wood. She drank the second glassful, climbed off the bed and began undressing, and then we were together, the cheap naked bulb still blazing down on the bed. Thinking back, I remember the stupidest things; the way there was a taut crease just above her hips, in the small of her back. The way she smelled like a baby's breath, a sweet barely there smell that retreated and retreated, so that no matter how close you got to it you weren't sure it was there. The brown speckles in the lavender-gray eyes, floating very close to the surface when I kissed her, the eyes wide open and aware. But not caring. The eyes of a gourmet offered a stale chunk of bread, using it of necessity but not tasting it any more than necessary. I remember getting up and coming back to her, and of throwing a shoe at the light bulb, later, when the whisky was gone. I remember the smell of rain-darkness in the room and her telling me I'd cut my feet on the light-bulb glass on the floor. And how she said I was no better than a tramp myself, that I made love to the cadence of the raingusts on the roof, and it was true I was doing just that, but it seemed the natural thing then. And I felt so marvelously clean and soaped and so in tune with the whole damned universe that I had the feeling I could have clouded up and rained and lightninged myself, and blown that cheese-colored room to smithereens.

Le Puits mystérieux À travers la forêt de folles arabesques Que le doigt du sommeil trace au mur de mes nuits, Je vis, comme l’on voit les Fortunes des fresques, Un jeune homme penché sur la bouche d’un puits. Il jetait, par grands tas, dans cette gueule noire Perles et diamants, rubis et sequins d’or, Pour faire arriver l’eau jusqu’à sa lèvre, et boire ; Mais le flot flagellé ne montait pas encor. Hélas ! que d’imprudents s’en vont aux puits, sans corde, Sans urne pour puiser le cristal souterrain, Enfouir leur trésor afin que l’eau déborde, Comme fit le corbeau dans le vase d’airain ! Hélas ! et qui n’a pas, épris de quelque femme, Pour faire monter l’eau du divin sentiment, Jeté l’or de son cœur au puits sans fond d’une âme, Sur l’abîme muet penché stupidement !

Ayant entendu pendant la nuit des bruits étranges dans la cage d'escalier, elle acheta le lendemain au marché noir un 7 x 57 mm Mauser et des munitions et annonça à son mari, qui la regardait en fronçant les sourcils, qu'elle abattrait sans sommation tout inconnu qui franchirait le seuil de son appartement sans son autorisation. Quand Léon lui fit remarquer qu'un pistolet accroché au mur au premier acte devait servir à faire feu au second acte, elle haussa les épaules en répliquant que la vraie vie obéissait à d'autres lois que les pièces de théâtres russes. Et quand il voulut savoir pourquoi elle avait choisi précisément une arme allemande, elle lui répondit que les inspecteurs allemands, s'ils trouvaient des balles allemandes dans un cadavre allemand, chercheraient très probablement le coupable parmi les Allemands.

-Tu est amoureux, prononce-t-elle. -Hein? -Tu as beau jouer les machos, tu est amoureux de moi. What? -T'as fumé, qu'est-ce que tu racontes? -Malgré les dangers, tu restes toujours près de moi.J'essaie de te décourager, et tu ne pars pas.C'est une belle définition de l'amour. -Euh non, c'est une définition de merde. Elle tourne sur elle-même, me tire la langue, toute fière. -Tu peux me dire ce que tu voudras.Je le sais, maintenant.J'en suis convaincue. -Et? -Et ça fait du bien. Je n'ai pas le temps de lui dire qu'elle est complètement folle, et qu'est-ce que c'est cette manière de prétendre que je suis amoureux, et elle se prend pour qui, et de toute façon c'est quoi l'amour, et si ça se trouve je vais me barrer demain et elle l'aura cherché, quand elle se glisse dans mes bras pour m'embrasser. Bon, d'accord, je suis peut-être amoureux.

We don’t know when the first star exploded, or when the sun caught on fire. We don’t know when the sun will stop burning and turn cold and dark, though we know it will. In between the fire and the cold, life beginning and ending, Laura, sometime after being born and before dying, plays a game and talks to a sister who has never existed, while Frank tells a little girl named Whitney a story about the life and death of a dog, a story that he sometimes believes while telling it. In the cities of the Sonoran Desert, the sunshine follows you into the shade. When you drink water anywhere, however pure the water, you’re drinking the piss of dinosaurs. The volume of water in this world has never varied. Nothing comes or goes, increases or decreases. On a speck of dust in what they call the universe, David and Frank search for Laura, and Laura searches for David and Frank. La Llorona searches for her children. Whitney wants to not be sad. All of them search for love.

Finally, some people tell me that they avoid science fiction because it’s depressing. This is quite understandable if they happened to hit a streak of post-holocaust cautionary tales or a bunch of trendies trying to outwhine each other, or overdosed on sleaze-metal-punk-virtual-noir Capitalist Realism. But the accusation often, I think, reflects some timidity or gloom in the reader’s own mind: a distrust of change, a distrust of the imagination. A lot of people really do get scared and depressed if they have to think about anything they’re not perfectly familiar with; they’re afraid of losing control. If it isn’t about things they know all about already they won’t read it, if it’s a different color they hate it, if it isn’t McDonald’s they won’t eat at it. They don’t want to know that the world existed before they were, is bigger than they are, and will go on without them. They do not like history. They do not like science fiction. May they eat at McDonald’s and be happy in Heaven." Pro: "But what I like in and about science fiction includes these particular virtues: vitality, largeness, and exactness of imagination; playfulness, variety, and strength of metaphor; freedom from conventional literary expectations and mannerism; moral seriousness; wit; pizzazz; and beauty. Let me ride a moment on that last word. The beauty of a story may be intellectual, like the beauty of a mathematical proof or a crystalline structure; it may be aesthetic, the beauty of a well-made work; it may be human, emotional, moral; it is likely to be all three. Yet science fiction critics and reviewers still often treat the story as if it were a mere exposition of ideas, as if the intellectual “message” were all. This reductionism does a serious disservice to the sophisticated and powerful techniques and experiments of much contemporary science fiction. The writers are using language as postmodernists; the critics are decades behind, not even discussing the language, deaf to the implications of sounds, rhythms, recurrences, patterns—as if text were a mere vehicle for ideas, a kind of gelatin coating for the medicine. This is naive. And it totally misses what I love best in the best science fiction, its beauty." "I am certainly not going to talk about the beauty of my own stories. How about if I leave that to the critics and reviewers, and I talk about the ideas? Not the messages, though. There are no messages in these stories. They are not fortune cookies. They are stories.

With language he created a whole new universe; what wonder if he loved words and attributed power to them! With fitted, harmonious words the magicians summoned rabbits out of empty hats and spirits from the elements. Their descendants, the literary men, still go on with the process, morticing their verbal formulas together, and, before the power of the finished spell, trembling with delight and awe. Rabbits out of empty hats? No, their spells are more subtly powerful, for they evoke emotions out of empty minds. Formulated by their art the most insipid statements become enormously significant. For example, I proffer the constatation, 'Black ladders lack bladders.' A self-evident truth, one on which it would not have been worth while to insist, had I chosen to formulate it in such words as 'Black fire-escapes have no bladders,' or, 'Les echelles noires manquent de vessie.' But since I put it as I do, 'Black ladders lack bladders,' it becomes, for all its self-evidence, significant, unforgettable, moving. The creation by word-power of something out of nothing—what is that but magic? And, I may add, what is that but literature? Half the world's greatest poetry is simply 'Les echelles noires manquent de vessie,' translated into magic significance as, 'Black ladders lack bladders.' And you can't appreciate words. I'm sorry for you.

Qu’un galop rapide, coursiers aux pieds brûlants, vous emporte vers le palais du Soleil: de son fouet, un conducteur tel que Phaéton vous aurait précipités vers le couchant et aurait ramené la sombre Nuit. Étends ton épais rideau. Nuit qui couronne l’amour; ferme les yeux errants, et que Roméo puisse voler dans mes bras sans qu’on le dise et sans qu’on le voie. La lumière de leurs mutuelles beautés suffit aux amants pour accomplir leurs amoureux mystères; ou si l’Amour est aveugle, il ne s’en accorde que mieux avec la Nuit. Viens, Nuit obligeante, matrone aux vêtements modestes, tout en noir, apprends-moi à perdre au jeu de qui perd gagne, où l’enjeu est deux virginités sans tache; couvre de ton obscur manteau mes joues où se révolte mon sang effarouché, jusqu’à ce que mon craintif amour, devenu plus hardi dans l’épreuve d’un amour fidèle, n’y voie plus qu’un chaste devoir.—Viens, ô Nuit; viens, Roméo; viens, toi qui es le jour au milieu de la nuit; car sur les ailes de la nuit tu arriveras plus éclatant que n’est sur les plumes du corbeau la neige nouvellement tombée. Viens, douce nuit; viens, nuit amoureuse, le front couvert de ténèbres: donne-moi mon Roméo; et quand il aura cessé de vivre, reprends-le, et, partage-le en petites étoiles, il rendra la face des cieux si belle, que le monde deviendra amoureux de la nuit et renoncera au culte du soleil indiscret. Oh! j’ai acheté une demeure d’amour, mais je n’en suis pas encore en possession, et celui qui m’a acquise n’est pas encore en jouissance. Ce jour est aussi ennuyeux que la veille d’une fête pour l’enfant qui a une robe neuve et qui ne peut encore la mettre.

PEER GYNT L'âme, souffle et lumière du verbe, te viendra plus tard, ma fille Quand, en lettres d'or, sur le fond rose de l'Orient, apparaîtront ces mots : Voici le jour, alors commenceront les leçons ; ne crains rien, tu seras instruite. Mais je serais un sot de vouloir, dans le calme de cette tiède nuit,me parer de quelques baillons d'un vieux savoir usé, pour te traiter en maître d'école. Après tout, le principal, quand on y réfléchit, ce n'est point l'âme, c'est le cœur. ANITRA Parle seigneur. Quand tu parles, il me semble voir comme des lueurs d'opale. PBER GYNT La raison poussée à l'excès est de la bêtise. La poltronnerie s'épanouit en cruauté. L'exagération de la vérité, c'est de la sagesse à l'envers. Oui, mon enfant, le diable m'emporte s'il n'y a pas de par le monde des êtres gavés d'âme qui n'en ont que plus de peine à voir clair. J'ai connu un individu de cette sorte, une vraie perle pourtant, qui a manqué son but et perdu la boussole. Vois-tu ce désert qui entoure l'oasis? Je n'aurais qu'à agiter mon turban pour que les flots de l'Océan en comblassent toute l'étendue. Mais je serais un imbécile de créer ainsi des continents et des mers nouvelles. Sais-tu, ce que c'est que de vivre? ANITRA Enseigne-le-moi. PEER GYNT C'est planer au-dessus du temps qui coule, en descendre le courant sans se mouiller les pieds, et sans jamais rien perdre de soi-même. Pour être celui qu'on est, ma petite amie, il faut la force de l'âge! Un vieil aigle perd son piumage, une vieille rosse son allure, une vieille commère ses dents. La peau se ride, et l'âme aussi. Jeunesse ! jeunesse ! Par toi je veux régner non sur les palmes et les vignes de quelque Gyntiana, mais sur la pensée vierge d'une femme dont je serai le sultan ardent et vigoureux. Je t'ai fait, ma petite, la grâce de te séduire, d'élire ton cœur pour y fonder un kalifat nouveau. Je veux être le maître de tes soupirs. Dans mon royaume, j'introduirai le régime absolu. Nous séparer sera la mort... pour toi, s'entend. Pas une fibre, pas une parcelle de toi qei ne m'appartienne. Ni oui, ni non, tu n'auras d'autre volonté que la mienne. Ta chevelure, noire comme la nuit, et tout ce qui, chez toi, est doux à nommer, s'inclinera devant mon pouvoir souverain. Ce seront mes jardins de Babylone.

Nights like this,” someone had told him, not so long ago, “feel like the world’s waiting for something.” He was sure, in hindsight, that on that night on a back step with a shared bottle of grocery store Pinot Noir, the girl beside him had wanted the two of them to be that something special.

THE POUNDING RAIN HAD STOPPED as suddenly as it had begun. Sheets of silver green neon clung hungrily to the moist black asphalt like some reptilian skin.

Something hard poking into my ribs brought me back. Lo and behold, it was her little pistol. Suddenly I was love-drunk no more, smack-dab in the middle of an old-fashioned Mexican stand-off.

She normally would have been home at three in the afternoon, but her husband had called to say he had an emergency at work and she’d have to fetch Brady and Lily from school. It was no bother, really—there was still plenty of time to finish up in the house before starting dinner. He’d been so lovely and apologetic about having to disrupt her schedule. Mel really could be the best, most charming man, and she was going to make it up to him; she’d already decided that. She’d cook his favorite dish for dinner: liver and onions, served with a nice pinot noir she already had out on the counter. Then a family night, a movie on the couch with the kids. Maybe that new superhero movie the kids were clamoring to see, though Mel was careful about what they watched.

Les 8 Vallées (les noms des paliers de profondeur du vagin) 1) La Corde du Luth, profonde de 1 pouce (2,5 cm) 2) Les Dents de la Châtaigne d’eau, 2 pouces 3) Le Ruisselet, trois pouces 4) La Perle Noire, 4 pouces 5) Le Propre de la Vallée, 5 pouces 6) La Chambre profonde, 6 pouces 7) La Porte Intérieure, 7 pouces 8) Le Pôle Nord, 8 pouces Les 9 manières d'agiter la Tige de Jade 1) Frapper à gauche et à droite comme un guerrier courageux qui tenterait de disperser les rangs de ses ennemis 2) Mouvoir de haut en bas (la tige de jade) comme un cheval sauvage fit le saut de mouton pour passer une rivière 3) Se retirer et s’enfoncer comme une bande de mouettes jouant sur les vagues 4) Alterner rapidement pénétrations profondes et pénétrations superficielles comme un moineau bequetant les grains de riz 5) Enchaîner d’une façon régulière coups profonds et coups peu profonds comme de grosses pierres s’enfonçant dans la mer 6) Entrer avec lenteur comme un serpent se glisse dans son trou pour hiverner 7) Donner de petits coups rapides à la manière d’un rat effrayé qui se précipite dans son trou 8) S’élever lentement, puis foncer comme l’aigle attrapant une proie fuyante 9) S’élever puis piquer du nez comme un grand voilier bravant le coup de vent Sou Nü, la conseillère de Huang Di (l'Empereur Jaune) ajoute: «Profonde et superficielles, lentes et rapides, directes et obliques, toutes ces poussées ne sont nullement uniformes, et chacune possède ses propres effets et caractéristiques. Une poussée lente doit ressembler au mouvement d’une carpe jouant avec l’hameçon; une poussée rapide, au vol des oiseaux contre le vent. Introduisant et retirant, remuant de bas en haut, de gauche à droite, marquant des pauses ou bien en une succession rapide, tous ces mouvements doivent se correspondre. Il faut appliquer chacun d’eux au moment voulu et ne pas s’en tenir toujours à un seul et même style parce qu’on y trouve son bon plaisir»

Their encounter had formed a strange chemical bond. Mitch, a hardened ruffian, had opened up the prison of his soul to her. And Kika, who led a bitterly puritanical existence, had started to make love to him on her sofa.

Why are you so into Pinot?” 2 Maya asks. In the next 60 seconds of the movie, the character of Miles Raymond tells a story which would set off a boom in sales of Pinot Noir. It’s a hard grape to grow. It’s thin-skinned, temperamental, ripens early. It’s not a survivor like Cabernet, which can just grow anywhere and thrive even when it’s neglected. No, Pinot needs constant care and attention. In fact it can only grow in these really specific, tucked away corners of the world. And only the most patient and nurturing of growers can do it, really. Only somebody who really takes the time to understand Pinot’s potential can coax it into its fullest expression. Its flavors are the most haunting and brilliant and thrilling and subtle and ancient on the planet. Miles is describing himself in the dialogue and using Pinot as a metaphor for his personality. In this one scene moviegoers projected themselves on the character, feeling his longing and his quest to be understood. Sideways was a hit and won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. It also launched a movement, turning the misunderstood Pinot Noir into the must-have wine of the year. In less than one year after the movie’s 2004 fall release date, sales of Pinot Noir had risen 18 percent. Winemakers began to grow more of the grape to meet demand. In California alone 70,000 tons of Pinot Noir grapes were harvested and crushed in 2004. Within two years the volume had topped 100,000 tons. Today California wine growers crush more than 250,000 tons of Pinot Noir each year. Interestingly, the Japanese version of the movie did not have the same “Sideways Effect” on wine sales. One reason is that the featured grape is Cabernet, a varietal already popular in Japan. But even more critical and relevant to the discussion on storytelling is that Japanese audiences didn’t see the “porch scene” because there wasn’t one. The scene was not included in the movie. No story, no emotional attachment to a particular varietal. You see, the movie Sideways didn’t launch a movement in Pinot Noir; the story that Miles told triggered the boom. In 60 seconds Maya fell in love with Miles and millions of Americans fell in love with an expensive wine they knew little about.

If any city was a study in noir et blanc—be it black-and-white photography, film, or literature—Paris was it. The French versions of all three techniques were born during the Age of Romanticism. So was the concept of the daredevil avenger-antihero of the noir crime novel genre, the so-called polar, a Parisian specialty I learned to love.

Nuit-Saint-Georges, a French pinot noir from a sub-region of Burgundy’s Côte de Nuits. All I can tell you is that it was a profound taste revelation! Ever since that night I have loved

And if this thing—this quantum computer—comes across a trigger like that, what does it do?” “It makes you want whatever you’re looking at. It makes you fall in love with it. You think there will always be a hole in your heart unless you have it. It aches, but at the same time, it feels so good, you can’t bear to turn away.

And all the qualities she loved about me … they’re not real. They are the qualities of a fictional character who is actually very, very different from me. This is a mirage called acting. Surrounded by another mirage called celebrity.

Perhaps, mentally, I should become a Catholic. If I do, it’ll be more because of the aesthetics around the rites than any need for absolution. I think it’s more important to be able to forgive yourself than to leave something so important to any perception we may have of God. Love, on the other hand, is a basic need. No one needs forgiveness for being human.

Amanis a spiritual being made to.be an alloy of all the metals that have no value of diamonds or rubies. Man are taught to be malleable not brittle. My father told me never entertain a whore while drinking wine, always entertain your wife after a round of Pinot noir. If you have to buy a slice of flesh don't eat the stake, look for a boney meat. Never smoke thus ungentle and uncouth you are pleasing capitalism of unethics and destroying your lungs. After drinking whiskey, and always drink Scottish, if you are poor enough try Canadian. If you want to be a sage Japanese taste crazy but it makes you a man. Boys are not made but they are roasted in fires of bellies and they stay in barrels for maturity. Spend hours reading Greek philosophy, African methodologies and read the holy Bible. In doing business always despise free lunch and never drink brandy, sometimes act like a Vatican and be an integrity vulture. Stoicism is the ultimate master. Avoid to step on great man shoe and always be water.

That was the remarkable thing about paper, you can leave it lying in the back of the cupboard drawer for years and when you take it out it retains a trace of scent, sometimes enough to ambush the heart with the memory of a long-lost love.

Words are such wonderful things that they deceive us, we fail to see how even the simplest things so often lie beyond their reach; we can describe spaceships and translucent sea creatures that live on the floor of the ocean trench, but we have no way to describe the subtly differing currents that sweep through the channels of our own hearts. Words are brass coal tongs with which we seek to caress butterflies. When the veils of memory are torn asunder, and the raw experience is released like scent in the mind, the coal tongs snap on empty air.

A wise man once said there are three ways to find a fool. He is a fool that seeks that which he cannot find; he is a fool that seeks that which being found will do him more harm than good; he is a fool that, having a variety of ways to bring him to his journey's end, takes that which is worst.