“
Do you really think this is the only room where I’ve felt tormented? Pain isn’t new to me, Jack. She’s an old friend I spend most of my days with, so I don’t mind if she sings to you. Honestly doesn’t even look like the same chamber with how you’ve redecorated. It’s a little monochromatic for me.
”
”
Rebecca Yarros (Onyx Storm (The Empyrean, #3))
“
Many love stories are like the shells of hermit crabs, though others are more like chambered nautiluses, whose architecture grows with the inhabitant and whose abandoned smaller chambers are lighter than water and let them float in the sea.
”
”
Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide to Getting Lost)
“
By the time I walked down the aisle—or rather, into a judge’s chambers—I had lived fourteen independent years, early adult years that my mother had spent married. I had made friends and fallen out with friends, had moved in and out of apartments, had been hired, fired, promoted, and quit. I had had roommates I liked and roommates I didn’t like and I had lived on my own; I’d been on several forms of birth control and navigated a few serious medical questions; I’d paid my own bills and failed to pay my own bills; I’d fallen in love and fallen out of love and spent five consecutive years with nary a fling. I’d learned my way around new neighborhoods, felt scared and felt completely at home; I’d been heartbroken, afraid, jubilant, and bored. I was a grown-up: a reasonably complicated person. I’d become that person not in the company of any one man, but alongside my friends, my family, my city, my work, and, simply, by myself. I was not alone.
”
”
Rebecca Traister (All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation)
“
Great.” Ridoc rolls his neck. “Down the stairwell to the torture chamber where an untold number of freshly fed dark wielders wait. Good times.
”
”
Rebecca Yarros (Onyx Storm (The Empyrean, #3))
“
You can govern the province you love during the day, then slide into bed with me at night. Or I can always join you in the Assembly chamber. You do some of your best work on that throne.
”
”
Rebecca Yarros (Onyx Storm (The Empyrean, #3))
“
...her father finds being called a Holocaust surviver demeaning. 'When people talk about the Holocaust, they talk about gas chambers, Auschwitz -- the Holocaust is not just about that,' she said. 'It's about the little humiliations, the loss of dignity.'
Her father made much the same point in the film. 'People talk about Sophie's Choice as if it was a rare event,' he said. 'It wasn't. Everybody had to make Sophie's Choice -- all of us. My mother left behind a four-year-old with the maid. You don't think I was beaten and shot at? There are no violins in my story. It is the most common thing that happened.
”
”
Rebecca Skloot (The Best American Science Writing 2011)
“
Shadows quake at the edges of the chamber, and a corner of my mouth rises.
”
”
Rebecca Yarros (Onyx Storm (The Empyrean, #3))
“
The Germans are about to reach Stalingrad, and the gas chambers are heating up, but the Ya-Yas are still in high school, and the life of the porch still surrounds them. They are lazy together. This is comfort. This is joy. Just look at these four. Not one wears a watch. This porch time is not planned. Not penciled into a DayRunner . . .I want to lay up like that, to float unstructured, without ambition or anxiety. I want to inhabit my life like a porch.
”
”
Rebecca Wells (Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood)
“
Are you in love with him?” he asks, his voice breaking on the last word as he pivots to face me fully. “Because Garrick and I heard the end of what he said in the interrogation chamber, and trust me, I might be in love with him after that declaration, but are you? Really and truly?” “Yes.” I hold his stare long enough that he knows I mean what I say. “And that’s never going to change.” Dain’s jaw flexes and he nods once. “Then I’ll trust him as much as you do.” I nod back slowly. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” “Tomorrow,” he agrees.
”
”
Rebecca Yarros (Iron Flame (The Empyrean, #2))
“
Because Garrick and I heard the end of what he said in the interrogation chamber, and trust me, I might be in love with him after that declaration, but are you? Really and truly?” “Yes.” I hold his stare long enough that he knows I mean what I say. “And that’s never going to change.” Dain’s jaw flexes and he nods once. “Then I’ll trust him as much as you do.” I nod back slowly. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” “Tomorrow,” he agrees.
”
”
Rebecca Yarros (Iron Flame (The Empyrean, #2))
“
In his 1873 Sex in Education; or A Fair Chance for the Girls, Harvard professor Edward Clarke argued that the female brain, if engaged in the same course of study as the male, would become overburdened and that wombs and ovaries would atrophy.43 Chambers-Schiller reports that in the medical establishment, “a painful menopause was the presumed consequence of reproductive organs that were not regularly bathed in male semen.” Yet
”
”
Rebecca Traister (All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation)
“
Chambers-Schiller reports that in the medical establishment, “a painful menopause was the presumed consequence of reproductive organs that were not regularly bathed in male semen.” Yet for all of this, women kept on not marrying and they kept on bucking for change. The
”
”
Rebecca Traister (All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation)
“
Rebecca approached the causality violation chamber (too grand a name for such a faulty thing), placed her hand against its door, and closed her eyes, much as Philip had during its christening years ago. There was no response from the machine; no prophecy; no apology; no advice. It did not relay the news from other, brighter timelines. It did not tell her what would have transpired had she returned from yesterday's shopping trip a few hours later, or had she turned the steering wheel left instead of right two years ago, or had she not taken that first drink, or had she turned down any one of the thousands of drinks that had followed, or had she chosen not to respond to Philip's insistent and perhaps deliberately oblivious messages during the early days of their online courtship, or had her parents or her grandparents, or her great-grandparents never met. The machine's obstinate silence was all it had to offer; the message of that silence was that she had made her choices in life, and her choices had made her in return.
”
”
Dexter Palmer (Version Control)
“
Some women went west themselves. Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller reports that prior to 1900, around 10 percent of land claims in two Colorado counties were filed by unmarried women, some of whom—like South Dakota homesteader “Bachelor Bess” Corey—were more interested in the land-grab than the man-grab. When Oklahoma’s Cherokee Strip was opened to homesteaders in 1893, Laura Crews raced her horse seventeen miles in under an hour to claim the piece of land that she would tend herself for years before oil was discovered on the property.33 Crews would be the last participant of the Cherokee land run to die, in 1976, at age 105, unmarried.34
”
”
Rebecca Traister (All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation)
“
The antechamber of the windowless, guarded cave isn’t too bad as far as torture chambers come.
”
”
Rebecca Yarros (Iron Flame (The Empyrean, #2))
“
Having been liberated from manual labour and located in the sensory deprivation chambers of apartments and offices, this body has nothing left but the erotic as a residue of what it means to be embodied.
”
”
Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)
“
Kate Chambers, amateur sleuth in "Ground Truth: A Pittsburgh Murder Mystery," believes that "One drink sharpens your wit, two drinks makes you a philosopher, three or more drinks just makes you stupid.
”
”
Rebecca A. Miles
“
Are you in love with him? Because Garrick and I heard the end of what he said in the interrogation chamber, and trust me, I might be in love with him after that declaration...
”
”
Rebecca Yarros (Iron Flame (The Empyrean, #2))
“
To everything we've become because of everything we've lost."
Kate Chambers, amateur sleuth in "Ground Truth and Broken Glass," always offers this toast.
”
”
Rebecca A. Miles (Broken Glass (A Pittsburgh Murder Mystery, #2))
“
White of snow or white of page is not"
the white of your skin, for skin, except
when truly albino, always has some other color
sleeping within it—a hint of red maple leaf,
a touch of the blue ice at the edge of a melting
stream, a richness implied of its many layers,
the deltas of cells and blood, that deep fecundity
that lies within and makes the skin shed, not
like a snake, but as a tree (one of those golden
cottonwoods flaring just now at the edge
of the river) that sheds its leaves each moment
while an eternity of leaf remains. Oh, nothing
seems to me as white as your skin, all your languid
ease of being—one resting upon the other,
the sliver of your shoulder against the black
fabric—reminds me so of the lost realm of beauty
that I am afraid of nothing, and only dazed
(as I was that day at the aquarium when the beluga
whales came swimming toward me—how white
they were, slipping out of the darkness, radiant
and buoyant as silence and snow, incandescent
as white fire, gliding through the weight of water,
and when they sang in that chamber as small
as the chambers of the human heart, murky
with exhaustion and captivity and the fragments
of what they had consumed, I was almost in love
with them; they seemed the lost children
of the moon, carrying in their milky mammalian skins
a hint of glacial ice and singing to each other
of all the existences they had left behind, their fins
like the wings of birds or angels, clicking and whistling
like canaries of the sea: there was no darkness
in their bodies, like clouds drifting through
unkempt skies, they illuminated the room).
So I did not think of you so much as I felt you
drifting through my being, in some gesture
that held me poised like a hummingbird above
the scarlet blossoms of the trumpet vine, I kissed you
above the heart, and by above I mean there,
not that geometric center, the breastbone
that so many use to divide the body in half and so mistake
for the place where the heart lies, but the exact
location, a little to the left, just on the crescent
where the breast begins to rise; oh, I know
all that drift of white implies, the vanished clothing,
the disappearing room, that landscape of the skin
and night that opens in imagination and in feeling
upon a sea of snow, so that just one kiss above
the heart is a kiss upon the heart, as if one could
kiss the very pulse of being, light upon the head
of that pin that pins us here, that tiny disk where
angels were once believed to dance, and all that
nakedness without could not have been
except for all that burning deep within
”
”
Rebecca Seiferle (Wild Tongue (Lannan Literary Selections))
“
My life was a shadowed chamber, and when Averil came she swept back the curtains. My existence was murky, poisoned water, and her presence cleared away the filth until the waves sparkled clear again.
”
”
Rebecca F. Kenney (The Sea Witch: A Little Mermaid Retelling (For the Love of the Villain, #1))
“
Are you in love with him?” he asks, his voice breaking on the last word as he pivots to face me fully. “Because Garrick and I heard the end of what he said in the interrogation chamber, and trust me, I might be in love with him after that declaration, but are you? Really and truly?” “Yes.” I hold his stare long enough that he knows I mean what I say. “And that’s never going to change.” Dain’s jaw flexes and he nods once. “Then I’ll trust him as much as you do.
”
”
Rebecca Yarros (Iron Flame (The Empyrean, #2))
“
About twenty feet in, the canyon opens into a circular chamber that could easily fit all ten of our dragons, and my eyes are immediately drawn upward, to where a series of runes lead to the sky. “How have I never seen this while flying overhead?” “Very old, very complicated masking runes.” The riders in front of us part, and the wardstone comes into view. My lips part, because…wow. The shimmering black pillar rises to over twice the height of Xaden and would take all nine of us holding our arms outstretched to surround it.
”
”
Rebecca Yarros (Iron Flame (The Empyrean, #2))
“
move toward it, soaking in every detail. “Is it onyx?” I ask Xaden. It’s massive. Too heavy for even a dragon to carry. They had to have carved it in this very chamber. “We can’t say for certain, but my father thought it was polished iron,” he answers. Iron rain. My heart jolts. This is really it. We’re about to have wards.
”
”
Rebecca Yarros (Iron Flame (The Empyrean, #2))
“
Six dragons surround the top of the chamber, standing wing to wing, and I make my way to Tairn, who stands beside Sgaeyl, as I would expect. “How is Andarna?” I ask him, taking my place between his forelegs and peeking over the stone-rimmed edge into the chamber where the wardstone sits a hundred feet below. “She’s not responding when I reach out.” “She’s been questioned by the elders, and her actions were found justifiable,” he answers. “But to slay another dragon is a heavy mark upon the soul, even when in defense of yourself or your rider.” “That’s why you only took his eye instead of killing him.” I stiffen as Xaden approaches, refusing to look his way as he moves into position with Sgaeyl. “I should have ended him then. I will not hesitate when faced with a similar predicament in the future. She now suffers with a burden that should have been mine.” “I’m proud of her.” “As am I.
”
”
Rebecca Yarros (Iron Flame (The Empyrean, #2))
“
You’ve always deserved better than me. And no one knows,” he repeats, his voice dropping. “Because if they did, I’d be dead.” “Why would—” My lips part, and my pulse jumps as my head starts to swim. He has to have full control. He has to make snap character judgments. He has to intrinsically know who to trust and who not to. In order for the movement to have been as successful as it was within the walls of Basgiath, he has to know…everything. Xaden’s most pressing need is information. Tairn shifts, angling his body toward Sgaeyl instead of beside her. Oh gods. There’s only one signet riders are killed for having. Fear churns in my stomach and threatens to bring up what little I’ve had to eat today. “Yes.” He nods, his gaze boring into mine. Shit, did he just— “No.” I shake my head and take a step backward out of his shadows, but he moves as if he takes the step with me. “Yes. It’s how I knew I could trust you not to tell anyone about the meeting under the tree last year,” he says as I retreat another step. “How I seem to know what my opponent has planned on the mat before their next move. How I know exactly what someone needs to hear in order to get them to do what I need done, and how I knew if someone remotely suspected us while we were at Basgiath.” I shake my head in denial, wishing I’d stopped pushing like he’d demanded me to. He crosses the space between us. “It’s why I didn’t kill Dain in the interrogation chamber, why I let him come with us, because the second his shields wavered, I knew he’d had a true epiphany. How would I know that, Violet?” He’d read Dain’s mind. Xaden is more dangerous than I ever imagined. “You’re an inntinnsic,” I whisper. Even the accusation is a death sentence among riders. “I’m a type of inntinnsic,” he repeats slowly, like it’s the first time he’s ever said the words. “I can read intentions. Maybe I would know what to call it if they didn’t kill everyone with even a hint of the signet.” My eyebrows jolt upward. “Can you read thoughts or not?” His jaw flexes. “It’s more complicated than that. Think of that breath of a second before the actual thought, the subconscious motivation you might not even be aware of in your mind, or when instinct drives you to move or you’re looking to betray someone. The intention is always there. Mostly they come across as pictures, but some people intend in really clear pictures.” Tairn growls low in his throat and lowers his head at Sgaeyl as a rush of something bitter and sick floods our bond. Betrayal. I slam my shields up, blocking him out before I’m lost to his emotions, already struggling with mine. He didn’t know.
”
”
Rebecca Yarros (Iron Flame (The Empyrean, #2))
“
Shadows quake at the edges of the chamber, and a corner of my mouth rises. “I won’t have to.” His eyes flare in confusion for all of a millisecond before shadows explode around us, immediately devouring every speck of light in a sea of endless black I instantly recognize as home. A band of darkness wraps around my hips and yanks me backward, then brushes my cheek gently, steadying my galloping heartbeat and quieting my power.
”
”
Rebecca Yarros (Onyx Storm (The Empyrean, #3))
“
Great." Ridoc rolls his neck. "Down the stairwell to the torture chamber where an untold number of freshly fed dark wielders wait. Good times.
”
”
Rebecca Yarros (Onyx Storm (The Empyrean, #3))
“
Do you really think this is the only room where I’ve felt tormented? Pain isn’t new to me, Jack. She’s an old friend I spend most of my days with, so I don’t mind if she sings to you. Honestly doesn’t even look like the same chamber with how you’ve redecorated. It’s a little monochromatic for me.” I step to the side. “Imogen, I’m ready to go.
”
”
Rebecca Yarros (Onyx Storm (The Empyrean, #3))
“
We should consider quitting the quadrant,” Ridoc jokes as we walk over the door and out of the chamber. “We’d be kickass thieves.” “With dragons,” Sawyer agrees. “Unstoppable
”
”
Rebecca Yarros (Iron Flame (The Empyrean, #2))
“
Shadows quake at the edges of the chamber, and a corner of my mouth rises. “I won’t have
”
”
Rebecca Yarros (Onyx Storm (The Empyrean, #3))
“
Shadows quake at the edges of the chamber, and a corner of my mouth rises. “I won’t have to.
”
”
Rebecca Yarros (Onyx Storm (The Empyrean, #3))
“
When this is over, we should take as much leave as they’ll give us and spend it all in Aretia. We can figure out what life is supposed to look like without the daily threat of death. You can govern the province you love during the day, then slide into bed with me at night. Or I can always join you in the Assembly chamber. You do some of your best work on that throne. —Recovered Correspondence of Cadet Violet Sorrengail to His Grace, Lieutenant Xaden Riorson, Sixteenth Duke of Tyrrendor
”
”
Rebecca Yarros (Onyx Storm (The Empyrean, #3))
“
I can't resist. Every time they come in, they always think the same damn thing. Kelpie, water, basement murder chamber." The kelpie grinned at her, eyes dancing with mischief. "Really, if they'd stop stereotyping, then the pranks wouldn't work."
~Adair to Nita
”
”
Rebecca Schaeffer (Only Ashes Remain (Market of Monsters, #2))
“
I can't resist. Every time they come in, they always think the same damn thing. Kelpie, water, basement murder chamber." The kelpie grinned at her, eyes dancing with mischief. "Really, if they'd stop stereotyping, then the pranks wouldn't work.
”
”
Rebecca Schaeffer (Only Ashes Remain (Market of Monsters, #2))
“
I move toward it, soaking in every detail. “Is it onyx?” I ask Xaden. It’s massive. Too heavy for even a dragon to carry. They had to have carved it in this very chamber. “We can’t say for certain, but my father thought it was polished iron,” he answers. Iron rain. My heart jolts. This is really it. We’re about to have wards.
”
”
Rebecca Yarros (Iron Flame (The Empyrean, #2))
“
Or I can always join you in the Assembly chamber. You do some of your best work on that throne.
”
”
Rebecca Yarros (Onyx Storm (The Empyrean, #3))
“
When this is over, we should take as much leave as they’ll give us and spend it all in Aretia. We can figure out what life is supposed to look like without the daily threat of death. You can govern the province you love during the day, then slide into bed with me at night. Or I can always join you in the Assembly chamber. You do some of your best work on that throne.
”
”
Rebecca Yarros (Onyx Storm (The Empyrean, #3))
“
We get separated, and you either get dragged into an interrogation chamber and tortured for days or nearly roasted by Aura’s fire, and I know I can’t be the only one who thought, if Liam had been here, keeping watch over you, it never would have happened.” He swings that finger toward Rhiannon and Sawyer. “You both know it crossed your minds.
”
”
Rebecca Yarros (Onyx Storm (The Empyrean, #3))
“
Shadows quake at the edges of the chamber, and a corner of my mouth rises. “I won’t have to.” His eyes flare in confusion for all of a millisecond before shadows explode around us, immediately devouring every speck of light in a sea of endless black I instantly recognize as home. A band of darkness wraps around my hips and yanks me backward, then brushes my cheek gently, steadying my galloping heartbeat and quieting my power. Screams fill the chamber, followed by a pair of thuds, and I know without a doubt any threat to my life’s been extinguished.
”
”
Rebecca Yarros (Onyx Storm (The Empyrean, #3))