Series Light Quotes

I love you, in ways you've never been loved, for reasons you've never been told, for longer than you think you deserved and with more than you will ever know existed inside me.

One minute the teacher was talking about the Civil War. And the next minute he was gone. There. Gone. No 'poof.' No flash of light. No explosion.

What if it's the there and not the here that I long for? The wander and not the wait, the magic in the lost feet stumbling down the faraway street and the way the moon never hangs quite the same.

Although it may not seem like it, this isn’t a story about darkness. It’s about light. Kahlil Gibran says Your joy can fill you only as deeply your sorrow has carved you. If you’ve never tasted bitterness, sweet is just another pleasant flavor on your tongue. One day I’m going to hold a lot of joy.

Sometimes the only way to catch your breath is to lose it completely.

Never doubt God in the darkness what he has given us in the light.

The brightest light casts the darkest shadow.

I do not know if I will ever be complete, but I know whatever I am, You will always be the rest of me.

Say it. But..." "But what?" he asked. She whispered it, sounding too vulnerable. "But only if its the truth, Caine. Only. If." "I love you," he said.

Thank You" she whispered soft like it may blow away with anything stronger than a breathe, "for fixing me." "You," I sputtered out like the first sound of morning, "were never broken.

You are the poem I never knew how to write and this life is the story I have always wanted to tell.

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

I will never, ever believe in the words "too late" because it is never too late to be exactly who you wish, do exactly what you should, say exactly what needs to be heard, and live the exact life you should be living.

Come live with us, Diana. Don't argue. Just say yes." Diana looked at the ground to hide her emotions. Then she said, "Would I have to be hearing you two going at it night and day?

I’ve always been enchanted by the endings of things. Series finales and sunsets. Last paragraphs and encores. I think for the way they remind me that losing something you love isn’t always sad and heartbreaking, but sometimes breathtaking and beautiful.

It's over, Sam. Finally." "Yeah," he said. "I guess it is." "Turn out the light, Sam." Sam reached for the switch and turned out the light.

We are the only people I have ever known that can make love from across a crowded room.

Which was how Britteny ended up nestled next to Mickey, under the shelter of a painter's drop cloth. She felt no pain. She saw no light. She heard, but barely. Her heart was still and silent. Yet she did not die.

Caine tried to roll to his feet, but something was jabbing him in the crouch. He shook off the stars and saw Edilio standing over him. Edilio had the business end of his automatic rifle in a very sensitive place. "If you move, Caine, I will shoot your balls off," Edilio said. "Toto?" "He will," Toto said, "Although he's not sure it will be just your balls.

As Hamlet said to Ophelia, ”God has given you one face, and you make yourself another." The battle between these two halves of identity...Who we are and who we pretend to be, is unwinnable. "Just as there are two sides to every story, there are two sides to every person. One that we reveal to the world and another we keep hidden inside. A duality governed by the balance of light and darkness, within each of us is the capacity for both good and evil. But those who are able to blur the moral dividing line hold the true power.

What a woman you are,” he murmured, and she heard the emotion in it, the way the Irish thickened just a bit in his voice. And saw it in those vivid eyes when he drew back. “That you would think of this. That you would do this.” He shook his head, kissed her. Like the breath, long and quiet. “I can’t thank you enough. There isn’t enough thanks. I can’t say what this means to me, even to you. I don’t have the words for it.” He took her hands, brought them both to his lips. “A ghra. You stagger me.” He framed her face now, touched his lips to her brow. “You’re the beat of my heart, the breath in my body, the light in my soul.

I said, you're the beat of my heart, the breath in my body, the light in my soul.

Wherever there is light, look for the shadow. The shadow is me.

Hello, Darkness," Caine said. Gaia's face fell. Her bloody, feral grin faded to be replaced by lips drawn right with fear. Her killer blue eyes widened as she looked at Caine who was no longer Caine. "Nemesis," Gaia said.

If you are sitting in the dark (due to depression) go turn the light on. If you can't find the light switch, seek the help of someone who can.

Love, real love, wasn’t empty, grasping hands, or lies that felt like truths. And it wasn’t perfect or neat or always easy. It was a rising sun on a new day. It was endless possibility.

When we are we and a closet we share, I will hang my clothes in the opposite direction as yours, because after a wait like this, I think even they deserve to always be walking directly towards each other.

When the starry sky, a vista of open seas, or a stained-glass window shedding purple beams fascinate me, there is a cluster of meaning, of colors, of words, of caresses, there are light touches, scents, sighs, cadences that arise, shroud me, carry me away, and sweep me beyond the things I see, hear, or think, The "sublime" object dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory. It is such a memory, which, from stopping point to stopping point, remembrance to remembrance, love to love, transfers that object to the refulgent point of the dazzlement in which I stray in order to be.

You have never had to steal my breath, or take it away, somehow you have always managed to convince me to hand it over freely.

Ach, Tchekov! Why are you dead? Why can’t I talk to you in a big darkish room at late evening—where the light is green from the waving trees outside? I’d like to write a series of Heavens: that would be one.

Be gentle, always delicate with every soul you meet, for every single morning you wake up, there is someone Wishing, silently and secretly, that they had not.

There's a terrible stillness. I notice a small tear in the wallpaper above her shoulder. I notice finger marks grimed on the light switch. Somewhere down in the house, a door opens and shuts. As Zoey turns to face me, I realize that life is made up of a series of moments, each one a journey to the end.

Sometimes you look up and there just seems to be so many more stars that ever before. More. They burn brighter and they shine longer and they never vanish into your periphery when you turn your head. It's as if they come out for us and to remind us that their light took so long to come to us, that if we never had the patience to wait, we never would have seen them here, tonight, like this. That as much as it hurts, sometimes it's all you can do, wait, endure and keep shining, knowing that eventually, your light will reach where it is supposed to reach and shine for who it is supposed to shine for. It is never easy, but it is always worth it.

I am so tired of waking to the blank canvass of morning and realizing it won't be painted with you.

The only way you can light other people on fire is to be lit yourself, from the inside.

Power can be hoarded by the mighty or stolen from the innocent.Power provides the ability to choose. But has a proclivity for corruption. The use of power is not to be taken lightly, for it is never without consequence.

Although it was only six o'clock, the night was already dark. The fog, made thicker by its proximity to the Seine, blurred every detail with its ragged veils, punctured at various distances by the reddish glow of lanterns and bars of light escaping from illuminated windows. The road was soaked with rain and glittered under the street-lamps, like a lake reflecting strings of lights. A bitter wind, heavy with icy particles, whipped at my face, its howling forming the high notes of a symphony whose bass was played by swollen waves crashing into the piers of the bridges below. The evening lacked none of winter's rough poetry.

Frustration is an interesting emotional state, because it tends to bring out the worst in whoever is frustrated. Frustrated babies tend to throw food and make a mess. Frustrated citizens tend to execute kings and queens and make a democracy. And frustrated moths tend to bang up against lightbulbs and make light fixtures all dusty.

Delilah Bard never read many books. The few she did had pirates and thieves, and always ended with freedom and the promise of more stories. Characters sailed away. They lived on. Lila always imagined people that way, a series of intersections and adventures. It was easy when you moved through life--through worlds--the way she did. Easy when you didn't care, when people came onto the page and walked away again, back to their own stories, and you could imagine whatever you wanted for them, if you cared enough to write it in your head.

No matter how much light I carry within me, there will always be times of feeling lost, being confused, seeking direction. It is the way of the human heart.

Find my hand in the darkness and if we cannot find the light, we will always make our own.

We do not lead others into the Light by stepping into the darkness with them.

Maybe. Maybe is gradations of darkness. The sweetest torture. Maybe is hope.

I promise to plant kisses like seeds on you body, so in time you can grow to love yourself as I love you.

This isn’t going to be a cute little storybook you can close when you’re done. You open this and you’re going to be letting things out you cannot possibly imagine. And believe me when I tell you this is no fairytale.”–Eli (Darkness Of Light)

this is the light of autumn; it has turned on us. Surely it is a privilege to approach the end still believing in something.

Darkness scares us. We yearn for the comfort of light as it provides shape and form, allowing us to recognize and define what's before us. But what is it we're afraid of really? Not the darkness itself, but the truth we know hides within.

Oh what we could be if we stopped carrying the remains of who we were.

The festival of the summer solstice speaks of love and light, of freedom and generosity of spirit. It is a beautiful time of year where vibrant flowers whisper to us with scented breath, forests and woodlands hang heavy in the summer’s heat and our souls become enchanted with midsummer magic.

Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, As without light, nothing flowers.

She knew, now, that there was always light – beyond the dark, and the fear, out of the depths; there was sun to reach for, and air and space and freedom.

no matter how early you rise or how late you turn in, you never see that point where light begins or the first bruise of darkness bleeds in under its fragile skin; the beauty, and the scary, unfathomable wisdom of transition.

Gemma,” I said, adding a singsong whine to my voice, “now I can’t scare her. You can’t go around telling people about me.

To be blind is not miserable; not to be able to bear blindness, that is miserable.—John Milton

Brighter, now brighter, pay no mind to those who squint, burn with all your heat.

He was rather like a Christmas tree whose lights, wired in series, must all go out if even one bulb is defective.

If I could see just once more – just one thing in this world – it would be you. I would only need a second. One second, and I would hold the image of you in my heart forever.

I listen to the gunfire we cannot hear, and begin this journey with the light of knowing the root of my own furious love.

Destiny. To believe that a life is meant for a single purpose, one must also believe in a common fate. Father to daughter, brother to sister, mother to child. Blood ties can be as unyielding as they are eternal. But it is our bonds of choice that truly light the road we travel. Love versus hatred. Loyalty against betrayal. A person's true destiny can only be revealed at the end of his journey, and the story I have to tell is far from over.

I laugh, and it’s laughter, not light, that casts out the darkness building within me, that reminds me I am still alive, even in this strange place where everything I’ve ever known is coming apart. I know some things—I know that I’m not alone, that I have friends, that I’m in love. I know where I came from. I know that I don’t want to die, and for me, that’s something—more than I could have said a few weeks ago.

Fun fact: The planet Venus- aka, the 'morning star' when it appears before sunrise, outshining all the stars in the heavens-was once known as Luciferin. Funner fact: The chemical that makes fireflies' butts light up is called "luciferin

I promise to plant kisses like seeds on your body, so in time you can grow to love yourself as I love you.

I want to know what your skin feels like after three days of traveling and no bother of a shower because what we see is more and worth more than how we feel.

What mattered to her was that she loved God, whether or not He granted her the consolation and joy of His felt presence.

What does he need?” He smiled sadly. “Someone who stays.

Children of her type contrive the purest philosophies. Ada had worked out her own little system. Hardly a week had elapsed since Van’s arrival when he was found worthy of being initiated in her web of wisdom. An individual’s life consisted of certain classified things: "real things" which were unfrequent and priceless, simply "things" which formed the routine stuff of life; and "ghost things," also called "fogs," such as fever, toothache, dreadful disappointments, and death. Three or more things occurring at the same time formed a "tower," or, if they came in immediate succession, they made a "bridge." "Real towers" and "real bridges" were the joys of life, and when the towers came in a series, one experienced supreme rapture; it almost never happened, though. In some circumstances, in a certain light, a neutral "thing" might look or even actually become "real" or else, conversely, it might coagulate into a fetid "fog." When the joy and the joyless happened to be intermixed, simultaneously or along the ramp of duration, one was confronted with "ruined towers" and "broken bridges.

Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye makes, but the soul is light; where it is, is day; where it was, is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury, if it be any thing more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming.

It’s the kind of kiss that inspires stars to climb into the sky and light up the world. The kind that takes forever and no time at all. His hands are holding my cheeks, and he pulls back just to look me in the eye and his chest is heaving and he says, “I think,” he says, “my heart is going to explode,” and I wish, more than ever, that I knew how to capture moments like these and revisit them forever. Because this. This is everything.

Maybe what I told her was a lie. Maybe I could be what she deserved. Maybe I could make the same teeth-clenching, sweat-pouring effort I’d put into my PT, and channel that into living blind, so that she wouldn’t have to constantly be cleaning up after me, or dragging my ass out of the house. My endless black was never going to go away. That was certainty. But kissing Charlotte had been a burst of light streaking across it, like a comet. Maybe. Maybe is gradations of darkness. The sweetest torture. Maybe is hope.

The smile that covered a "multitude of pains" was no hypocritical mask. She was trying to hide her sufferings - even from God! - so as not to make others, especially the poor, suffer because of them. When she promised to do "a little extra praying & smiling" for one of her friends, she was alluding to an acutely painful and costly sacrifice: to pray when prayer was so difficult and to smile when her interior pain was agonizing.

Sometimes we’re on a collision course, and we just don’t know it. Whether it’s by accident or by design, there’s not a thing we can do about it. A woman in Paris was on her way to go shopping, but she had forgotten her coat - went back to get it. When she had gotten her coat, the phone had rung, so she’d stopped to answer it; talked for a couple of minutes. While the woman was on the phone, Daisy was rehearsing for a performance at the Paris Opera House. And while she was rehearsing, the woman, off the phone now, had gone outside to get a taxi. Now a taxi driver had dropped off a fare earlier and had stopped to get a cup of coffee. And all the while, Daisy was rehearsing. And this cab driver, who dropped off the earlier fare; who’d stopped to get the cup of coffee, had picked up the lady who was going to shopping, and had missed getting an earlier cab. The taxi had to stop for a man crossing the street, who had left for work five minutes later than he normally did, because he forgot to set off his alarm. While that man, late for work, was crossing the street, Daisy had finished rehearsing, and was taking a shower. And while Daisy was showering, the taxi was waiting outside a boutique for the woman to pick up a package, which hadn’t been wrapped yet, because the girl who was supposed to wrap it had broken up with her boyfriend the night before, and forgot. When the package was wrapped, the woman, who was back in the cab, was blocked by a delivery truck, all the while Daisy was getting dressed. The delivery truck pulled away and the taxi was able to move, while Daisy, the last to be dressed, waited for one of her friends, who had broken a shoelace. While the taxi was stopped, waiting for a traffic light, Daisy and her friend came out the back of the theater. And if only one thing had happened differently: if that shoelace hadn’t broken; or that delivery truck had moved moments earlier; or that package had been wrapped and ready, because the girl hadn’t broken up with her boyfriend; or that man had set his alarm and got up five minutes earlier; or that taxi driver hadn’t stopped for a cup of coffee; or that woman had remembered her coat, and got into an earlier cab, Daisy and her friend would’ve crossed the street, and the taxi would’ve driven by. But life being what it is - a series of intersecting lives and incidents, out of anyone’s control - that taxi did not go by, and that driver was momentarily distracted, and that taxi hit Daisy, and her leg was crushed.

Just as there are two sides to every story, there are two sides to every person. One that we reveal to the world and another we keep hidden inside. A duality governed by the balance of light and darkness. Within each of us is the capacity for both good and evil. But those of us who are able to blur the moral dividing line hold the true power.

Morphine hits the backs of the legs first, then the back of the neck, a spreading wave of relaxation slackening the muscles away from the bones so that you seem to float without outlines, like lying in warm salt water. As this relaxing wave spread through my tissues, I experienced a strong feeling of fear. I had the feeling that some horrible image was just beyond the field of vision, moving as I turned my head, so that I never quite saw it. I felt nauseous; I lay down and closed my eyes. A series of pictures passed, like watching a movie: A huge, neon-lighted cocktail bar that got larger and larger until streets, traffic, and street repairs were included in it; a waitress carrying a skull on a tray; stars in a clear sky. The physical impact of the fear of death; the shutting off of breath; the stopping of blood.

May the light be in you forever, May the sun love you and keep you, May the dream make you awaken. For the stars love to shine upon you, And the heavens cry for your loss. May goodness and love flow through you once more, Drink of the light and the love here, Find that we all need you, May your spirit come back across.

- Oscar Wilde said that we always destroy the thing we love the most. And it is true. The simple possibility of achieving that which we desire causes the soul of the common man to be filled with guilt. He looks around, and sees many others who have not succeeded, and so he thinks he does not deserve it. He forgets everything he overcame, all he suffered, everything he had to renounce in order to come this far. I know many people who, when they are within reach of their Personal Legend, make a series of silly mistakes and do not attain their objective - when it was just one step away.

To commit herself to becoming "an apostle of Joy" when humanly speaking she might have felt at the brink of despair, was heroic indeed. She could do so because her joy was rooted in the certitude of the ultimate goodness of God's loving plan for her. And though her faith in this truth did not touch her soul with consolation, she ventured to meet the challenges of life with a smile. Her one lever was her blind trust in God.

Counselor, you can come along, but I prefer to interview Stella alone.” “Let’s just say I’ll think about that.” “Is there a legal precedence that you feel you need to be there?” “No, no legal precedence. Just looking out for my client.” “Stella is now my client, as well. I don’t take any of my cases lightly. I’ve been hired to find the murderer and that’s what I intend to do. Stella is the starting point, and her interview is pivotal. If you are in the interview room with us, she may not divulge information that could be crucial to my going further. I hope you can understand my position in this.

The night has a thousand eyes,’” Kit said hoarsely, and lifted her head to face the villain. The Baudelaires could tell by her voice that she was reciting the words of someone else. “‘And the day but one; yet the light of the bright world dies with the dying sun. The mind has a thousand eyes, and the heart but one: yet the light of a whole life dies when love is done.

My first novel was published by the first publisher I sent it to. And so I’ve been learning as I go, and I find it now rather embarrassing that people beginning the Discworld series start with The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic, which I don’t think are some of the best books to start with. This is the author saying this, folks. Do not start at the beginning with Discworld.

My second thoughts condemn And wonder how I dare To look you in the eye. What right have I to swear Even at one a.m. To love you till I die? Earth meets too many crimes For fibs to interest her; If I can give my word, Forgiveness can recur Any number of times In Time. Which is absurd. Tempus fugit. Quite. So finish up your drink. All flesh is grass. It is. But who on earth can think With heavy heart or light Of what will come of this?

A fourth group of people climbs from ignorance and pretends to possess the rational faculty. They suppose that the highest felicity is the expansion of honor and fame, the spread of reputation, a multiplicity of followers, and the influence of the command that is obeyed. Hence, you see that their only concern is eye service and cultivation of the things upon which observers cast their glance. One of them may go hungry in his house and suffer harm so that he can spend his wealth on clothes with which to adorn himself so that no one will look at him with the eye of contempt when he goes out. The types of these people are beyond count. All of them are veiled from Allah by the sheer darkness that is their own dark souls.

We are the memory keepers and the trappers of time; stealers of stolen glances and breathless lungs from all that have been taken away. We are the noticers of subtle signs hidden in plain sight by a benevolent universe bigger than we'd ever believe...We are the directionless wanderers and the destinationless travelers and we are the crumpled map that never got packed to join us. We are the cinematic lovers and the translucent curtains saturated in light. The soundtrack to the moments without sounds and the swiftness that two bodies can become one in the stillness of a second. We, says the last string pulled out, the final string that kept it all together, balled up tight, filling us after all this time, We, are the chasers of the light.

The slam of a car door drew her attention to a new arrival. Maxville Deputy Sheriff Zach Manus emerged from his unmarked 2011 Camaro and stalked toward them. Deep sorrow and anger laced across his handsome features. His light-brown hair stood a little more on end than normal. He stopped in front of them, his frown deepening and his golden-brown eyes darkening.

When you dream you go inside yourself, even though it makes you feel like you are traveling many miles and light years to go to the dream worlds. This is the irony of all of it. Everything lives within the heart of the dreamer. Your heart can take you everywhere. It’s the world where we are still together. The heart is where you’ll find me and anyone else you have ever loved with all your heart and all your soul.

Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations. Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies like a snowflake falling on water. Below us, some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death, snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn back into the little system of his care. All night, the cities, like shimmering novas, tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.

There is so much deep contradiction in my soul. Such deep longing for God - so deep that it is painful - a suffering continual - and yet not wanted by God - repulsed - empty - no faith - no love - no zeal. Souls hold no attraction - Heaven means nothing - to me it looks like an empty place - the thought of it means nothing to me and yet this torturing longing for God. Pray for me please that I keep smiling at Him in spite of everything. For I am only His - so He has every right over me. I am perfectly happy to be nobody even to God. . . . Your devoted child in J.C. M. Teresa

Bushido as an independent code of ethics may vanish, but its power will not perish from the earth; its schools of martial prowess or civic honor may be demolished, but its light and its glory will long survive their ruins. Like its symbolic flower, after it is blown to the four winds, it will still bless mankind with the perfume with which it will enrich life.

Love and honor. They are the two great things, and now they’re dimmed and blighted. Today, love is just sex and sentimentality. Love is really a recognition of truth, a recognition of another person’s integrity and truth in a way that is compatible with — that makes both of you light up when you recognize the quality in the other. That’s what love is. It’s a recognition of singularity… And love is giving and giving and giving … not looking for any return. Until you do that, you can’t love.

The town was a series of dark shapes with edges picked out in moonlight; sloping rooves and gables, balconies and gutters met one another in a chaotic, shadowed jumble. Behind him, the far-flung darkness of what must be the great northern forests. And to the south ... to the south, past the dark shapes of the city, past the lightly wooded hills and rich central provinces of Vere, lay the border, prickling with true castles, Ravenel, Fortaine, Marlas ... and across the border Delpha, and home.

When my own mother died, there seemed to me to be no answer to anything. For a time the only universality was death. And then I remember walking in the dusk along the quiet little street toward the house now so empty and meaningless. There was light enough from the sky to cast the lattice shadow of leaves on the walk. The sound of the river was steady and swift, and the air smelled of sulphur from the mills beyond it. As I looked up, a delicate petal of moon drifted into the tender blue, and all at once I thought, How beautiful God made the world! How wonderful that the stars still shine! And I was comforted.

The outside of the building was covered with faded poster advertising what was sold, and by the eerie light of the half-moon, the Baudelaires could see that fresh limes, plastic knives, canned meat, white envelopes, mango-flavored candy, red wine, leather wallets, fashion magazines, goldfish bowls, sleeping bags, roasted figs, cardboard boxes, controversial vitamins, and many other things were available inside the store. Nowhere on the building, however, was there a poster advertising help, which is really what the Baudelaires needed.

A third group of people see the highest felicity in the abundance of property and the extension of ease. After all, property is an instrument to achieve the object of appetite. Through it, the human being attains the ability to achieve wishes. Hence, these people aspire to gather property; to increase estates, land, valuable horses, cattle, and farmland, and to hoard dinars in the earth. Hence, you will see one of them striving throughout life --- embarking on great dangers in the deserts, on journeys, and in the oceans to gather possessions with which he is niggardly toward himself, to say nothing of others. These are the ones meant by the words of The Prophet: "The slave of the dirham is miserable: the slave of the dinar is miserable." What darkness is greater than that which deceives the human being? Gold and silver are two stones that are not desired in themselves. When wishes are not achieved through them and they are not spent, then they are just like pebbles, and pebbles are just like them.

In the pragmatist, streetwise climate of advanced postmodern capitalism, with its scepticism of big pictures and grand narratives, its hard-nosed disenchantment with the metaphysical, 'life' is one among a whole series of discredited totalities. We are invited to think small rather than big – ironically, at just the point when some of those out to destroy Western civilization are doing exactly the opposite. In the conflict between Western capitalism and radical Islam, a paucity of belief squares up to an excess of it. The West finds itself faced with a full-blooded metaphysical onslaught at just the historical point that it has, so to speak, philosophically disarmed. As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith.

The dark sky. A hundred million stars. More stars than I’ve ever seen before. My eyes let me see farther, but they don’t show me the one thing I want to see. I would trade all the stars in the universe if I could just have him back again. Wind whistles through the trees nearby. Birdsong weaves in and out of the sound. The hybrids emerge from the communication building, heads tilted to the sky. And then we see the end. Godspeed’s engine was nuclear; who knows what fueled the biological weapons. But they explode together. In space, they don’t make the familiar mushroom cloud. They don’t make the boom! of an exploding bomb. There is, against the dark sky, a brief flash of light. It is filled with colors, like a nebula or the aurora borealis, bursting like a popped bubble. Nothing else—no sound of an explosion, no tremors in the earth, no smell of smoke. Not here, on the surface of the planet. Nothing else to signify Elder’s death. Just light. And then it’s gone. And then he’s gone.

An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pierglass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, the candle is the egoism of any party now absent.

The lights came up as Dylan Raddeck walked nonchalantly into the room. As expected he stopped, staring at his killer … Eyes fixed on her target, Bast hesitated as James Heron appeared behind him. For a fraction of a second too long, she wavered, unable to decide her target, then she snarled, and fired a series of the needles at Radeck, seeing them strike exactly at her aiming point. The only problem was that he didn’t go down. Nor did Heron. Instead they stepped nimbly aside and an armoured figure behind them got off an accurate shot. It wasn’t a killing shot. It was intended to disable and disarm her—Mr Brown was specific, he wanted her alive. Unfortunately the prosthetics she wore to disguise her anatomy absorbed most of the paralysing agent. She screamed in frustration as she went down. With an effort, she turned her needle projector on herself, and fired.

Intrinsic to the concept of a translator's fidelity to the effect and impact of the original is making the second version of the work as close to the first writer's intention as possible. A good translator's devotion to that goal is unwavering. But what never should be forgotten or overlooked is the obvious fact that what we read in a translation is the translator's writing. The inspiration is the original work, certainly, and thoughtful literary translators approach that work with great deference and respect, but the execution of the book in another language is the task of the translator, and that work should be judged and evaluated on its own terms. Still, most reviewers do not acknowledge the fact of translation except in the most perfunctory way, and a significant majority seem incapable of shedding light on the value of the translation or on how it reflects or illuminates the original.

Color—that’s another thing people don’t expect. In her imagination, in her dreams, everything has color. The museum buildings are beige, chestnut, hazel. Its scientists are lilac and lemon yellow and fox brown. Piano chords loll in the speaker of the wireless in the guard station, projecting rich blacks and complicated blues down the hall toward the key pound. Church bells send arcs of bronze careening off the windows. Bees are silver; pigeons are ginger and auburn and occasionally golden. The huge cypress trees she and her father pass on their morning walk are shimmering kaleidoscopes, each needle a polygon of light. She has no memories of her mother but imagines her as white, a soundless brilliance. Her father radiates a thousand colors, opal, strawberry red, deep russet, wild green; a smell like oil and metal, the feel of a lock tumbler sliding home, the sound of his key rings chiming as he walks. He is an olive green when he talks to a department head, an escalating series of oranges when he speaks to Mademoiselle Fleury from the greenhouses, a bright red when he tries to cook. He glows sapphire when he sits over his workbench in the evenings, humming almost inaudibly as he works, the tip of his cigarette gleaming a prismatic blue.

While dragging herself up she had to hang onto the rail. Her twisted progress was that of a cripple. Once on the open deck she felt the solid impact of the black night, and the mobility of the accidental home she was about to leave. Although Lucette had never died before—no, dived before, Violet—from such a height, in such a disorder of shadows and snaking reflections, she went with hardly a splash through the wave that humped to welcome her. That perfect end was spoiled by her instinctively surfacing in an immediate sweep — instead of surrendering under water to her drugged lassitude as she had planned to do on her last night ashore if it ever did come to this. The silly girl had not rehearsed the technique of suicide as, say, free-fall parachutists do every day in the element of another chapter. Owing to the tumultuous swell and her not being sure which way to peer through the spray and the darkness and her own tentaclinging hair—t,a,c,l—she could not make out the lights of the liner, an easily imagined many-eyed bulk mightily receding in heartless triumph. Now I’ve lost my next note. Got it. The sky was also heartless and dark, and her body, her head,and particularly those damned thirsty trousers, felt clogged with Oceanus Nox, n,o,x. At every slap and splash of cold wild salt, she heaved with anise-flavored nausea and there was an increasing number, okay, or numbness, in her neck and arms. As she began losing track of herself, she thought it proper to inform a series of receding Lucettes—telling them to pass it on and on in a trick-crystal regression—that what death amounted to was only a more complete assortment of the infinite fractions of solitude. She did not see her whole life flash before her as we all were afraid she might have done; the red rubber of a favorite doll remained safely decomposed among the myosotes of an un-analyzable brook; but she did see a few odds and ends as she swam like a dilettante Tobakoff in a circle of brief panic and merciful torpor. She saw a pair of new vairfurred bedroom slippers, which Brigitte had forgotten to pack; she saw Van wiping his mouth before answering, and then, still withholding the answer, throwing his napkin on the table as they both got up; and she saw a girl with long black hair quickly bend in passing to clap her hands over a dackel in a half-tom wreath. A brilliantly illumined motorboat was launched from the not-too-distant ship with Van and the swimming coach and the oilskin-hooded Toby among the would-be saviors; but by that time a lot of sea had rolled by and Lucette was too tired to wait. Then the night was filled with the rattle of an old but still strong helicopter. Its diligent beam could spot only the dark head of Van, who, having been propelled out of the boat when it shied from its own sudden shadow, kept bobbing and bawling the drowned girl’s name in the black, foam-veined, complicated waters.

Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them. For it always happened that when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful attempt to discover where I was, everything would be moving round me through the darkness: things, places, years. My body, still too heavy with sleep to move, would make an effort to construe the form which its tiredness took as an orientation of its various members, so as to induce from that where the wall lay and the furniture stood, to piece together and to give a name to the house in which it must be living. Its memory, the composite memory of its ribs, knees, and shoulder-blades offered it a whole series of rooms in which it had at one time or another slept; while the unseen walls kept changing, adapting themselves to the shape of each successive room that it remembered, whirling madly through the darkness. And even before my brain, lingering in consideration of when things had happened and of what they had looked like, had collected sufficient impressions to enable it to identify the room, it, my body, would recall from each room in succession what the bed was like, where the doors were, how daylight came in at the windows, whether there was a passage outside, what I had had in my mind when I went to sleep, and had found there when I awoke. The stiffened side underneath my body would, for instance, in trying to fix its position, imagine itself to be lying, face to the wall, in a big bed with a canopy; and at once I would say to myself, "Why, I must have gone to sleep after all, and Mamma never came to say good night!" for I was in the country with my grandfather, who died years ago; and my body, the side upon which I was lying, loyally preserving from the past an impression which my mind should never have forgotten, brought back before my eyes the glimmering flame of the night-light in its bowl of Bohemian glass, shaped like an urn and hung by chains from the ceiling, and the chimney-piece of Siena marble in my bedroom at Combray, in my great-aunt's house, in those far distant days which, at the moment of waking, seemed present without being clearly denned, but would become plainer in a little while when I was properly awake.