Slender Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Slender. Here they are! All 100 of them:

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I will never leave him. It will be this, always, for as long as he will let me. If I had had words to speak such a thing, I would have. But there were none that seemed big enough for it, to hold that swelling truth. As if he had heard me, he reached for my hand. I did not need to look; his fingers were etched into my memory, slender and petal-veined, strong and quick and never wrong. โ€œPatroclus,โ€ he said. He was always better with words than I.
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Madeline Miller (The Song of Achilles)
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I couldn't possibly have sex with someone with such a slender grasp on grammar!
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Russell Brand
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Sweet mother, I cannot weave โ€“ slender Aphrodite has overcome me with longing for a girl.
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Sappho (Sappho: A New Translation of the Complete Works)
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I found myself grinning until my cheeks hurt, my scalp prickling till I thought it might lift off my head. My tongue ran away from me, giddy with freedom. This, and this, and this, I said to him. I did not have to fear that I spoke too much. I did not have to worry that I was too slender, or too slow. This and this and this! I taught him how to skip stones, and he taught me how to carve wood. I could feel every nerve in my body, every brush of air against my skin.
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Madeline Miller (The Song of Achilles)
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Have you kissed many boys before?" he asked quietly. His question brought my mind back into focus. I raised an eyebrow. "Boys? That's an assumption." Noah laughed, the sound low and husky. "Girls, then?" "No." "Not many girls? Or not many boys?" "Neither," I said. Let him make of that what he would. "How many?" "Whyโ€”" "I am taking away that word. You are no longer allowed to use it. How many?" My cheeks flushed, but my voice was steady as I answered. "One." At this, Noah leaned in impossibly closer, the slender muscles in his forearm flexing as he bent his elbow to bring himself nearer to me, almost touching. I was heady with the proximity of him and grew legitimately concerned that my heart might explode. Maybe Noah wasn't asking. Maybe I didn't mind. I closed my eyes and felt Noah's five o' clock graze my jaw, and the faintest whisper of his lips at my ear. "He was doing it wrong.
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Michelle Hodkin (The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer (Mara Dyer, #1))
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If any of you survive, make sure I have an open casket," Jesper said as he hefted two slender coils of rope over his shoulder and signalled for Wylan to follow him across the roof. "The world deserves a few more moments with this face.
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Leigh Bardugo (Six of Crows (Six of Crows, #1))
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I will love you as a thief loves a gallery and as a crow loves a murder, as a cloud loves bats and as a range loves braes. I will love you as misfortune loves orphans, as fire loves innocence and as justice loves to sit and watch while everything goes wrong. I will love you as a battlefield loves young men and as peppermints love your allergies, and I will love you as the banana peel loves the shoe of a man who was just struck by a shingle falling off a house. I will love you as a volunteer fire department loves rushing into burning buildings and as burning buildings love to chase them back out, and as a parachute loves to leave a blimp and as a blimp operator loves to chase after it. I will love you as a dagger loves a certain personโ€™s back, and as a certain person loves to wear dagger proof tunics, and as a dagger proof tunic loves to go to a certain dry cleaning facility, and how a certain employee of a dry cleaning facility loves to stay up late with a pair of binoculars, watching a dagger factory for hours in the hopes of catching a burglar, and as a burglar loves sneaking up behind people with binoculars, suddenly realizing that she has left her dagger at home. I will love you as a drawer loves a secret compartment, and as a secret compartment loves a secret, and as a secret loves to make a person gasp, and as a gasping person loves a glass of brandy to calm their nerves, and as a glass of brandy loves to shatter on the floor, and as the noise of glass shattering loves to make someone else gasp, and as someone else gasping loves a nearby desk to lean against, even if leaning against it presses a lever that loves to open a drawer and reveal a secret compartment. I will love you until all such compartments are discovered and opened, and until all the secrets have gone gasping into the world. I will love you until all the codes and hearts have been broken and until every anagram and egg has been unscrambled. I will love you until every fire is extinguised and until every home is rebuilt from the handsomest and most susceptible of woods, and until every criminal is handcuffed by the laziest of policemen. I will love until M. hates snakes and J. hates grammar, and I will love you until C. realizes S. is not worthy of his love and N. realizes he is not worthy of the V. I will love you until the bird hates a nest and the worm hates an apple, and until the apple hates a tree and the tree hates a nest, and until a bird hates a tree and an apple hates a nest, although honestly I cannot imagine that last occurrence no matter how hard I try. I will love you as we grow older, which has just happened, and has happened again, and happened several days ago, continuously, and then several years before that, and will continue to happen as the spinning hands of every clock and the flipping pages of every calendar mark the passage of time, except for the clocks that people have forgotten to wind and the calendars that people have forgotten to place in a highly visible area. I will love you as we find ourselves farther and farther from one another, where we once we were so close that we could slip the curved straw, and the long, slender spoon, between our lips and fingers respectively. I will love you until the chances of us running into one another slip from slim to zero, and until your face is fogged by distant memory, and your memory faced by distant fog, and your fog memorized by a distant face, and your distance distanced by the memorized memory of a foggy fog. I will love you no matter where you go and who you see, no matter where you avoid and who you donโ€™t see, and no matter who sees you avoiding where you go. I will love you no matter what happens to you, and no matter how I discover what happens to you, and no matter what happens to me as I discover this, and now matter how I am discovered after what happens to me as I am discovering this.
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Lemony Snicket
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You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), in order to discern at once, by ineffable signsโ€•the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limbs, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulateโ€•the little deadly demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.
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Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)
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Kaz reached into his coat pocket. "Here," he said and handed Jesper a slender book with an elaborate cover. "Are we going to read to each other?" "Just flip it open to the back." Jesper opened the book and peered at the last page, puzzled. "So?" "Hold it up so we don't have to look at your ugly face." "My face has character. Besides - oh!" "An excellent read, isn't it?" "Who knew I had a taste for literature?
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Leigh Bardugo (Six of Crows (Six of Crows, #1))
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I settled on the floor and whispered to Sam, โ€œI want you to listen to me, if you can.โ€ I leaned the side of my face against his ruff and remembered the golden wood he had shown me so long ago. I remembered the way the yellow leaves, the color of Samโ€™s eyes, fluttered and twisted, crashing butterflies, on their way to the ground. The slender white trunks of the birches, creamy and smooth as human skin. I remembered Sam standing in the middle of the wood, his arms stretched out, a dark, solid form in the dream of the trees. His coming to me, me punching his chest, the soft kiss. I remembered every kiss weโ€™d ever had, and I remembered every time Iโ€™d curled in his human arms. I remembered the soft warmth of his breath on the back of my neck while we slept. I remembered Sam.
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Maggie Stiefvater (Shiver (The Wolves of Mercy Falls, #1))
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But you didn't die." "Clever lad, to deduce that from such slender evidence after living with me for just three years.
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Scott Lynch (The Lies of Locke Lamora (Gentleman Bastard, #1))
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On what slender threads do life and fortune hangโ€ฆ !
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Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo)
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Incredible what slender threads you begin to hang your hopes on.
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Elizabeth Wein (Code Name Verity (Code Name Verity, #1))
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Why is she convinced Ambrose is out to get her" Leif asked "Ambrose?" Yelena raised a slender eyebrow. She carried a tray of tea and fruit. "You're on a first name basis with the Commander now?" "I usually call him Amby, but not in mixed company.
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Maria V. Snyder (Storm Glass (Glass, #1))
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And her slender white neck was bowed over her book, the fair hair falling on either side of it
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L.J. Smith (The Awakening (The Vampire Diaries, #1))
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Jack couldn't help but watch Nonie as she left. She looked to be twenty-nine, thirty at the most, stood maybe five foot-four and was slender. She had shoulder-length, curly, walnut-colored hair and the largest most beautiful blue eyes he'd ever seem Her nose and ears were small in comparison to her full lips, which he'd give anything to kiss.
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Deborah Leblanc (Toe to Toe (Nonie Broussard Ghost Tracker Series))
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The woman turned and went slowly into the house. As she passed the doors she turned and looked back. Grave and thoughtful was her glance, as she looked on the king with cool pity in here eyes. Very fair was her face, and her long hair was like a river of gold. Slender and tall she was in her white robe girt with silver; but strong she seemed and stern as steel, a daughter of kings.
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J.R.R. Tolkien (The Two Towers (The Lord of the Rings, #2))
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If I had had words to speak such a thing, I would have. But there were none that seemed big enough for it, to hold that swelling truth. As if he had heard me, he reached for my hand. I did not need to look; his fingers were etched into my memory, slender and petal-veined, strong and quick and never wrong. โ€œPatroclus,โ€ he said. He was always better with words than I.
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Madeline Miller (The Song of Achilles)
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I chose fat and functional over slender and miserable.
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Andrew Solomon (The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression)
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I would hold the rosy, slender fingers of the dawn for you.
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Ezra Pound
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There were people thrice her size on the Trenton platform and she looked admiringly at one of them, a woman in a very short skirt. She thought nothing of slender legs shown off in miniskirts--it was safe and easy, after all, to display legs of which the world approved--but the fat woman's act was about the quiet conviction that one shared only with oneself, a sense of rightness that others failed to see.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Americanah)
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We still groped for each other on the backstairs or in parked cars โŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸas the road around us grew glossy with ice and our breath softened the view through the glass โŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸalready laced with frost, but more frequently I was finding myself sleepless, and he was running out of โŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸlullabies. But damn if there isnโ€™t anything sexier โŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸthan a slender boy with a handgun, โŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸโŸa fast car, a bottle of pills.
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Richard Siken (Crush)
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White bee, even when you are gone you buzz in my soul You live again in time, slender and silent.
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Pablo Neruda (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair)
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I will love you as we find ourselves farther and farther from one another, where we once were so close that we could slip the curved straw, and the long, slender spoon, between our lips and fingers respectively. I will love you until the chances of us running into one another slip from slim to zero, and until your face is fogged by distant memory, and your memory faced by distant fog, and your fog memorized by a distant face, and your distance distanced by the memorized memory of a foggy fog. I will love you no matter where you go and who you see, no matter where you avoid and who you donโ€™t see, and no matter who sees you avoiding where you go. I will love you no matter what happens to you, and no matter how I discover what happens to you, and no matter what happens to me as I discover this, and no matter how I am discovered after what happens to me as I am discovering this.
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Lemony Snicket
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Each leaf that brushed his face deepened his sadness and dread. Each leaf he passed he'd never pass again. They rode over his face like veils, already some yellow, their veins like slender bones where the sun shone through them. He had resolved himself to ride on for he could not turn back and the world that day was as lovely as any day that ever was and he was riding to his death.
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Cormac McCarthy (Child of God)
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Annabelle gave him a chiding smile. โ€œIf youโ€™re implying that Iโ€™m spoiled, I assure you that I am not.โ€ โ€œYou should be.โ€ His warm gaze slid over her pink-tinted face and slender upper body, then sought hers again. There was a note in his voice that gently robbed her of breath. โ€œYou could do with a bit of spoiling.
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Lisa Kleypas (Secrets of a Summer Night (Wallflowers, #1))
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You cannot escape where you come from, September. Some part of it remains inside you always, like the slender white heart in the center of the thickest onion.
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Catherynne M. Valente (The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There (Fairyland, #2))
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She was slender, and wonderfully graceful. Except that her movements were languidโ€”very languidโ€”indeed, there was nothing in her appearance to indicate an invalid.
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J. Sheridan Le Fanu (Carmilla)
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He let his eyes flitter over her. โ€œI donโ€™t see anything โ€˜precisely.โ€™ I can tell youโ€™re slender. I can see youโ€™re wearing white, or some light color. Your face is pale, your lips are reddish. And there appears to be a dark brown octopus attacking your head.โ€ โ€œThatโ€™s my hair.โ€ Ransom shrugged. โ€œYou asked what I see. I see tentacles.
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Tessa Dare (Romancing the Duke (Castles Ever After, #1))
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Those were the Rommely women: Mary, the mother, Evy, Sissy, and Katie, her daughters, and Francie, who would grow up to be a Rommely woman even though her name was Nolan. They were all slender, frail creatures with wondering eyes and soft fluttery voices. But they were made out of thin invisible steel.
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Betty Smith
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Prayer is the slender nerve that moves the muscle of omnipotence.
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Charles Haddon Spurgeon
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Achamian tossed his hands skyward in dismay. โ€œFoolish boy! How many faiths are there? How many competing beliefs? And you would murder another on the slender hope that yours is somehow the only one?
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R. Scott Bakker
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But I got a great deal else from the experience. I learned to pitch a tent and sleep beneath the stars. For a brief, proud period I was slender and fit. I gained a profound respect for the wilderness and nature and the benign dark power of woods. I understand now, in a way I never did before, the colossal scale of the world. I found patience and fortitude that I didn't know I had. I discovered an America that millions of people scarcely know exists. I made a friend. I came home.
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Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail)
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It told a story...the story of Prythian. It began with a cauldron. A mighty black cauldron held by glowing, slender female hands in a starry, endless night. Those hands tipped it over, and, from it, golden sparkling liquid poured out over the lip. No -- not sparkling, but...effervescent with small symbols, perhaps some ancient faerie language.
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Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Thorns and Roses (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #1))
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How slender, how fragile, the foundations of an empire. Take away the centre, and whatโ€™s left? A gasping periphery, baseless, powerless, cut down at the roots.
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R.F. Kuang (Babel)
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She discovered the pure joy of reading for pleasure, and was rarely - if ever - seen without a book in her hand. Even in slumber, she was often to be found clutching a volume with one slender hand, her fingers wrapped right around its spine, as if she feared to wake into a world where all books had been forgotten and removed, and this book might become the last she had to linger over.
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Seanan McGuire (In an Absent Dream (Wayward Children, #4))
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Your soul is a chosen landscape Where charming masked and costumed figures go Playing the lute and dancing and almost Sad beneath their fantastic disguises. All sing in a minor key Of all-conquering love and careless fortune They do not seem to believe in their happiness And their song mingles with the moonlight. The still moonlight, sad and beautiful, Which gives the birds to dream in the trees And makes the fountain sprays sob in ecstasy, The tall, slender fountain sprays among the marble statues.
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Paul Verlaine (Fรชtes galantes)
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The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change oneโ€™s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was excited, filled with strength. The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?
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James Salter (Light Years)
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it never really occurred to her that literary men, if they like women at all, do not want literary women but girls.
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Muriel Spark (The Girls of Slender Means (New Directions Classic))
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It occurred to her then that life was conical in shape, the past broadening beyond the sharp point of the lived moment. The more life you had, the more the base expanded, so that the wounds and treasons that were nearly imperceptible when they happened stretched like tiny dots on a balloon slowly blown up. A speck on the slender child grows into a gross deformity in the adult, inescapable, ragged at the edges.
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Lauren Groff (Fates and Furies)
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Faithโ€”is the Pierless Bridge Supporting what We see Unto the Scene that We do notโ€” Too slender for the eye It bears the Soul as bold As it were rocked in Steel With Arms of Steel at either sideโ€” It joinsโ€”behind the Veil To what, could We presume The Bridge would cease to be To Our far, vacillating Feet A first Necessity.
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Emily Dickinson
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I blinked at her. My shades were down and the hall was dark and to me, half-drugged and reeling, she seemed not at all her bright unattainable self but rather a hazy and ineffably tender apparition, all slender wrists and shadows and disordered hair, the Camilla who resided, dim and lovely, in the gloomy boudoir of my dreams.
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Donna Tartt (The Secret History)
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Whoever you are: in the evening step out of your room, where you know everything; yours is the last house before the far-off: whoever you are. With your eyes, which in their weariness barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold, you lift very slowly one black tree and place it against the sky: slender, alone. And you have made the world. And it is huge and like a word which grows ripe in silence. And as your will seizes on its meaning, tenderly your eyes let it go...
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Rainer Maria Rilke (The Book of Images)
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Grave and thoughtful was her glance, as she looked on the king with cool pity in her eyes. Very fair was her face, and her long hair was like a river of gold. Slender and tall she was in her white robe girt with silver; but strong she seemed and stern as steel, a daughter of kings. Thus Aragorn for the first time in the full light of day beheld Eowyn, Lady of Rohan, and thought her fair; fair and cold, like a morning of pale spring that is not yet come to womanhood. And she now was suddenly aware of him: tall heir of kings, wise with many winters, grey cloaked, hiding a power that yet she felt. For a moment still as stone she stood, then turning swiftly she was gone.
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J.R.R. Tolkien
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A slender acquaintance with the world must convince every man that actions, not words, are the true criterion of the attachment of friends.
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George Washington
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In the hour before a thunderstorm, the color of the forest deepens: the pine needles take on a dense vibrant greenness they possess at no other time, the slender trunks go black, and the leaden sky above sinks lower by the minute.
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Michael McDowell (Cold Moon Over Babylon)
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I knew he wouldn't come, but I howled anyway, and when I did, the other wolves would pass images of him to me of what he looked like: lithe, gray, yellow-eyed. I would pass back images of my own, of a wolf on the edge of the woods, silent and cautious, watching me. The images, clear as the slender-leaved trees in front of me, made finding him seem urgent, but I didn't know how to begin to look.
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Maggie Stiefvater (Forever (The Wolves of Mercy Falls, #3))
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God, she was beautiful - my first image of the Orient - a woman such as only the desert poet knew how to praise: her face was the sun, her hair the protecting shadow, her eyes fountains of cool water, her body the most slender of palm-trees and her smile a mirage.
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Amin Maalouf (Samarkand)
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Hua Cheng quietly sighed, extended his arms, and once again folded him into his embrace. "Your Highness, I've always watched you." This was the second time he had said this, but his voice was softer than before. Xie Lian clutched the red robes at his chest, asking, his mind blank, "I know, I know. But... what should I do now?" Hua Cheng's long and slender fingers gently combed through Xie Lian's mussed hair. "Then, Your Highness, do you know why I refuse to leave this world?" Xie Lian couldn't understand why Hua Cheng could still be so calm at a time like this, he was panicking so hard he was trembling. But, while feeling lost, he still simple-mindedly asked, "Why?" Hua Cheng replied quietly, "Because I have a beloved who is still in this world." Hearing this, Xie Lian was slightly stunned. He seemed to have heard this somewhere before. Hua Cheng continued, "My beloved is a brave, noble, and gracious special someone. He's saved my life; I've looked up to him ever since I was young. But, I wanted to catch up to him more, and become and even stronger person for him. Although he might not remember me well. We never really talked. I want to protect him." He gazed at Xie Lian. "If your dream is to save the common people, then my dream is only you." "..." Relying on his memory, Xie Lian asked with a trembling voice, "But... you won't... be able to rest in peace... like this...?" Hua Cheng answered, "I pray to never rest in peace.
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Mรฒ Xiฤng Tรณng Xiรน (ๅคฉๅฎ˜่ต็ฆ [Tiฤn Guฤn Cรฌ Fรบ])
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You have five minutes to call someone, anyone, I don't care who, and order me the finest blend of coffee that rat hole town has, and a dozen beers. If it's not sitting on this table..." a slender finger pointed furiously at the table in question,"... in one hour, you die" - Faith telling Jacob
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Lora Leigh (Jacob's Faith (Breeds, #9; Wolf Breeds, #3))
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He had tried to explain the way he felt to Danny once, about compulsive behavior and time rushing too fast and the Internet and drugs. Danny had only lifted one of his slender, mobile eyebrows and stared at him in smirking confusion. Danny did not think coke and computers were anything alike. But Jude had seen the way people hunched over their screens, clicking the refresh button again and again, waiting for some crucial if meaningless hit of information, and he thought it was almost exactly the same.
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Joe Hill (Heart-Shaped Box)
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Slender Youth. A tour companion who may be either a lost prince or a girl/princess in disguise. In the latter case it is tactful to pretend you think she is a boy. She/he will be ignorant, hasty and shy, and will need hauling out of trouble quite a lot. But she/he will grow up in the course of the Tour. In fact she/he will be the only Companion who will change in any way. Quite often, she/he will soon exhibit a very useful talent for magic and end up by hauling everyone else out of trouble. But this will not be until midway through your second brochure.
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Diana Wynne Jones (The Tough Guide to Fantasyland)
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His mane was like a crest, mounting, then falling low. His neck was long and slender, and arched to the small, savagely beautiful head. The head was that of the wildest of all wild creatures- a stallion born wild- and it was beautiful, savage, splendid. A stallion with a wonderful physical perfection that matched his savage, ruthless spirit.
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Walter Farley
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But it was a happy and beautiful bride who came down the old, homespun- carpeted stairs that September noon - the first bride of Green Gables, slender and shining-eyed, in the mist of her maiden veil, with her arms full of roses. Gilbert, waiting for her in the hall below, looked up at her with adoring eyes. She was his at last, this evasive, long-sought Anne, won after years of patient waiting. It was to him she was coming in the sweet surrender of the bride. Was he worthy of her? Could he make her as happy as he hoped? If he failed her - if he could not measure up to her standard of manhood - then, as she held out her hand, their eyes met and all doubt was swept away in a glad certainty. They belonged to each other; and, no matter what life might hold for them, it could never alter that. Their happiness was in each otherโ€™s keeping and both were unafraid.
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L.M. Montgomery (Anne's House of Dreams (Anne of Green Gables, #5))
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She might have liked to try to strangle him with those slender fingers of hers, but she wanted to make a job of it and this great patience with which she waited for her claws to grow was in itself a form of enjoyment.
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ร‰mile Zola
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... As Lorcan stared down at Lysandra, his blood-splattered face impassive. "Out of the way, shifter." Lysandra had held up a slender hand- and Lorcan paused. The shape-shifter pressed her other hand against her stomach, her face blanching. But then she smiled and said, "You forgot to say 'please.' " Lorcan's dark brows flattened. "I don't have time for this." He made to step around her, shove her aside. Lysandra vomited black blood all over him. Rowan didn't know whether to laught or cringe as Lysandra, panting, gaped at Lorcan, and at the blood on his neck and chest. Slowly, too slowly, Lorcan looked down at himself. She pressed a hand over her mouth. "I am-so sorry-" Lorcan didn't even step out of the way as Lysandra vomited on him again, black blood and bits of gore now on the warrior and on the marble floor.
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Sarah J. Maas (Queen of Shadows (Throne of Glass, #4))
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Esca tossed the slender papyrus roll onto the cot, and set his own hands over Marcus's. "I have not served the Centurion because I was his slave," he said, dropping unconsciously into the speech of his own people. "I have served Marcus, and it was not slave-service...my stomach will be glad when we start on this hunting trail.
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Rosemary Sutcliff (The Eagle of the Ninth)
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In the spring or warmer weather when the snow thaws in the woods the tracks of winter reappear on slender pedestals and the snow reveals in palimpsest old buried wanderings, struggles, scenes of death. Tales of winter brought to light again like time turned back upon itself.
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Cormac McCarthy (Child of God)
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In a nervous and slender-leaved mimosa grove at the back of their villa we found a perch on the ruins of a low stone wall. She trembled and twitched as I kissed the corner of her parted lips and the hot lobe of her ear. A cluster of stars palely glowed above us between the silhouettes of long thin leaves; that vibrant sky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock. I saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct, as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own. Her legs, her lovely live legs, were not too close together, and when my hand located what it sought, a dreamy and eerie expression, half-pleasure, half-pain, came over those childish features. She sat a little higher than I, and whenever in her solitary ecstasy she was led to kiss me, her head would bend with a sleepy, soft, drooping movement that was almost woeful, and her bare knees caught and compressed my wrist, and slackened again; and her quivering mouth, distorted by the acridity of some mysterious potion, with a sibilant intake of breath came near to my face. She would try to relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine; then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly near and let me feed on her open mouth, while with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails, I gave her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion.
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Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)
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This is what most girls are taughtโ€”that we should be slender and small. We should not take up space. We should be seen and not heard, and if we are seen, we should be pleasing to men, acceptable to society. And most women know this, that we are supposed to disappear, but itโ€™s something that needs to be said, loudly, over and over again, so that we can resist surrendering to what is expected of us.
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Roxane Gay (Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body)
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Come on, Paisley. What's the worst that could happen?" Aria meant it as a joke,but her voice sounded too high so she tacked on a laugh. That came out sounding mildly hysterical. "What could happen in a damaged dome?" Paisley counted on her slender fingers. "Our skin could rot off. We could get locked out. An Aether storm could turn us into human bacon. Then the cannibals could eat us for breakfast.
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Veronica Rossi (Under the Never Sky (Under the Never Sky, #1))
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She felt him sigh, and then his hand covered hers where it lay on his chest. His fingers were cool, long and slender, so familiar, she would have known them in the dark. โ€œWe might live here someday,โ€ he said. โ€œTogether.โ€ She smiled, knowing he couldnโ€™t see her, but unable to help it. โ€œThink you can win me over with a fancy house?โ€ she said. โ€œDonโ€™t get ahead of yourself, Jace. Jace Herondale,โ€ she added, and wrapped her arms around him in the cold.
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Cassandra Clare (City of Heavenly Fire (The Mortal Instruments, #6))
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He and Nina had never exchanged gifts or rings; theyโ€™d had no possessions they shared. They had been wanderers and soldiers. Even so, she could not leave him with nothing. From her pocket, she drew a slender sprig of ash and let it drift down into the grave, followed by a smattering of withered red petals from the tulips their compatriots had placed on his chest when they bid him goodbye in Ketterdam. โ€œI know you never cared for sweets.โ€ Her voice wobbled as she let a handful of toffees fall from her hand. They made a hollow patter. โ€œBut this way Iโ€™m with you, and you can keep them for me when I see you next. I know you wonโ€™t eat them yourself.
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Leigh Bardugo (King of Scars (King of Scars, #1))
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A woman who goes around wearing a knife is obviously looking for trouble." She reached deep into her pocket and brought out a long, slender piece of metal, glittering all along one edge. "However a woman who carries a knife is ready for trouble. Generally speaking, it's easier to appear harmless. It's less trouble all around.
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Patrick Rothfuss (The Name of the Wind (The Kingkiller Chronicle, #1))
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For an hour, blended with all she could offer, something noble had been created which had nothing to do with the physical world. And from the turn of his throat, the warmth of his hair, the strong, slender sinews of his hands, something further; which had. Though she combed the earth and searched through the smoke of the galaxies there was no being she wanted but this, who was not and should not be for Philippa Somerville.
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Dorothy Dunnett (Checkmate (The Lymond Chronicles, #6))
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There are many days when all the awful things that happen make you sick at heart, when the path before you is so steep you canโ€™t bear to look. Not even love can rescue a person from that. Still, enveloped in the twilight coming from the west, there she was, watering the plants with her slender, graceful hands, in the midst of a light so sweet it seemed to form a rainbow in the transparent water she poured.
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Banana Yoshimoto
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Ty braced himself as Julian walked directly up to him, not breaking stride, his jaw set, his blue-green eyes as dark as the deep part of the ocean. He reached Ty and caught hold of him, pulling him into a fierce hug. He pressed his face down into his little brother's black hair as Ty stood, frozen and astonished at Julian's lack of anger. "Jules?" he said. "Are you alright?" Julian's shoulders shook. He held his little brother tighter, as if he could crush Ty into himself, into a place where he'd always be safe. He put his cheek against Ty's curls, squeezing his eyes shut, his voice muffled. "I thought something happened to you," he said. "I thought Johnny Rook might--" He didn't finish his sentence. Ty put his arms carefully around Julian. He patted his back, gently, with his slender hands. It was the first time Emma had seen Ty comfort his older brother--almost the first time she'd ever actually seen Julian let someone else take care of him.
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Cassandra Clare (Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices, #1))
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She looked at a silver birch: it would have a soft, showery voice and would look like a slender girl, with hair blown all about her face and fond of dancing. She looked at the oak: he would be a wizened, but hearty, old man with a frizzled beard and warts on his fact and hands, with hair growing out of the warts. She looked at the beech under which she was standing. Ah! --she would be the best of all. She would be a gracious goddess, smooth and stately, the Lady of the Wood.
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C.S. Lewis (Prince Caspian (Chronicles of Narnia, #4))
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What was unfolding in Mumbai was unfolding elsewhere, too. In the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn't unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional. And this undercity strife created only the faintest ripple in the fabric of the society at large. The gates of the rich, occasionally rattled, remained unbreached. The politicians held forth on the middle class. The poor took down one another, and the world's great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace.
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Katherine Boo (Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity)
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Adam described the circumstances surrounding his eye and his hand with the same level tone he would use to answer a question in class. He allowed Ronan to lean in to compare his eyes โ€“ close enough that Ronan felt his breath on his cheek โ€“ and he allowed Ronan to study the palm of his hand. The latter was not strictly necessary, and they both knew it, but Adam watched Ronan closely as he lightly traced the lines there. This was like walking the line between dream and sleep. The night-sharp balance of being asleep enough to dream and awake enough to remember what he wanted. He knew Adam had figured out how he felt. But he didnโ€™t know if he could step off this knife-slender path without destroying what he had.
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Maggie Stiefvater (The Raven King (The Raven Cycle, #4))
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It took a freaking genius to put this together, Michael." I hefted my staff. "Fortunately," I said, and took a two-handed swing at the nearest stand of slender, delicate crystal. It shattered with gratifying ease, and the encasing light around the greater circle began to waver and dissipate. "It only takes a monkey with a big stick to take it apart.
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Jim Butcher (Small Favor (The Dresden Files, #10))
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Hey! Come merry dol! derry dol! My darling! Light goes the weather-wind and the feathered starling. Down along under the Hill, shining in the sunlight, Waiting on the doorstep for the cold starlight, There my pretty lady is, River-woman's daughter, Slender as the willow-wand, clearer than the water. Old Tom Bombadil water-lilies bringing Comes hopping home again. Can you hear him singing? Hey! Come merry dol! derry dol! and merry-o, Goldberry, Goldberry, merry yellow berry-o! Poor old Willow-man, you tuck your roots away! Tom's in a hurry now. Evening will follow day. Tom'sgoing hom again water lilies-bringing. Hey! Come derry dol! Can you hear me singing?
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J.R.R. Tolkien
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Remember, you can be exalted without a college degree. You can be exalted without being slender and beautiful. You can be exalted without having a successful career. You can be exalted if you are not rich and famous. So focus the best that you can on those things in life that will lead you back to the presence of God - keeping all things in their proper balance.
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M. Russell Ballard
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A teenage girl lay asleep on the sofa, curled up under a red-and-black knitted afghan. She was on her side, with one slender arm cradling a throw cushion nestled under her head. Long wavy blond hair spread across her back and her shoulders like a cape. Even though she was sleeping, Alex could see how pretty she was, with her delicate, almost elfin features. He stood in the doorway, watching the soft rise and fall of her chest.
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L.A. Weatherly (Angel Burn (Angel, #1))
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For time and eternity there have been fathers like Nathan who simply can see no way to have a daughter but to own her like a plot of land. To work her, plow her under, rain down a dreadful poison upon her. Miraculously, it causes these girls to grow. They elongate on the pale slender stalks of their longing, like sunflowers with heavy heads. You can shield them with your body and soul, trying to absorb that awful rain, but they'll still move toward him. Without cease they'll bend to his light.
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Barbara Kingsolver (The Poisonwood Bible)
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If ever he had harboured a conscience in his tough narrow breast he had by now dug out and flung away the awkward thing - flung it so far away that were he ever to need it again he could never find it. High-shouldered to a degree little short of malformation, slender and adroit of limb and frame, his eyes close-set and the colour of dried blood, he is climbing the spiral staircase of the soul of Gormenghast, bound for some pinnacle of the itching fancy - some wild, invulnerable eyrie best known to himself; where he can watch the world spread out below him, and shake exultantly his clotted wings
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Mervyn Peake (The Gormenghast Novels (Gormenghast, #1-3))
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Very fair was her face, and her long hair was like a river of gold. Slender and tall she was in her white robe girt with silver; but strong she seemed and stern as steel, a daughter of kings. Thus Aragon for the first time in the full light of day beheld Eowyn, lady of Rohan, and thought her fair, fair and cold, like a morning of pale spring that is not yet come to womanhood.
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J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, #1))
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What a face this girl possessed!โ€”could I not gaze at it every day I would need to recreate it through painting, sculpture, or fatherhood until a second such face is born. Her face, at once innocent and feral, soft and wild! Her mouth voluptuous. Eyes deep as oceans, her eyes as wide as planets. I likened her to the slender Psychรฉ and judged that the perfection of her face ennobled everything unclean around her: the dusty hems of her bunched-up skirt, the worn straps of her nightshirt; the blackened soles of her tiny bare feet, the coal-stained balcony bricks upon which she sat, and that dusty wrought-ironwork that framed her perch. All this and the pungent air!โ€”almost foul, with so many odors. ร”, that and the spicy night! โ€ฆPungency, spice, filth and night, dust and light; all things dark did blossom in sight; flower and bloom, the night has its pearl tooโ€”the moon! And once a month it will make the face of this tender girl bloom.
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Roman Payne
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A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane's and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and soft-hued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slate-blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird's, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.
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James Joyce (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
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With the passage of days in this godly isolation [desert], my heart grew calm. It seemed to fill with answers. I did not ask questions any more; I was certain. Everything - where we came from, where we are going, what our purpose is on earth - struck me as extremely sure and simple in this God-trodden isolation. Little by little my blood took on the godly rhythm. Matins, Divine Liturgy, vespers, psalmodies, the sun rising in the morning and setting in the evening, the constellations suspended like chandeliers each night over the monastery: all came and went, came and went in obedience to eternal laws, and drew the blood of man into the same placid rhythm. I saw the world as a tree, a gigantic poplar, and myself as a green leaf clinging to a branch with my slender stalk. When God's wind blew, I hopped and danced, together with the entire tree.
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Nikos Kazantzakis
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And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!โ€ She lifted up her hand and from the ring that she wore there issued a great light that illuminated her alone and left all else dark. She stood before Frodo seeming now tall beyond measurement, and beautiful beyond enduring, terrible and worshipful. Then she let her hand fall, and the light faded, and suddenly she laughed again, and lo! she was shrunken; a slender Elf woman, clad in simple white, whose gentle voice was soft and sad.
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J.R.R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings)
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In the evening, the brilliant yellow pumpkin blossoms will close, drunk on sunshine, while the milky white jasmine will open their slender throats and sip the chill Himalayan air. At night, low hearths will send up wispy curls of smoke fragrant with a dozen dinners, and darkness will clothe the land. Except on nights when the moon is full. On those nights, the hillside and the valley below are bathed in a magical white light, the glow of the perpetual snows that blanket the mountaintops. On those nights I lie restless in the sleeping loft, wondering what the world is like beyond my mountain home.
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Patricia McCormick (Sold)
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After a seven days' march through woodland, the traveler directed toward Baucis cannot see the city and yet he has arrived. The slender stilts that rise from the ground at a great distance from one another and are lost above the clouds support the city. You climb them with ladders. On the ground the inhabitants rarely show themselves: having already everything they need up there, they prefer not to come down. Nothing of the city touches the earth except those long flamingo legs on which it rests and, when the days are sunny, a pierced, angular shadow that falls on the foilage. "There are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Baucis: that they hate the earth; that they respect it so much they avoid all contact; that they love it as it was before they existed and with spyglasses and telescopes aimed downward they never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, contemplating with fascination their own absence.
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Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities)
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She walked down the basement steps. She saw an imaginary framed photo seep into the wall - a quiet-smiled secret. No more than a few meters, it was a long walk to the drop sheets and the assortment of paint cans that shielded Max Vandenburg. She removed the sheets closest to the wall until there was a small corridor to look through. The first part of him she saw was his shoulder, and through the slender gap, she slowly, painfully, inched her hand in until it rested there. His clothing was cool. He did not wake. She could feel his breathing and his shoulder moving up and down ever so slightly. For a while, she watched him. Then she sat and leaned back. Sleepy air seemed to have followed her. The scrawled words of practice stood magnificently on the wall by the stairs, jagged and childlike and sweet. They looked on as both the hidden Jew and the girl slept, hand to shoulder. They breathed. German and Jewish lungs.
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Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)
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A Blessing Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota, Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass. And the eyes of those two Indian ponies Darken with kindness. They have come gladly out of the willows To welcome my friend and me. We step over the barbed wire into the pasture Where they have been grazing all day, alone. They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness That we have come. They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other. There is no loneliness like theirs. At home once more, They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness. I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms, For she has walked over to me And nuzzled my left hand. She is black and white, Her mane falls wild on her forehead, And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist. Suddenly I realize That if I stepped out of my body I would break Into blossom.
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James Wright (Above the River: The Complete Poems)
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On a cold, fretful afternoon in early October, 1872, a hansom cab drew up outside the offices of Lockhart and Selby, Shipping Agents, in the financial heart of London, and a young girl got out and paid the driver. She was a person of sixteen or so--alone, and uncommonly pretty. She was slender and pale, and dressed in mourning, with a black bonnet under which she tucked back a straying twist of blond hair that the wind had teased loose. She had unusually dark brown eyes for one so fair. Her name was Sally Lockhart; and within fifteen minutes, she was going to kill a man.
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Philip Pullman (The Ruby in the Smoke (Sally Lockhart, #1))
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Her religious poetry was surprisingly slender, and as I was eager to know more about her religion, I asked her about this aspect of her poetry. She replied with these lines from Keats' Ode to a Grecian Urn: 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'--that is all Ye know on eath, and all ye need to know'. Do not ask me to immortalise the great Mystery of Life. I am just a humble worker. For beauty, look to the Pslams, to Isaiah, to St. John of the Cross. How could my poor pen scan such verse? For truth, look to the Gospels-- four short accounts of God made Man. There is nothing more to say.
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Jennifer Worth (The Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times)
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She was scarcely a year older than I was, dark-haired, slender, with a face that would break your heart. It certainly broke mine. Lowborn, half-starved, unwashed... Yet lovely. They'd torn the rags she was wearing half off her back, so I wrapped her in my cloak while Jaime chase the men into the woods. By the time he came trotting back, I'd gotten a name out of her, and a story. She was a crofter's child, orphaned when her father died of fever, on her way to... Well, nowhere, really. The girl was too frightened to send her off by herself, though, so I offered to take her to the closest inn and feed her while my brother rode back to the Rock for help. She was hungrier than I would have believed. We finished two whole chickens and part of a third, and drank a flagon of wine, talking. I was only thirteen, and the wine went to my head, I fear. The next thing I knew, I was sharing her bed. If she was shy, I was shyer. I'll never know where I found the courage. When I broke her maidenhead, she wept, but afterward she kissed me and sang her little song, and by morning I was in love.
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George R.R. Martin (A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, #1))
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He dreamt that night that he rode through the woods on a low ridge. Below him he could see deer in a meadow where the sun fell on the grass. The grass was still wet and the deer stood in it to their elbows. He could feel the spine of the mule rolling under him and he gripped the mule's barrel with his legs. Each leaf that brushed his face deepened his sadness and dread. Each leaf he passed, he'd never pass again. They rode over his face like veils, already some yellow, their veins slender like bones where the sun shone through them. He had resolved himself to ride on for he could not turn back and the world that day was as lovely as any day ever was and he was riding to his death.
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Cormac McCarthy (Child of God)
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But the helm of her secrecy had fallen from her, and her bright hair, released from its bonds, gleamed with pale gold upon her shoulders. Her eyes grey as the sea were hard and fell, and yet tears were on her cheek. A sword was in her hand, and she raised her shield against the horror of her enemy's eyes. [โ€ฆ]Still she did not blench: maiden of the Rohirrim, child of kings, slender but as a steel-blade, fair yet terrible. A swift stroke she dealt, skilled and deadly. The outstretched neck she clove asunder, and the hewn head fell like a stone. Backward she sprang as the huge shape crashed to ruin, vast wings outspread, crumpled on the earth; and with its fall the shadow passed away. A light fell about her, and her hair shone in the sunrise.
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J.R.R. Tolkien (The Return of the King (The Lord of the Rings, #3))
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A nurseโ€™s aid threw the contents of a patientโ€™s water glass out a window, the mass of water hitting the ground dislodging a pebble which rolled across the angled pavement and fell with a click on a stone culvert in the ditch below, startling a squirrel having at some sort of nut right there on the concrete pipe, causing the squirrel to run up the nearest tree, in doing which it disturbed a slender brittle branch and surprised a few nervous morning birds, of of which, preparatory to flight released a black-and-white glob of droppings, which glob fell neatly on the windshield of the tiny car of one Lenore Beadsman, just as she pulled into a parking space. Lenore got out of the car while birds flew away, making sounds.
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David Foster Wallace (The Broom of the System)
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Only people who've been discriminated against can really know how much it hurts. Each person feels the pain in his own way, each has his own scars. So I think I'm as concerned about fairness and justice as anybody. But what disgusts me even more are people who have no imagination. The kind T. S. Eliot calls hollow men. People who fill up that lack of imagination with heartless bits of straw, not even aware of what they're doing. Callous people who throw a lot of empty words at you, trying to force you to do what you don't want to. Like that lovely pair we just met.โ€ He sighs and twirls the long slender pencil in his hand. โ€œGays, lesbians, straights, feminists, fascist pigs, communists, Hare Krishnas-- none of them bother me. I don't care what banner they raise. But what I can't stand are hollow people. When I'm with them I just can't bear it, and wind up saying things I shouldn't. With those women--I should've just let it slide, or else called Miss Saeki and let her handle it. She would have given them a smile and smoothed things over. But I just can't do โ€œdo that. I say things I shouldn't, do things I shouldn't do. I can't control myself. That's one of my weak points. Do you know why that's a weak point of mine?โ€ โ€œ'Cause if you take every single person who lacks much imagination seriously, there's no end to it,โ€ I say.
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Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)
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I do believe you think what now you speak, but what we do determine oft we break. Purpose is but the slave to memory, of violent birth, but poor validity, which now, like fruit unripe, sticks on the tree, but fall, unshaken, when they mellow be. Most unnecessary 'tis that we forget to pay ourselves what to ourselves is debt. What to ourselves in passion we propose, the passion ending, doth the purpose lose. The violence of either grief or joy their own enactures with themselves destroy. Where joy most revels, grief doth most lament. Grief joys, joy grieves on slender accident. This world is not for aye, nor 'tis not strange that even our loves should with our fortunes change. For 'tis a question left us yet to prove, whether love lead fortune, or else fortune love. The great man down, you mark his favorite flies. The poor advanced makes friends of enemies. And hitherto doth love on fortune tend, for who not needs shall never lack a friend, and who in want a hollow friend doth try, directly seasons him his enemy. But, orderly to end where I begun, our wills and fates do so contrary run that our devices still are overthrown. Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own. So think thou wilt no second husband wed, but die thy thoughts when thy first lord is dead.
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William Shakespeare (Hamlet)
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I will love you as a drawer loves a secret compartment, and as a secret compartment loves a secret, and as a secret loves to make a person gasp, and as a gasping person loves a glass of brandy to calm their nerves, and as a glass of brandy loves to shatter on the floor, and as the noise of glass shattering loves to make someone else gasp, and as someone else gasping loves a nearby desk to lean against, even if leaning against it presses a lever that loves to open a drawer and reveal a secret compartment. I will love you until all such compartments are discovered and opened, and until all the secrets have gone gasping into the world. I will love you until all the codes and hearts have been broken and until every anagram and egg has been unscrambled. I will love you until every fire is extinguished and until every home is rebuilt form the handsomest and most susceptible of woods, and until every criminal is handcuffed by the laziestย of policemen. I will love you until M. hates snakes and J. hates grammar, and I will love you until C. realizes S. is not worthy of his love and N. realizes he is not worthy of the V. I will love you until the bird hates a nest and the worm hates an apple, and until the apple hates a tree and the tree hates a nest, and until a bird hates a tree and an apple hates a nest, although honestly I cannot imagine that last occurrence no matter how hard I try. I will love you as we grow older, which has just happened, and has happened again, and happened several days ago, continuously, and then several years before that, and will continue to happen as the spinning hands of every clock and the flipping pages of every calendar mark the passage of time, except for the clocks that people have forgotten to wind and the calendars that people have forgotten to place in a highly visible area. I will love you as we find ourselves farther and farther from one another, where once we were so close that we could slip the curved straw, and the long, slender spoon, between our lips and fingers respectively. I will love you until the chances of us running into one another slip from skim to zero, and until your face is fogged by distant memory, and your memory faced by distant fog, and your fog memorized by a distant face, and your distance distanced by the memorized memory of a foggy fog. I will love you no matter where you go and who you see, no matter where you avoid and who you donโ€™t see, and no matter who sees you avoiding where you go. I will love you no matter what happens to you, and no matter how I discover what happens to you, and no matter what happens to me as I discover this, and no matter how I am discovered after what happens to me happens to me as I am discovering this. I will love you if you donโ€™t marry me. I will love you if you marry someone else โ€“ your co-star, perhaps, or Y., or even O., or anyone Z. through A., even R. although sadly I believe it will be quite some time before two women can be allowed to marry โ€“ and I will love you if you have a child, and I will love you if you have two children, or three children, or even more, although I personally think three is plenty, and I will love you if you never marry at all, and never have children, and spend your years wishing you had married me after all, and I must say that on late, cold nights I prefer this scenario out of all the scenarios I have mentioned. That, Beatrice, is how I will love you even as the world goes on its wicked way.
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Lemony Snicket (The Beatrice Letters)
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From the vast, invisible ocean of moonlight overhead fell, here and here, a slender, broken stream that seemed to plash against the intercepting branches and trickle to earth, forming small white pools among the clumps of laurel. But these leaks were few and served only to accentuate the blackness of his environment, which his imagination found it easy to people with all manner of unfamiliar shapes, menacing, uncanny, or merely grotesque. He to whom the portentous conspiracy of night and solitude and silence in the heart of a great forest is not an unknown experience needs not to be told what another world it all is - how even the most commonplace and familiar objects take on another character. The trees group themselves differently; they draw closer together, as if in fear. The very silence has another quality than the silence of the day. And it is full of half-heard whispers, whispers that startle - ghosts of sounds long dead. There are living sounds, too, such as are never heard under other conditions: notes of strange night birds, the cries of small animals in sudden encounters with stealthy foes, or in their dreams, a rustling in the dead leaves - it may be the leap of a wood rat, it may be the footstep of a panther. What caused the breaking of that twig? What the low, alarmed twittering in that bushful of birds? There are sounds without a name, forms without substance, translations in space of objects which have not been seen to move, movements wherein nothing is observed to change its place. Ah, children of the sunlight and the gaslight, how little you know of the world in which you live! ("A Tough Tussle")
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Ambrose Bierce (Ghost Stories (Haunting Ghost Stories))
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Sand as far as the eye can see, between the last hills and the sea -- the sea -- in the cold air of an afternoon almost past, and blessed by the wind that always blows from the north. The beach. And the sea. It could be perfection -- an image for divine eyes -- a world that happens, that's all, the mute existence of land and water, a work perfectly accomplished, truth --truth -- but once again it is the redeeming grain of a man that jams the mechanism of that paradise, a bagatelle capable on its own of suspending all that great apparatus of inexorable truth, a mere nothing, but one planted in the sand, an imperceptible tear in the surface of that sacred icon, a minuscule exception come to rest on the perfection of that boundless beach. To see him from afar he would be no more than a black dot: amid nothingness, the nothing of a man and a painter's easel. The easel is anchored by slender cords to four stones placed on the sand. It sways imperceptibly in the wind that always blows from the north. The man is wearing waders and a large fisherman's jacket. He is standing, facing the sea, twirling a slim paintbrush between his fingers. On the easel, a canvas.
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Alessandro Baricco (Ocean Sea)
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What's a colony without its dusky natives? Where's the fun if they're all going to die off? Just a big chunk of desert, no more maids, no field-hands, no laborers for the construction or the mining--wait, wait a minute there, yes it's Karl Marx, that sly old racist skipping away with his teeth together and his eyebrows up trying to make believe it's nothing but Cheap Labor and Overseas Markets... Oh, no. Colonies are much, much more. Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit. Where he can fall on his slender prey roaring as loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood with open joy. Eh? Where he can just wallow and rut and let himself go in a softness, a receptive darkness of limbs, of hair as woolly as the hair on his own forbidden genitals. Where the poppy, and the cannabis and coca grow full and green, and not to the colors and style of death, as do ergot and agaric, the blight and fungus native to Europe. Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death and repression. Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts... No word ever gets back. The silences down here are vast enough to absorb all behavior, no matter how dirty, how animal it gets....
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Thomas Pynchon (Gravityโ€™s Rainbow)
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Perhaps I ought to remember that she is very young, a mere girl and make allowances. She is all interest, eagerness, vivacity, the world is to her a charm, a wonder, a mystery, a joy; she canโ€™t speak for delight when she finds a new flower, she must pet it and caress it and smell it and talk to it, and pour out endearing names upon it. And she is color-mad: brown rocks, yellow sand, gray moss, green foliage, blue sky; the pearl of the dawn, the purple shadows on the mountains, the golden islands floating in crimson seas at sunset, the pallid moon sailing through the shredded cloud-rack, the star-jewels glittering in the wastes of space โ€” none of them is of any practical value, so far as I can see, but because they have color and majesty, that is enough for her, and she loses her mind over them. If she could quiet down and keep still a couple of minutes at a time, it would be a reposeful spectacle. In that cases I think I could enjoy looking at her; indeed I am sure I could, for I am coming to realize that she is a quite remarkably comely creature โ€” lithe, slender, trim, rounded, shapely, nimble, graceful; and once when she was standing marble-white and sun-drenched on a boulder, with her young head tilted back and her hand shading her eyes, watching the flight of a bird in the sky, I recognized that she was beautiful.
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Mark Twain (The Diaries of Adam and Eve)
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How are you giving it magic?โ€ he said, through his teeth. โ€œI already found the path!โ€ I said. โ€œIโ€™m just staying on it. Canโ€™t youโ€”feel it?โ€ I asked abruptly, and held my hand cupping the flower out towards him; he frowned and put his hands around it, and then he said, โ€œVadiya rusha ilikad tuhi,โ€ and a second illusion laid itself over mine, two roses in the same spaceโ€”his, predictably, had three rings of perfect petals, and a delicate fragrance. โ€œTry and match it,โ€ he said absently, his fingers moving slightly, and by lurching steps we brought our illusions closer together until it was nearly impossible to tell them one from another, and then he said, โ€œAh,โ€ suddenly, just as I began to glimpse his spell: almost exactly like that strange clockwork on the middle of his table, all shining moving parts. On an impulse I tried to align our workings: I envisioned his like the water-wheel of a mill, and mine the rushing stream driving it around. โ€œWhat are youโ€”โ€ he began, and then abruptly we had only a single rose, and it began to grow. And not only the rose: vines were climbing up the bookshelves in every direction, twining themselves around ancient tomes and reaching out the window; the tall slender columns that made the arch of the doorway were lost among rising birches, spreading out long finger-branches; moss and violets were springing up across the floor, delicate ferns unfurling. Flowers were blooming everywhere: flowers I had never seen, strange blooms dangling and others with sharp points, brilliantly colored, and the room was thick with their fragrance, with the smell of crushed leaves and pungent herbs. I looked around myself alight with wonder, my magic still flowing easily. โ€œIs this what you meant?โ€ I asked him: it really wasnโ€™t any more difficult than making the single flower had been. But he was staring at the riot of flowers all around us, as astonished as I was. He looked at me, baffled and for the first time uncertain, as though he had stumbled into something, unprepared. His long narrow hands were cradled around mine, both of us holding the rose together. Magic was singing in me, through me; I felt the murmur of his power singing back that same song. I was abruptly too hot, and strangely conscious of myself. I pulled my hands free.
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Naomi Novik (Uprooted)
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All of the Indians must have tragic features: tragic noses, eyes, and arms. Their hands and fingers must be tragic when they reach for tragic food. The hero must be a half-breed, half white and half Indian, preferably from a horse culture. He should often weep alone. That is mandatory. If the hero is an Indian woman, she is beautiful. She must be slender and in love with a white man. But if she loves an Indian man then he must be a half-breed, preferably from a horse culture. If the Indian woman loves a white man, then he has to be so white that we can see the blue veins running through his skin like rivers. When the Indian woman steps out of her dress, the white man gasps at the endless beauty of her brown skin. She should be compared to nature: brown hills, mountains, fertile valleys, dewy grass, wind, and clear water. If she is compared to murky water, however, then she must have a secret. Indians always have secrets, which are carefully and slowly revealed. Yet Indian secrets can be disclosed suddenly, like a storm. Indian men, of course, are storms. The should destroy the lives of any white women who choose to love them. All white women love Indian men. That is always the case. White women feign disgust at the savage in blue jeans and T-shirt, but secretly lust after him. White women dream about half-breed Indian men from horse cultures. Indian men are horses, smelling wild and gamey. When the Indian man unbuttons his pants, the white woman should think of topsoil. There must be one murder, one suicide, one attempted rape. Alcohol should be consumed. Cars must be driven at high speeds. Indians must see visions. White people can have the same visions if they are in love with Indians. If a white person loves an Indian then the white person is Indian by proximity. White people must carry an Indian deep inside themselves. Those interior Indians are half-breed and obviously from horse cultures. If the interior Indian is male then he must be a warrior, especially if he is inside a white man. If the interior Indian is female, then she must be a healer, especially if she is inside a white woman. Sometimes there are complications. An Indian man can be hidden inside a white woman. An Indian woman can be hidden inside a white man. In these rare instances, everybody is a half-breed struggling to learn more about his or her horse culture. There must be redemption, of course, and sins must be forgiven. For this, we need children. A white child and an Indian child, gender not important, should express deep affection in a childlike way. In the Great American Indian novel, when it is finally written, all of the white people will be Indians and all of the Indians will be ghosts.
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Sherman Alexie