“
I got tired, I told him. Not worn out, but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one morning and says I can't bake any more bread.
You never bake bread, he wrote, and we were still joking.
Then it's like I woke up and baked bread, I said, and we were joking even then. I wondered will there come a time when we won't be joking? And what would it look like? And how would that feel?
When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calender that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from the chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.
I spent my life learning to feel less.
Every day I felt less.
Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.
”
”
Jonathan Safran Foer
“
It’s ridiculous, when I think about it. How did I find myself here? I wonder where it started, my decline; I wonder at what point I could have halted it. Where did I take the wrong turn?
”
”
Paula Hawkins (The Girl on the Train)
“
There is an emotional promiscuity we’ve noticed among many good young men and women. The young man understands something of the journey of the heart. He wants to talk, to “share the journey.” The woman is grateful to be pursued, she opens up. They share the intimacies of their lives - their wounds, their walks with God. But he never commits. He enjoys her... then leaves. And she wonders, What did I do wrong? She failed to see his passivity. He really did not ever commit or offer assurances that he would. Like Willoughby to Marianne in Sense and Sensibility.
Be careful you do not offer too much of yourself to a man until you have good, solid evidence that he is a strong man willing to commit. Look at his track record with other women. Is there anything to be concerned about there? If so, bring it up. Also, does he have any close male friends - and what are they like as men? Can he hold down a job? Is he walking with God in a real and intimate way? Is he facing the wounds of his own life, and is he also demonstrating a desire to repent of Adam’s passivity and/or violence? Is he headed somewhere with his life? A lot of questions, but your heart is a treasure, and we want you to offer it only to a man who is worthy and ready to handle it well.
”
”
Stasi Eldredge (Captivating: Unveiling the Mystery of a Woman's Soul)
“
Just tell me how to be different in a way that makes sense. To make this all go away. And disappear. I know that's wrong, because it's my responsibilty, and I know things have to get worse before they get better. I walk around the school hallways and look at the people. I look at the teachers and wonder why their here. If they like their jobs. Or us. I wonder how smart they were when they were fifteen. Not in a mean way. In a curious way. It's like looking at all the students and wondering who's had their heart broken that day. And how they cope with having three quizes and a book report. On top of that. Or wondering who did the heart breaking. And wondering why. Especially since I know that if they went to another school, the person who had their heart broken would have had their heart broken by somebody else, so why does it have to be personal? It's much easier to not know things sometimes. Things change and friends leave. And life doesn't stop for anybody. I wanted to laugh. Or maybe get mad. Or maybe shrug at how strange everybody was, especiall me. I think the idea is that every person has to live for his or her own life and than make the choice to share it with other people. You can't just sit their and put everybody's lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love. You just can't. You have to do things. I'm going to do what I want to do. I'm going to be who I really am. And I'm going to figure out what that is. And we could all sit around and wonder and feel bad about each other and blame a lot of people for what they did or didn't do or what they didn't know. I don't know. I guess there could always be someone to blame. It's just different. Maybe it's good to put things in perspective, but sometimes, I think that the only perspective is to really be there. Because it's okay to feel things. I was really there. And that was enough to make me feel infinite. I feel infinite.
”
”
Stephen Chbosky
“
To my son,
If you are reading this letter, then I am dead.
I expect to die, if not today, then soon. I expect that Valentine will kill me. For all his talk of loving me, for all his desire for a right-hand man, he knows that I have doubts. And he is a man who cannot abide doubt.
I do not know how you will be brought up. I do not know what they will tell you about me. I do not even know who will give you this letter. I entrust it to Amatis, but I cannot see what the future holds. All I know is that this is my chance to give you an accounting of a man you may well hate.
There are three things you must know about me. The first is that I have been a coward. Throughout my life I have made the wrong decisions, because they were easy, because they were self-serving, because I was afraid.
At first I believed in Valentine’s cause. I turned from my family and to the Circle because I fancied myself better than Downworlders and the Clave and my suffocating parents. My anger against them was a tool Valentine bent to his will as he bent and changed so many of us. When he drove Lucian away I did not question it but gladly took his place for my own. When he demanded I leave Amatis, the woman I love, and marry Celine, a girl I did not know, I did as he asked, to my everlasting shame.
I cannot imagine what you might be thinking now, knowing that the girl I speak of was your mother. The second thing you must know is this. Do not blame Celine for any of this, whatever you do. It was not her fault, but mine. Your mother was an innocent from a family that brutalized her. She wanted only kindess, to feel safe and loved. And though my heart had been given already, I loved her, in my fashion, just as in my heart, I was faithful to Amatis. Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae. I wonder if you love Latin as I do, and poetry. I wonder who has taught you.
The third and hardest thing you must know is that I was prepared to hate you. The son of myslef and the child-bride I barely knew, you seemed to be the culmination of all the wrong decisions I had made, all the small compromises that led to my dissolution. Yet as you grew inside my mind, as you grew in the world, a blameless innocent, I began to realize that I did not hate you. It is the nature of parents to see their own image in their children, and it was myself I hated, not you.
For there is only one thing I wan from you, my son — one thing from you, and of you. I want you to be a better man than I was. Let no one else tell you who you are or should be. Love where you wish to. Believe as you wish to. Take freedom as your right.
I don’t ask that you save the world, my boy, my child, the only child I will ever have. I ask only that you be happy.
Stephen
”
”
Cassandra Clare (City of Lost Souls (The Mortal Instruments, #5))
“
Cricket walks several steps behind me. It's a careful distance. I wonder if he's looking at my butt.
WHY DID I JUST THINK THAT? Now my butt feels COLOSSAL. Maybe he's looking at my legs. Is that better? Or worse? Do I want him looking at me? I hold on to the bottom of my dress as I climb into the backseat and crawl to the other side. I'm sure he's looking at my butt. He has to be. It's huge, and it's right there, and it's huge.
No. I'm acting crazy.
I glance over, and he smiles at me as he buckles his seat belt.
My cheeks grow warm.
WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?
”
”
Stephanie Perkins (Lola and the Boy Next Door (Anna and the French Kiss, #2))
“
I hear you've been with every Rephaite in a skirt.'
Crap. Where did that come from?
'Who told you that?' HIs smile shifts into something less amused. 'Daniel. Who else? The prick.'
'Is he a liar?'
Rafa leans against the pale wall. 'I haven't been with everyone.'
'What about Taya?'
'Hell, no. I'm no monk, but I have standards.'
I wonder what else Daniel was wrong about. 'What about me?'
Rafa's teasing smile doesn't quite reach his eyes. 'You had standards too.
”
”
Paula Weston (Shadows (The Rephaim, #1))
“
Life is messy, Ren. It's not easy and it's definitely not for the timid. Everyone has a past. Things that stab them right between the eyes. Old grudges. Old shame. Regrets that steal your sleep and leave you awake until you fear for your own sanity. Betrayals that make your soul scream so loud you wonder why no one else hears it. In the end, we are all alone in that private hell. But life isn't about learning to forgive those who have hurt you or forgetting the past. It's about learning to forgive yourself for being human and making mistakes. Yes, people disappoint us all the time. But the harshest lessons come when we disappoint ourselves. When we put our trust and our hearts into the hands of the wrong person and they do us wrong. And while we may hate them for what they did, the one we hate most is ourself for allowing them into our private circle. How could I have been so stupid? How could I let them deceive me? We all go through that. It's humanity's brotherhood of misery.
”
”
Sherrilyn Kenyon (Time Untime (Dark-Hunter, #21))
“
I'm not the girl men chose.
I'm the girl who's charming and funny and then drives home wondering what she did wrong. I'm the girl who meets someone halfway decent and then fills in the gaps in his character with my own imagination, only to be shocked when he's not the man I thought he was.
I'm the girl who hides who she really is for fear I'll fall short.
”
”
Liza Palmer (More Like Her)
“
The nursery rhyme ends when a spider comes along and frightens Miss Muffet straight off her tuffet. I have wondered about what kind of lesson this is for a young girl. If you're eating your curds and whey and a spider comes along, I don't think there's anything wrong with picking up a newspaper, smashing it, and going back to your breakfast.
”
”
Sloane Crosley (How Did You Get This Number: Essays)
“
Maxon, I hope you find someone you can't love without. I really do. And I hope you never have to know what it's like to have to try and live without them."
Maxon's face was a shallow echo of my own pain. He looked absolutely brokenhearted for me. More than that, he looked angry.
"I'm sorry, America. I don't..." His face shifted a little. "Is this a good time to pat your shoulder?"
His uncertainty made me smile. "Yes. Now would be a great time."
He seemed as skeptically as he'd been the other day, but instead of just patting my shoulder, he leaned in and tentatively wrapped his arms around me.
"I only really ever hug my mother. Is this okay?" he asked.
I laughed. "It's hard to get a hug wrong."
After a minute, I spoke again. "I know what you mean, though. I don't really hug anyone besides my family."
I felt so drained after the long day of dressing and the Report and dinner and talking. It was nice to have Maxon just hold me, sometimes even patting my hair. He wasn't as lost as he seemed. He patiently waited for my breathing to slow, and when it did, he pulled back to look at me.
"America, I promise you I'll keep you here until the last possible moment. I understand that they want me to narrow the Elite down to three and then choose. But I swear to you, I'll make it to two and keep you here until then. I won't make you leave a moment before I have to. Or the moment you're ready. Whichever comes first."
I nodded.
"I know we just met, but I think you're wonderful. And it bothers me to see you hurt. If he were here, I'd...I'd..." Maxon shook with frustration, then sighed. "I'm so sorry, America."
He pulled me back in, and I rested my head on his broad shoulder. I knew Maxon would keep his promises. So I settled into perhaps the last place I ever thought I'd find genuine comfort.
”
”
Kiera Cass (The Selection (The Selection, #1))
“
But every day we meet someone whose behavior suddenly changes from one moment to the next. And we wonder: what happened to this person I thought I knew? Why is he acting so aggressively? Is it stress at work?
And then the next day the person is normal again. You're relieved, but soon after the rug is pulled out from under you when you least expect it. And this time, instead of asking what's wrong with this person, you wonder what you did wrong.
”
”
Paulo Coelho (Adultery)
“
Asking isn't what I had in mind,” Sicarius said.
“Yes, I can see that.” Amaranthe planted a hand on his chest, fingers splayed. “Why don’t you give Yara and me a few minutes alone to discuss this? I’ll brief you on whatever we decide to do before we do it. And you can loiter nearby in case anything goes wrong.”
His face didn't soften exactly—and he gave that hand a long look before meeting Amaranthe’s eyes— but the hostility he’d been oozing did seem to lessen. “Assassins don’t loiter,” he said.
The comment startled Evrial, and she wondered if she’d heard it correctly. The man hadn't uttered much that could be classified as humor, not with her around anyway. Maybe he was simply feeling indignant.But Amaranthe smiled. “What do you call it?”
“Standing. Purposefully.
”
”
Lindsay Buroker (Beneath the Surface (The Emperor's Edge, #5.5))
“
I wonder if my watching him from the armchair is what it's like to be God, if there is a God. He sits back and sees the big picture, just as I could see that if the bluebottle just moved up a few inches, he'd be free. He wasn't really trapped at all, he was just looking in the wrong place. I wondered if God could see a way out for me and Mum. If I can see the open window for the bluebottle, maybe God can see the tomorrows for me and Mum. That idea brings me comfort. Well, it did, until I left the room and returned a few hours later to see a dead bluebottle on the windowsill. Then to show you where my mind is right now, I started crying...Then I got mad at God because in my head the death of that bluebottle meant Mum and I might never find our way out of this mess. What good is it being so far back you can see everything and yet not do anything to help?
Then I realized this: I had tried to help the bluebottle, but it wouldn't let me. And then I felt sorry for God because i understood how it must be frustrating for him. He offers people a helping hand, but it often gets pushed away. People always want to help themselves first.
”
”
Cecelia Ahern (The Book of Tomorrow)
“
Like my father I've always been a daydreamer, and sometimes I'd imagine that on the way home a terrorist might jump out and shoot me on those steps. I wondered what I would do. Maybe I'd take off my shoes and hit him, but then I'd think if I did that there would be no difference between me and a terrorist. It would be better to plead, "OK, shoot me, but first listen to me. What you are doing is wrong. I'm not against you personally, I just want every girl to go to school.
”
”
Malala Yousafzai (I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban)
“
Musashi wondered how many people there were who on this night could say: “I was right. I did what I should have done. I have no regrets.” For him, each resounding knell evoked a tremor of remorse. He could conjure up nothing but the things he had done wrong during the last year. Nor was it only the last year—the year before, and the year before that, all the years that had gone by had brought regrets. There had not been a single year devoid of them. Indeed, there had hardly been one day.
”
”
Eiji Yoshikawa (Musashi: An Epic Novel of the Samurai Era)
“
Do you wonder then that this man’s behaviour used to puzzle me tremendously? He was an ordinary clergyman at that time as well as being Headmaster, and I would sit in the dim light of the school chapel and listen to him preaching about the Lamb of God and about Mercy and Forgiveness and all the rest of it and my young mind would become totally confused. I knew very well that only the night before this preacher had shown neither Forgiveness nor Mercy in flogging some small boy who had broken the rules.
So what was it all about? I used to ask myself.
Did they preach one thing and practise another, these men of God?
And if someone had told me at the time that this flogging clergyman was one day to become the Archbishop of Canterbury, I would never have believed it.
It was all this, I think, that made me begin to have doubts about religion and even about God. If this person, I kept telling myself, was one of God’s chosen salesmen on earth, then there must be something very wrong about the whole business.
”
”
Roald Dahl (Boy: Tales of Childhood (Roald Dahl's Autobiography, #1))
“
I was worried that being in a relationship would add to my responsibilities. That’s why I’ve avoided them my whole life. I already have enough on my plate, and seeing the stress my parents’ marriage seemed to cause them, and the failed marriages of some of my friends, I wanted no part in something like that. But after tonight, I realized that maybe a lot of people are just doing it wrong. Because what’s happening between us doesn’t feel like a responsibility. It feels like a reward. And I’ll fall asleep wondering what I did to deserve it.
”
”
Colleen Hoover (It Ends with Us (It Ends with Us, #1))
“
You were right to end it with us,” I said harshly. “And I’m not willing to do it again.”
He stared at me, shocked. My words were a lie, of course. Part of me wanted to try again, to endure anything to be with him. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Maddie. Couldn’t stop thinking about the hurt she would go through. It was ironic, really. Last time, he’d gone out of his way to hurt me purposely because it was for the greater good. Now I was doing the same for both of them, saving her from heartache and him from more grief with me. We were in an endless cycle.
“You can’t mean that. I know you can’t.” His face was a mixture of incredulity and pain.
I shook my head. “I do. You and me are a disaster. What we did during this stasis...it was wrong. It was disgraceful. Immoral. We betrayed someone who loves both of us, who wishes nothing but the best for us. How could we do that? What kind of precedent is that? How could we expect to have a solid relationship that was built on that sort of sordid foundation? One that was built on lies and deceit?” Saying those words hurt. It was tarnishing the beauty of these precious few days we had, but I needed to make my case.
Seth was silent for several moments as he assessed me. “You’re serious.”
“Yes.” I was a good liar, good enough that the person who loved me most couldn’t tell. “Go back to her, Seth. Go back to her and make it up to her.”
“Georgina...” I could see it, see it hitting him. The full weight of betraying Maddie was sinking in. His nature couldn’t ignore the wrong he’d done. It was part of his good character, the character that had gone back to save Dante, the character that was going to make him leave me. Again. Hesitantly, he extended his hand to me. I took it, and he pulled me into an embrace. “I will always love you.”
My heart was going to burst. How many times, I wondered, could I endure this kind of agony? “No, you won’t,” I said. “You’ll move on. So will I.”
Seth left not long after that. Staring at the door, I replayed my own words. You’ll move on. So will I. In spite of how much he loved me, how much he was willing to risk, I truly felt he’d go back to Maddie, that he’d believe what I said. I’d driven home the guilt, made it trump his love for me.
You’ll move on. So will I.
The unfortunate part about being a good liar, however, was that while I could get other people to believe my words, I didn’t believe them myself.
”
”
Richelle Mead (Succubus Heat (Georgina Kincaid, #4))
“
You okay?" he says, touching my cheek. His hand cradles the side of my head, his long fingers slipping through my hair. He smiles and holds my head in place as he kisses me. Heat spreads through me slowly.And fear, buzzing like an alarm in my chest.
His lips still on mine,he pushes the jacket from my shoulders.I flinch when I hear it drop,and push him back,my eyes burning. I don't know why I feel this way. I didn't feel like this when he kissed me on the train.I press my palms to my face,covering my eyes.
"What? What's wrong?"
I shake my head.
"Don't tell me it's nothing." His voice is cold.He grabs my arm. "Hey. Look at me."
I take my hands from my face and lift my eyes to his.The hurt in his eyes and the anger in his clenched jaw surprise me.
"Sometimes I wonder," I say,as calmly as I can, "what's in it for you. This...whatever it is."
"What's in it for me," he repeats. He steps back,shaking his head. "You're an idiot,Tris."
"I am not an idiot," I say. "Which is why I know that it's a little weird that,of all the girls you could have chosen,you chose me.So if you're just looking for...um,you know...that..."
"What? Sex?" He scowls at me. "You know, if that was all I wanted, you probably wouldn't be the first person I would go to."
I feel like he just punched me in the stomach. Of course I'm not the first person he would go to-not the first, not the prettiest,not desirable. I press my hands to my abdomen and look away, fighting off tears. I am not the crying type.Nor am I the yelling type. I blink a few times, lower my hands, and stare up at him.
"I'm going to leave now," I say quietly. And I turn toward the door.
"No,Tris." He grabs my wrist and wrenches me back. I push him away,hard, but he grabs my other wrist, holding our crossed arms between us.
"I'm sorry I said that," he says. "What I meant was that you aren't like that. Which I knew when I met you."
"You were an obstacle in my fear landscape." My lower lip wobbles. "Did you know that?"
"What?" He releases my wrists, and the hurt look is back. "You're afraid of me?"
"Not you," I say. I bite my lip to keep it still. "Being with you...with anyone. I've never been involved with someone before,and...you're older, and I don't know what your expectations are,and..."
"Tris," he says sternly, "I don't know what delusion you're operating under,but this is all new to me, too."
"Delusion?" I repeat. "You mean you haven't..." I raise my eyebrows. "Oh. Oh.I just assumed..." That because I am so absorbed by him, everyone else must be too. "Um. You know."
"Well,you assumed wrong." He looks away. His cheeks are bright,like he's embarrassed. "You can tell me anything, you know," he says. He takes my face in his hands,his fingertips cold and his palms warm. "I am kinder than I seemed in training. I promise."
I believe him.But this has nothing to do with his kindness.
He kisses me between the eyebrows, and on the tip of my nose,and then carefully fits his mouth to mine. I am on edge.I have electricity coursing through my veins instead of blood. I want him to kiss me,I want him to; I am afraid of where it might go.
”
”
Veronica Roth (Divergent (Divergent, #1))
“
But after tonight, I realized that maybe a lot of people are just doing it wrong. Because what’s happening between us doesn’t feel like a responsibility. It feels like a reward. And I’ll fall asleep wondering what I did to deserve it.
”
”
Colleen Hoover (It Ends with Us (It Ends with Us, #1))
“
He calls me his Queen of the Night. He shows me the wonders in this incredible city. He encourages me to find my own way, and to choose what I think is right or wrong.
And the sex, God, the sex! I never knew what sex was until him! It’s not soft music and candlelight, a choice, a deliberate action.
It’s as involuntary as breathing, and as impossible not to do. It’s slammed up against a wall in a dark alley, or flat on my back on cold concrete because I can’t stand one more second without him. It’s on my hands and knees, dry-mouthed, heart-in-my-throat, waiting for the moment he touches me, and I’m alive again. It’s punishing and purifying, velvet and violent, and it makes everything else melt away, until nothing matters but getting him inside me and I wouldn’t just die for him—I’d kill for him, too.
Like I did tonight.
”
”
Karen Marie Moning (Faefever (Fever, #3))
“
The three of us stood there for a minute. I don’t know what Stew was thinking, and the filing cabinet wasn’t thinking anything. But I was thinking, is this the world? Is this really the place in which you’ve ended up, Snicket? It was a question that struck me, as it might strike you, when something ridiculous was going on, or something sad. I wondered if this was really where I should be, or if there was another world someplace, less ridiculous and less sad. But I never knew the answer to the question. Perhaps I had been in another world before I was born, and did not remember it, or perhaps I would see another world when I died, which I was in no hurry to do. In the meantime, I was stuck in the police station, doing something so ridiculous it felt sad, and feeling so sad it was ridiculous. The world of the police station, the world of Stain’d-by-the-Sea and all of the wrong questions I was asking, was was the only world I could see.
”
”
Lemony Snicket (When Did You See Her Last? (All the Wrong Questions, #2))
“
meander, v.
"...because when it all comes down to it, there's no such thing as a two-hit wonder. So it's better just to have that one song that everyone knows, instead of diluting it with a follow-up that only half succeeds. I mean, who really cares what Soft Cell's next single was, as long as we have 'Tainted Love'?"
I stop. You're still listening.
"Wait," I say. "What was I talking about? How did we get to 'Tainted Love'?"
"Let's see," you say, "I believe we started roughly at the Democratic gains in the South, then jumped back to the election of 1948, dipping briefly into northern constructions of the South, vis-a-vis Steel Magnolias, Birth of a Nation, Johnny Cash, and Fried Green Tomatoes. Which landed you on To Kill a Mockingbird, and how it is both Southern and universal, which -- correct me if I'm wrong -- got us to Harper Lee and her lack of a follow-up novel, intersected with the theory, probably wrong, that Truman Capote wrote the novel, then hopping over to literary one-hit wonders, and using musical one-hit wonders to make a point about their special place in our culture. I think."
"Thank you," I say. "That's wonderful.
”
”
David Levithan (The Lover's Dictionary)
“
Design is not limited to fancy new gadgets. Our family just bought a new washing machine and dryer. We didn’t have a very good one so we spent a little time looking at them. It turns out that the Americans make washers and dryers all wrong. The Europeans make them much better – but they take twice as long to do clothes! It turns out that they wash them with about a quarter as much water and your clothes end up with a lot less detergent on them. Most important, they don’t trash your clothes. They use a lot less soap, a lot less water, but they come out much cleaner, much softer, and they last a lot longer. We spent some time in our family talking about what’s the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table. We’d get around to that old washer-dryer discussion. And the talk was about design. We ended up opting for these Miele appliances, made in Germany. They’re too expensive, but that’s just because nobody buys them in this country. They are really wonderfully made and one of the few products we’ve bought over the last few years that we’re all really happy about. These guys really thought the process through. They did such a great job designing these washers and dryers. I got more thrill out of them than I have out of any piece of high tech in years.
”
”
Steve Jobs
“
Calvin: Today at school, I tried to decide whether to cheat on my test or not. I wondered, is it better to do the right thing and fail ... or is it better to do the wrong thing and succeed? On the one hand, undeserved success gives no satisfaction ... but on the other hand, well-deserved failure gives no satisfaction either. Of course, most everybody cheats some time or other. People always bend the rules if they think they can get away with it. Then again, that doesn't justify my cheating. Then I thought, look, cheating on one little test isn't such a big deal. It doesn't hurt anyone. But then I wondered if I was just rationalizing my unwillingness to accept the consequence of not studying. Still, in the real world, people care about success, not principles. Then again, maybe that's why the world is such a mess. What a dilemma!
Hobbes: So what did you decide?
Calvin: Nothing. I ran out of time and I had to turn in a blank paper.
Hobbes: Anymore, simply acknowledging the issue is a moral victory.
Calvin: Well, it just seemed wrong to cheat on an ethics test.
”
”
Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes (Calvin and Hobbes, #1))
“
When I could talk, I said, "I don't know what I did wrong."
Dena sighed, "You care too much.
”
”
Melissa Bank (The Wonder Spot)
“
Afterward, I felt it had been wrong not telling the family about the baby, because then I wanted them to know about the miscarriage, so that they knew the baby had existed. But when I told people, they seemed more interested in the fact that I'd kept the pregnancy a secret. They felt they'd been tricked. They said things like "Oh, I did wonder that day when you didn't drink at the Easter BBQ but you said you just didn't feel like drinking!” In other words, LIAR.
”
”
Liane Moriarty (What Alice Forgot)
“
Is Jace with you?"
"Uh, no," said Alec.
He wondered if Aline was asking for a specific reason. Aline and Jace had kissed in Alicante, before the war. Alec tried to think of what Isabelle usually said to girls about Jace.
"The thing is," he added, "Jace is a beautiful antelope, who has to be free to run across the plains."
"What?" said ALine.
Maybe Alec had gotten that wrong. "Jace is home with his, uh, his new girlfriend. You remember Clary." Alec hoped Aline was not too heartbroken.
"Oh right, the short redhead," she said. Aline was tiny herself, but refused to ever admit it. "you know, Jace was so sad before the war, I thought he must have a forbidden love. I just didn't think it was Clary, for obvious reasons. I thought it was that vampire."
Alec coughed. Aline offered him a sip of her latte.
"No," he said when he got his voice back. "Jace is not dating Simon. Jace is straight. Simon is straight."
"I totally saw scars on Jace's neck," Aline said. "He let the vampire bite him. He brought him to Alicante. I thought: classic Jace. Never makes a mess when a total catastrophe will do. Wait, did you think I wanted a ride on that disaster train?"
"Yes?" said Alec.
”
”
Cassandra Clare (The Red Scrolls of Magic (The Eldest Curses, #1))
“
Frank grabbed a tourist brochure stuck under the napkin dispenser. He began to read it. Piper patted Leo’s arm, like she couldn’t believe he was really here. Nico stood at the edge of the group, eyeing the passing pedestrians as if they might be enemies. Coach Hedge munched on the salt and pepper shakers. Despite the happy reunion, everybody seemed more subdued than usual—like they were picking up on Leo’s mood. Jason had never really considered how important Leo’s sense of humor was to the group. Even when things were super serious, they could always depend on Leo to lighten things up. Now, it felt like the whole team had dropped anchor. “So then Jason harnessed the venti,” Hazel finished. “And here we are.” Leo whistled. “Hot-air horses? Dang, Jason. So basically, you held a bunch of gas together all the way to Malta, and then you let it loose.” Jason frowned. “You know, it doesn’t sound so heroic when you put it that way.” “Yeah, well. I’m an expert on hot air. I’m still wondering, why Malta? I just kind of ended up here on the raft, but was that a random thing, or—” “Maybe because of this.” Frank tapped his brochure. “Says here Malta was where Calypso lived.” A pint of blood drained from Leo’s face. “W-what now?” Frank shrugged. “According to this, her original home was an island called Gozo just north of here. Calypso’s a Greek myth thingie, right?” “Ah, a Greek myth thingie!” Coach Hedge rubbed his hands together. “Maybe we get to fight her! Do we get to fight her? ’Cause I’m ready.” “No,” Leo murmured. “No, we don’t have to fight her, Coach.” Piper frowned. “Leo, what’s wrong? You look—” “Nothing’s wrong!” Leo shot to his feet. “Hey, we should get going. We’ve got work to do!” “But…where did you go?” Hazel asked. “Where did you get those clothes? How—” “Jeez, ladies!” Leo said. “I appreciate the concern, but I don’t need two extra moms!” Piper smiled uncertainly. “Okay, but—” “Ships to fix!” Leo said. “Festus to check! Earth goddesses to punch in the face! What are we waiting for? Leo’s back!” He spread his arms and grinned. He was making a brave attempt, but Jason could see the sadness lingering in his eyes. Something had happened to him…something to do with Calypso.
”
”
Rick Riordan (The House of Hades (Heroes of Olympus, #4))
“
Don't let a Narcissist, or any other kind of vampire, get away with nonverbal disapproval. Unspoken communication has much more power than mere words because it is ambiguous. If a Narcissist says you did something wrong, you can at least disagree. If he only hints at it, you are left wondering if what you're seeing really means what you think it does, or if the whole thing is somehow your fault, or whatever else you might be imagining. ... Translate rather than pointing the finger. This is the tricky part because it is subtle, but it will make all the difference. An unsubstantiated accusation of an internal state, like, "You're bored," invites defensiveness. A translation, like, "You keep looking at the clock; I'm assuming you're bored," is much harder to deny. A Histrionic might try, but other kinds of vampires will have to concede that they are indeed looking at the clock.
”
”
Albert J. Bernstein (Emotional Vampires: Dealing With People Who Drain You Dry)
“
On his first parade the sergeant-major exclaimed that he couldn't make out the shape of Arthur's head because there was so much hair on it, and Arthur jocularly agreed to get it cut, intending to forget about it until the fifteen days was over, which he did. 'You're a soldier now, not a Teddy-boy,' the sergeant-major said, but Arthur knew he was wrong in either case. He was nothing at all when people tried to tell him what he was. Not even his own name was enough, though it might be on on his pay-book. What am I? he wondered. A six-foot pit-prop that wants a pint of ale. That's what I am. And if any knowing bastard says that's what I am, I'm a dynamite-dealer, Sten-gun seller, hundred-ton tank trader, a capstan-lathe operator waiting to blow the army to Kingdom Cum. I'm me and nobody else; and what people think I am or say I am, that's what I'm not, because they don't know a bloody thing about me.
”
”
Alan Sillitoe (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning)
“
Kasha didn't say a word as we ate. She sat with her back to us, staring at a mountain range far in the distance. Yorn and I made small talk about the birds, but my mind was on Kasha, wondering what she was thinking. She was the Traveler from Eelong. We needed her. Eelong needed her. Heck, Halla needed her. I wished I knew how to convince her of that. When she finally did speak, I was surprised at her question.
"How many territories are there?" she asked.
"Ten in all," I said. "At least that's what I've been told. They're all part of Halla."
"Explain to me what halla is," she said. It was an order more than a question. I didn't know why she suddenly had this interest, but if she was willing to listen, I was ready to talk.
"The way it was told to me, Halla is everything. Every time, every place, every person and creature that ever existed. It all still exists."
"And you understand that?" she asked.
"Well, not entirely," I answered honestly.
"But you're willing to risk your life and the lives of those around you to protect Halla from Saint Dane?"
Good question. I'd asked myself the same question more than once.
"I wasn't at first," I began. "Far from it. I didn't want any part of Travelers or flumes and especially of Saint Dane. But since then I've been to a bunch of territories and seen the evil he's capable of."
Kasha scoffed and said,"Evil? You're a fool, Pendragon. A tang is evil. What possible evil could a gar cause that's worse than that?"
"I'll tell you," I said. "He's killed more people than I want to count, all in the name of creating chaos. He fueled a war on Denduron and tried to poison all of Cloral. Then he nearly crushed three territories at once, my home territories of Earth. But each time the Travelers stopped him. Until Veelox. We failed on Veelox. An entire civilization is going to collapse, millions will die, all because we failed. And Saint Dane wil be there to pick up the pieces. Or step on them."
"It's all mildly interesting," she said calmly. "But like I said before, it has nothing to do with me. I don't care."
That's when I snapped. Okay, I admit, maybe I should have been cool, but Kasha's total lack of concern had finally gotten to me. I jumped to my feet and said, "Well, you'd better start!"
"It's all right, Pendragon," Yorn said calmly. "Relax."
"Relax?" I shouted, getting more amped up by the second. "Why? So I won't upset Kasha? She should be upset. People have died fighting Saint Dane. People I've loved, people she's loved." I looked right at Kasha and said, "You don't care? I'll tell you what I don't care about. I don't care that your life is a mess. Sorry, it's true. You've got way bigger problems coming, kitty cat. You want to pretend like none of this affects you? Fine. You're wrong. If we fail, Eelong will crumble and everything you care about will crash along with it. And whether you like it or not, you're a Traveler. So why don't you just grow up and accept it!
”
”
D.J. MacHale (Black Water (Pendragon, #5))
“
After watching so many of the other women find satisfaction-joy, even-in activities like these, I sometimes wondered what was wrong with me that I only found more excuses not to join them. I felt like I did back in high school, not wanting to be a cheerleader or head up the homecoming committee-I didn't have a bubbly personality and didn't care about the theme of a prom
”
”
Amy Hatvany (Best Kept Secret)
“
weren't we all the same as children?" eiko asked. "all of us, destined to become beautiful brides in fluffy white dresses!" she giggled to herself. "where did we go wrong?"
isn't that what keeps life interesting?" i replied. "and who knows? next year you could be somebody's wife. no one knows what will happen."
sometimes i think it would be wonderful just to stay the way i am forever, just kick back and space out during the afternoon thinking about all the exciting things that the night will bring, all the naughty things i might take part in." she snickered again.
well," i said, "aren't you the happy one."
she squinted her tiny nose and laughed.
dawn was breaking as we said good-bye. i saw her off by watching her small body disappear into the background, her high heels clapping along, echoing in the early morning city.
my drunkenness, the sunrise, the bright sky, and a friend who was leaving.
if i had died in my fall i would have missed that morning - that splendid sunrise over tokyo.
”
”
Banana Yoshimoto
“
I got the feeling that if I moved the frames to the side, I'd see the artists watching me, as though through a two-way mirror, cracking their arthritic knuckles and rubbing their stubbled chins, wondering what I was wondering about them, if I saw their brilliance, or if their lives had been pointless, if only God could judge them after all. Did they want more? Was there more genius to be wrung out of the turpentine rags at their feet? Could they have painted better? Could they have painted more generously? More clearly? Could they have dropped more fruit from their windows? Did they know that glory was mundane? Did they wish they'd crushed those withered grapes between their fingers and spent their days walking through fields of grass or being in love or confessing their delusions to a priest or starving like the hungry souls they were, begging for alms in the city square with some honesty for once? Maybe they'd lived wrongly.
(...)
Or maybe not. Maybe, in the morning, they were aloof and happy to distract themselves with their brushes and oils, to mix their colors and smoke their pipes and go back to their fresh still lives without having to swat away any more flies.
”
”
Ottessa Moshfegh (My Year of Rest and Relaxation)
“
In times of old when I was new
And Hogwarts barely started
The founders of our noble school
Thought never to be parted:
United by a common goal,
They had the selfsame yearning,
To make the world’s best magic school
And pass along their learning.
“Together we will build and teach!”
The four good friends decided
And never did they dream that they
Might someday be divided,
For were there such friends anywhere
As Slytherin and Gryffindor?
Unless it was the second pair
Of Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw?
So how could it have gone so wrong?
How could such friendships fail?
Why, I was there and so can tell
The whole sad, sorry tale.
Said Slytherin, “We’ll teach just those
Whose ancestry is purest.”
Said Ravenclaw, “We’ll teach those whose
Intelligence is surest.”
Said Gryffindor, “We’ll teach all those
With brave deeds to their name.”
Said Hufflepuff, “I’ll teach the lot,
And treat them just the same.”
These differences caused little strife
When first they came to light,
For each of the four founders had
A House in which they might
Take only those they wanted, so,
For instance, Slytherin
Took only pure-blood wizards
Of great cunning, just like him,
And only those of sharpest mind
Were taught by Ravenclaw
While the bravest and the boldest
Went to daring Gryffindor.
Good Hufflepuff, she took the rest,
And taught them all she knew,
Thus the Houses and their founders
Retained friendships firm and true.
So Hogwarts worked in harmony
For several happy years,
But then discord crept among us
Feeding on our faults and fears.
The Houses that, like pillars four,
Had once held up our school,
Now turned upon each other and,
Divided, sought to rule.
And for a while it seemed the school
Must meet an early end,
What with dueling and with fighting
And the clash of friend on friend
And at last there came a morning
When old Slytherin departed
And though the fighting then died out
He left us quite downhearted.
And never since the founders four
Were whittled down to three
Have the Houses been united
As they once were meant to be.
And now the Sorting Hat is here
And you all know the score:
I sort you into Houses
Because that is what I’m for,
But this year I’ll go further,
Listen closely to my song:
Though condemned I am to split you
Still I worry that it’s wrong,
Though I must fulfill my duty
And must quarter every year
Still I wonder whether
Sorting May not bring the end I fear.
Oh, know the perils, read the signs,
The warning history shows,
For our Hogwarts is in danger
From external, deadly foes
And we must unite inside her
Or we’ll crumble from within.
I have told you, I have warned you. . . .
Let the Sorting now begin.
The hat became motionless once more;
”
”
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter, #5))
“
Hi, I’m Adele Czerny. I don’t really have a long speech. I mean, I sat through these things when I was your age, and they’re boring. I’m just going to say a few things about Noah and Raven Day. Did any of you guys know him?”
In unison, Gansey and Adam started to lift their hands and just as quickly dropped them. Yes, they knew him. No, they had not known him. Noah, alive, had been before their time here. Noah, dead, was a phenomenon, not an acquaintance.
“Well, you were missing out,” she said. “My mom always said he was a firecracker, which just meant he was always getting speeding tickets and jumping on tables at family reunions and stuff. He always had so many ideas. He was so hyper.”
Adam and Gansey looked at each other. They had always had the sense that the Noah they knew was not the true Noah. It was just disconcerting to hear how much Noahness death had stripped. It was impossible to not wonder what Noah would have done with himself if he had lived.
“Anyway, I’m here because I was actually the first one he told about his idea for Raven Day. He called me one evening, I guess it would’ve been when he was fourteen, and he told me he’d had this dream about ravens fighting and battling. He said they were all different colours and sizes and shapes, and he was inside them, and they were, like, swirling around him.” She motioned around herself in a whirlwind; she had Noah’s hands, Noah’s elbows. “And he told me, ‘I think it would be a cool art project.’ And I told him, ‘I’ll bet if everybody at the school made one, I bet you’d have enough.’ ”
Gansey was aware that his arm hairs were standing up.
“So they’re swooping and careening and there’s nothing but ravens, nothing but dreams all around you,” Adele said, only Gansey wasn’t sure if she had actually said it, or if he’d heard her wrong and he was just half-remembering something she’d already said. “Anyway, I know he’d like what it is like nowadays. So, um, thanks for remembering one of his crazy dreams.
”
”
Maggie Stiefvater (The Raven King (The Raven Cycle, #4))
“
Come, Paul!" she reiterated, her eye grazing me with its hard ray like a steel stylet. She pushed against her kinsman. I thought he receded; I thought he would go. Pierced deeper than I could endure, made now to feel what defied suppression, I cried -
"My heart will break!"
What I felt seemed literal heart-break; but the seal of another fountain yielded under the strain: one breath from M. Paul, the whisper, "Trust me!" lifted a load, opened an outlet. With many a deep sob, with thrilling, with icy shiver, with strong trembling, and yet with relief - I wept.
"Leave her to me; it is a crisis: I will give her a cordial, and it will pass," said the calm Madame Beck.
To be left to her and her cordial seemed to me something like being left to the poisoner and her bowl. When M. Paul answered deeply, harshly, and briefly - "Laissez-moi!" in the grim sound I felt a music strange, strong, but life-giving.
"Laissez-moi!" he repeated, his nostrils opening, and his facial muscles all quivering as he spoke.
"But this will never do," said Madame, with sternness. More sternly rejoined her kinsman -
"Sortez d'ici!"
"I will send for Père Silas: on the spot I will send for him," she threatened pertinaciously.
"Femme!" cried the Professor, not now in his deep tones, but in his highest and most excited key, "Femme! sortez à l'instant!"
He was roused, and I loved him in his wrath with a passion beyond what I had yet felt.
"What you do is wrong," pursued Madame; "it is an act characteristic of men of your unreliable, imaginative temperament; a step impulsive, injudicious, inconsistent - a proceeding vexatious, and not estimable in the view of persons of steadier and more resolute character."
"You know not what I have of steady and resolute in me," said he, "but you shall see; the event shall teach you. Modeste," he continued less fiercely, "be gentle, be pitying, be a woman; look at this poor face, and relent. You know I am your friend, and the friend of your friends; in spite of your taunts, you well and deeply know I may be trusted. Of sacrificing myself I made no difficulty but my heart is pained by what I see; it must have and give solace. Leave me!"
This time, in the "leave me" there was an intonation so bitter and so imperative, I wondered that even Madame Beck herself could for one moment delay obedience; but she stood firm; she gazed upon him dauntless; she met his eye, forbidding and fixed as stone. She was opening her lips to retort; I saw over all M. Paul's face a quick rising light and fire; I can hardly tell how he managed the movement; it did not seem violent; it kept the form of courtesy; he gave his hand; it scarce touched her I thought; she ran, she whirled from the room; she was gone, and the door shut, in one second.
The flash of passion was all over very soon. He smiled as he told me to wipe my eyes; he waited quietly till I was calm, dropping from time to time a stilling, solacing word. Ere long I sat beside him once more myself - re-assured, not desperate, nor yet desolate; not friendless, not hopeless, not sick of life, and seeking death.
"It made you very sad then to lose your friend?" said he.
"It kills me to be forgotten, Monsieur," I said.
”
”
Charlotte Brontë (Villette)
“
Until I was twenty I was sure there was a being who could see everything I did and who didn't like most of it. He seemed to care about minute aspects of my life, like on what day of the week I ate a piece of meat. And yet, he let earthquakes and mudslides take out whole communities, apparently ignoring the saints among them who ate their meat on the assigned days. Eventually, I realized that I didn't believe there was such a being. It didn't seem reasonable. And I assumed that I was an atheist.
As I understood the word, it meant that I was someone who didn't believe in a God; I was without a God. I didn't broadcast this in public because I noticed that people who do believe in a god get upset to hear that others don't. (Why this is so is one of the most pressing of human questions, and I wish a few of the bright people in this conversation would try to answer it through research.)
But, slowly I realized that in the popular mind the word atheist was coming to mean something more - a statement that there couldn't be a God. God was, in this formulation, not possible, and this was something that could be proved. But I had been changed by eleven years of interviewing six or seven hundred scientists around the world on the television program Scientific American Frontiers. And that change was reflected in how I would now identify myself.
The most striking thing about the scientists I met was their complete dedication to evidence. It reminded me of the wonderfully plainspoken words of Richard Feynman who felt it was better not to know than to know something that was wrong.
”
”
Alan Alda
“
prayer ABCs: A. Acknowledge him. Let him know you’re thinking about him. “Hi, Lord. I love you. Would you go into my day with me?” B. Bring it. Tell him about your concerns or needs. “Lord, I’m worried about making rent this month. Would you show me what to do? Would you provide for my need?” C. Chat. Tell God whatever is on your mind. For example, you could tell him about your day, problems, job, family, bank account, or mother-in-law, just as if you were talking to a good friend. “Lord, did you see the family at dinner tonight? I’m worried about little Bobby. He seemed so quiet, and I’m wondering if something’s wrong. Would you comfort him and give me wisdom to know how to talk to him about what’s going on?
”
”
Linda Evans Shepherd (Experiencing God's Presence: Learning to Listen While You Pray)
“
I look back at this moment sometimes, the moment I accepted this job, and I have to wonder what kind of decision it was--the right decision that is the wrong one, or the wrong one that's actually right. Someday I hope this is clear to me, that I can find the right end, the right moral to this story. Am I the sort of person who makes life harder than it has to be? Did I actively invite all this trouble into my life or was I just doing the best I could? But it's as terrible as it is true: everyone has something in them they cannot yet see.
”
”
Catherine Lacey (The Answers)
“
Aren’t you a little young to be a captain? Not that I’m sure you weren’t wonderful at it,” I added hastily, “but Frank’s got to be your same age, and Mr. Graces and Mr. Liu are both older than you. How on earth did it happen?”
He shut down. It was like a curtain being pulled across a window. This was a subject he definitely did not wish to discuss.
“The title is honorary,” he said, not meeting my gaze. “I can’t stop them calling me that, even though I’ve asked them not to. I was the highest-ranking officer to survive the…accident.”
Accident? I supposed this was another one of those things he didn’t want to tell me because it would make me hate him.
Recognizing that dropping that particular topic-for now at least-would probably be best. I said, “John, I can warn you about the Furies. And I know exactly where the coffin is. All you have to do is take me back to Isla Huesos-just this one time, to help Alex-and I’ll never mention going there again. I’ll even,” I said, reaching up to straighten the collar of his leather jacket, which had gone askew, “forgive you for the waffles-“
John seized me by both shoulders, pulling me towards him so abruptly that Hope gave an alarmed flap of her wings.
“Pierce,” he said. “Do you mean that?”
When I pushed back some of the hair that had tumbled into my face and raised my dark eyes to meet his light ones, I saw that he was staring down at me with an intensity that burned.
“You’ll never mention going back to Isla Huesos again if I take you there right now, this once, to talk to your cousin Alex?” he demanded. “You’ll give…cohabitation another chance?”
His sudden fierceness was making me nervous.
“Of course, John,” I said. “But it’s not like I have a choice.”
“What if you did?” he asked, his grip tightening.
I blinked. “But I can’t. You said-“
He gave me a little shake. “Never mind what I said. What if I was wrong?”
I reached up to lay a hand on his cheek. It felt a little scratchy, because he hadn’t shaved. I didn’t care about stubble. What I cared about was the desperate need I saw in his eyes. The need for me.
“I’d come back,” I said, simply, “to stay with you.”
A second later, the late-and everything around it-was gone.
”
”
Meg Cabot (Underworld (Abandon, #2))
“
He and I were walking hand in hand, just after we’d had sex for the first and only time—and right before we’d gone into battle against the cannibals.
’Bout to face shittier odds than I ever have, stone-cold sober, and I never felt so good. Is this what being at peace means? No damn wonder everyone wants to feel this way.
Evie glances up at me with those blue eyes, and she’s so fucking beautiful I nearly trip over my feet. Her scent is honeysuckle, which means she’s all but purring. Her lips curve, and that smile hits me harder than any punch. She’s got no regrets.
Good. ’Cause I’m never letting her go. I might reach too high to have her, but she doan think so. I want to say something, to tell her how I feel about what we just did. Everything I think to say could be taken the wrong way.
So I squeeze her hand and keep it simple. “À moi, Evangeline.” Mine.
She promises me: “Always.”
And I believe her.
”
”
Kresley Cole (Dead of Winter (The Arcana Chronicles, #3))
“
On game days, I could be in the worst mood imagiable-a really bad mood. But sometimes, I'd get a call from the Make-A-Wish Foundation-there would be people, sometimes kids, who anted to meet me before they died. And the foundation would call on a game day and say, "There's kid dying here whose last wish is to see you. Can you just come and see him?" I'd get there and sometimes the kid would be comatose. One day, a kid woke up for a split second and smiled at me. I was told he'd been hanging on. The mom and dad called me later and said, "I don't know what yu did to him, but those few moments were wonderful." And I cried all the way to the game, just cried my eyes out.
It's very scary. It's uplifting, too, but so scary. And then... I'm bitching because my breakfast is cold?
”
”
Charles Barkley (I May Be Wrong but I Doubt It)
“
My mom was a sayyed from the bloodline of the Prophet (which you know about now). In Iran, if you convert from Islam to Christianity or Judaism, it’s a capital crime.
That means if they find you guilty in religious court, they kill you. But if you convert to something else, like Buddhism or something, then it’s not so bad. Probably because Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are sister religions, and you always have the worst fights with your sister.
And probably nothing happens if you’re just a six-year-old. Except if you say, “I’m a Christian now,” in your school, chances are the Committee will hear about it and raid your house, because if you’re a Christian now, then so are your parents probably. And the Committee does stuff way worse than killing you.
When my sister walked out of her room and said she’d met Jesus, my mom knew all that.
And here is the part that gets hard to believe: Sima, my mom, read about him and became a Christian too. Not just a regular one, who keeps it in their pocket. She fell in love. She wanted everybody to have what she had, to be free, to realize that in other religions you have rules and codes and obligations to follow to earn good things, but all you had to do with Jesus was believe he was the one who died for you.
And she believed.
When I tell the story in Oklahoma, this is the part where the grown-ups always interrupt me. They say, “Okay, but why did she convert?”
Cause up to that point, I’ve told them about the house with the birds in the walls, all the villages my grandfather owned, all the gold, my mom’s own medical practice—all the amazing things she had that we don’t have anymore because she became a Christian.
All the money she gave up, so we’re poor now.
But I don’t have an answer for them.
How can you explain why you believe anything? So I just say what my mom says when people ask her. She looks them in the eye with the begging hope that they’ll hear her and she says, “Because it’s true.”
Why else would she believe it?
It’s true and it’s more valuable than seven million dollars in gold coins, and thousands of acres of Persian countryside, and ten years of education to get a medical degree, and all your family, and a home, and the best cream puffs of Jolfa, and even maybe your life.
My mom wouldn’t have made the trade otherwise.
If you believe it’s true, that there is a God and He wants you to believe in Him and He sent His Son to die for you—then it has to take over your life. It has to be worth more than everything else, because heaven’s waiting on the other side.
That or Sima is insane.
There’s no middle. You can’t say it’s a quirky thing she thinks sometimes, cause she went all the way with it.
If it’s not true, she made a giant mistake.
But she doesn’t think so.
She had all that wealth, the love of all those people she helped in her clinic. They treated her like a queen. She was a sayyed.
And she’s poor now.
People spit on her on buses. She’s a refugee in places people hate refugees, with a husband who hits harder than a second-degree black belt because he’s a third-degree black belt. And she’ll tell you—it’s worth it. Jesus is better.
It’s true.
We can keep talking about it, keep grinding our teeth on why Sima converted, since it turned the fate of everybody in the story. It’s why we’re here hiding in Oklahoma.
We can wonder and question and disagree. You can be certain she’s dead wrong.
But you can’t make Sima agree with you.
It’s true.
Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.
This whole story hinges on it.
Sima—who was such a fierce Muslim that she marched for the Revolution, who studied the Quran the way very few people do read the Bible and knew in her heart that it was true.
”
”
Daniel Nayeri (Everything Sad Is Untrue)
“
The Perfect Friend ©
Today I found a friend
Who knew everything I felt
She knew my every weakness
And the problems I’ve been dealt
She understood my wonders
And listened to my dreams
She listened to how I felt about life and love
And knew what it all means
Not once did she interrupt me
Or tell me I was wrong
She understood what I was going through
And promised she'd stay long
I reached out to this friend
To show her that I care
To pull her close and let her know
How much I need her there
I went to hold her hand
To pull her a bit nearer
And I realized this perfect friend I found
Was nothing but a mirror
Copyright © 1995 Shannen Wrass. All Rights Reserved
”
”
Shannen Wrass
“
But then, not long after, in another article, Loftus writes, "We live in a strange and precarious time that resembles at its heart the hysteria and superstitious fervor of the witch trials." She took rifle lessons and to this day keeps the firing instruction sheets and targets posted above her desk. In 1996, when Psychology Today interviewed her, she burst into tears twice within the first twenty minutes, labile, lubricated, theatrical, still whip smart, talking about the blurry boundaries between fact and fiction while she herself lived in another blurry boundary, between conviction and compulsion, passion and hyperbole. "The witch hunts," she said, but the analogy is wrong, and provides us with perhaps a more accurate window into Loftus's stretched psyche than into our own times, for the witch hunts were predicated on utter nonsense, and the abuse scandals were predicated on something all too real, which Loftus seemed to forget: Women are abused. Memories do matter. Talking to her, feeling her high-flying energy the zeal that burns up the center of her life, you have to wonder, why. You are forced to ask the very kind of question Loftus most abhors: did something bad happen to her? For she herself seems driven by dissociated demons, and so I ask. What happened to you? Turns out, a lot.
(refers to Dr. Elizabeth F. Loftus)
”
”
Lauren Slater (Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century)
“
Betrayals that make your soul scream so loud you wonder why no one else hears it. In the end, we are all alone in that private hell. But life isn't about learning to forgive those who have hurt you or forgetting the past. It's about learning to forgive yourself for being human and making mistakes. Yes, people disappoint us all the time. But the harshest lessons come when we disappoint ourselves. When we put our trust and our hearts into the hands of the wrong person and they do us wrong. And while we may hate them for what they did, the one we hate most is ourself for allowing them into our private circle. How could I have been so stupid? How could I let them deceive me?
”
”
Sherrilyn Kenyon
“
My Dearest, Can you forgive me? In a world that I seldom understand, there are winds of destiny that blow when we least expect them. Sometimes they gust with the fury of a hurricane, sometimes they barely fan one’s cheek. But the winds cannot be denied, bringing as they often do a future that is impossible to ignore. You, my darling, are the wind that I did not anticipate, the wind that has gusted more strongly than I ever imagined possible. You are my destiny. I was wrong, so wrong, to ignore what was obvious, and I beg your forgiveness. Like a cautious traveler, I tried to protect myself from the wind and lost my soul instead. I was a fool to ignore my destiny, but even fools have feelings, and I’ve come to realize that you are the most important thing that I have in this world. I know I am not perfect. I’ve made more mistakes in the past few months than some make in a lifetime. I was wrong to deny what was obvious in my heart: that I can’t go on without you. You were right about everything. I tried to deny the things you were saying, even though I knew they were true. Like one who gazes only backward on a trip across the country, I ignored what lay ahead. I missed the beauty of a coming sunrise, the wonder of anticipation that makes life worthwhile. It was wrong of me to do that, a product of my confusion, and I wish I had come to understand that sooner. Now, though, with my gaze fixed toward the future, I see your face and hear your voice, certain that this is the path I must follow. It is my deepest wish that you give me one more chance. For the first few days after you left, I wanted to believe that I could go on as I always had. But I couldn’t. I knew in my heart that my life would never be the same again. I wanted you back, more than I imagined possible, yet whenever I conjured you up, I kept hearing your words in our last conversation. No matter how much I loved you, I knew it wasn’t going to be possible unless we—both of us—were sure I would devote myself fully to the path that lay ahead. I continued to be troubled by these thoughts until late last night when the answer finally came to me. Oh, I am sorry, so very sorry, that I ever hurt you. Maybe I’m too late now. I don’t know. I love you and always will. I am tired of being alone. I see children crying and laughing as they play in the sand, and I realize I want to have children with you. I am sick and sad without you. As I sit here in the kitchen, I am praying that you will let me come back to you, this time forever.
”
”
Nicholas Sparks (Message in a Bottle)
“
One of the great tragedies and errors of the way people have understood the Bible has been the assumption that what people did in the Old Testament must have been right ‘because it’s in the Bible’. It has justified violence, enslavement, abuse and suppression of women, murderous prejudice against gay people; it has justified all manner of things we now cannot but as Christians regard as evil. But they are not there in the Bible because God is telling us, ‘That’s good.’ They are there because God is telling us, ‘You need to know that that is how some people responded. You need to know that when I speak to human beings things can go very wrong as well as very wonderfully.’ God tells us, ‘You need to know that when I speak, it isn’t always simple to hear, because of what human beings are like.’ We need, in other words, to guard against the temptation to take just a bit of the whole story and treat it as somehow a model for our own behaviour. Christians have often been down that road and it has not been a pretty sight. We need rather to approach the Bible as if it were a parable of Jesus. The whole thing is a gift, a challenge and an invitation into a new world, seeing yourself afresh and more truthfully.
”
”
Rowan Williams (Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer)
“
There’s something else I’m curious about, Kelsey.”
I smiled at him. “Sure, what else do you want to know?”
“What exactly is going on between you and Ren?”
A vise clamped down on my chest, but I tried to play it cool. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, are you two more than just traveling companions? Are you together?”
I clipped off a fast, “No. Definitely not.”
He grinned. “Good!” He grabbed my hand and kissed it. “Then that means you’re free to go out with me. No girl in her right mind would want to be with Ren, anyway. He’s very…stuffy. Cold, as far as relationships go.”
My mouth hung open for a minute, shocked, and then I felt anger shove the shock aside and take over. “First of all, I am not going to be with either one of you. Second, a girl would have to be crazy not to want Ren. You’re wrong about him. He’s not stuffy or cold. In fact, he’s considerate, warm, drop-dead gorgeous, dependable, loyal, sweet, and charming.”
He raised an eyebrow and measure me thoughtfuly for a minute. I squirmed under his gaze, knowing that I had spoken too quickly and said way too much.
He ventured carefully. “I see. You may be right. The Dhiren I know has surely changed in the past couple of hundred years. However, despite that and your insistent claim that you will not be with either one of us, I would like to propose that we go out and celebrate tonight, if not as my..what is the correct word?”
“The word is date.”
“Date. If not as my date…then, as my friend.”
I grimaced.
Kishan continued, pressing his point, “Surely, you won’t leave me to fend for myself on my first night back in the real world?”
He smiled at me, encouraging my acceptance. I did want to be his friend, but I wasn’t sure what to say to his request. And for just a moment, I wondered how Ren would feel about it and what the consequences might be.
I questioned, “Where exactly do you want to go to celebrate?”
“Mr. Kadam said there’s a nightclub in town nearby with dinner and dancing. I thought we could celebrate there, maybe get something to eat, and you can teach me how to dance.”
I laughed nervously. “This is my first time in India, and I don’t know a thing about dancing or the music here.”
Kisham seemed even more delighted by that news. “Fantastic! Then we will learn together. I won’t take no for an answer.” He jumped up to rush off.
I yelled, “Wait, Kishan! I don’t even know what to wear!”
He shouted back over his shoulder, “Ask Kadam. He knows everything!
”
”
Colleen Houck (Tiger's Curse (The Tiger Saga, #1))
“
It's as if I had been going downhill when I thought I was going uphill. That's how it was. In society's opinion I was heading uphill, but in equal measure life was slipping away from me... And now it's all over. Nothing left but to die!"
"So what's it all about? What's it for? It's not possible. It's not possible that life could have been as senseless and sickening as this. And if it has really been as sickening and senseless as this why do I have to die, and die in agony? There's something wrong. Maybe I didn't live as I should have done?" came the sudden thought. "But how can that be when I did everything properly?" he wondered, instantly dismissing as a total impossibility the one and only solution to the mystery of life and death.
”
”
Leo Tolstoy
“
There was something beautiful in someone trying to purchase happiness for a dying woman via a three-dollar box of french fries. I remember hoping that one dally someone would buy me french fries if that's all I wanted, even if he knew they'd be no good in the end.
I remember understanding what love really is.It didn't hurt; it didn't ignore your prayers, didn't seem to not care that your mom was dying. It didn't leave you wondering what you did wrong. Love tried to make you happy, even if it was useless. Love would do you anything to make you happy.
”
”
Jackson Pearce (Purity)
“
During my first few months of Facebooking, I discovered that my page had fostered a collective nostalgia for specific cultural icons. These started, unsurprisingly, within the realm of science fiction and fantasy. They commonly included a pointy-eared Vulcan from a certain groundbreaking 1960s television show.
Just as often, though, I found myself sharing images of a diminutive, ancient, green and disarmingly wise Jedi Master who speaks in flip-side down English. Or, if feeling more sinister, I’d post pictures of his black-cloaked, dark-sided, heavy-breathing nemesis. As an aside, I initially received from Star Trek fans considerable “push-back,” or at least many raised Spock brows, when I began sharing images of Yoda and Darth Vader. To the purists, this bordered on sacrilege.. But as I like to remind fans, I was the only actor to work within both franchises, having also voiced the part of Lok Durd from the animated show Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
It was the virality of these early posts, shared by thousands of fans without any prodding from me, that got me thinking. Why do we love Spock, Yoda and Darth Vader so much? And what is it about characters like these that causes fans to click “like” and “share” so readily?
One thing was clear: Cultural icons help people define who they are today because they shaped who they were as children. We all “like” Yoda because we all loved The Empire Strikes Back, probably watched it many times, and can recite our favorite lines. Indeed, we all can quote Yoda, and we all have tried out our best impression of him.
When someone posts a meme of Yoda, many immediately share it, not just because they think it is funny (though it usually is — it’s hard to go wrong with the Master), but because it says something about the sharer. It’s shorthand for saying, “This little guy made a huge impact on me, not sure what it is, but for certain a huge impact. Did it make one on you, too? I’m clicking ‘share’ to affirm something you may not know about me. I ‘like’ Yoda.”
And isn’t that what sharing on Facebook is all about? It’s not simply that the sharer wants you to snortle or “LOL” as it were. That’s part of it, but not the core. At its core is a statement about one’s belief system, one that includes the wisdom of Yoda.
Other eminently shareable icons included beloved Tolkien characters, particularly Gandalf (as played by the inimitable Sir Ian McKellan). Gandalf, like Yoda, is somehow always above reproach and unfailingly epic.
Like Yoda, Gandalf has his darker counterpart. Gollum is a fan favorite because he is a fallen figure who could reform with the right guidance. It doesn’t hurt that his every meme is invariably read in his distinctive, blood-curdling rasp.
Then there’s also Batman, who seems to have survived both Adam West and Christian Bale, but whose questionable relationship to the Boy Wonder left plenty of room for hilarious homoerotic undertones. But seriously, there is something about the brooding, misunderstood and “chaotic-good” nature of this superhero that touches all of our hearts.
”
”
George Takei
“
Here's what I want you to learn from this: Never let someone answer a question for you. Jump in with anything at all to make sure hat you're the one talking. Say, 'That's an interesting question', or 'I'm glad you asked that question,' or 'Oh goody, my favorite subject.' Say anything that will guarantee that you're in the conversation about yourself and not out of it like a teenager standing next to her mother at a cocktail party.
You must tell your own story, never let someone, even someone as familiar to you as your sister-in-law think she knows you better than you know yourself. She only sees what you do, she doesn't' see who you are inside. If I regret anything when I look back, it's how often I allowed people to think what they wanted to thing. I should've stopped them sort. I should've laughed at their assumptions. I should've hooted with laughter, 'Hoo hoo hoo,' and followed with twinkling, mischievous smile just to throw them off, just to keep them guessing,
The problem is they watch what you do, who you love, how you cook, what you read and what you don't read, and they decide what it means, and sometimes you're not there to stop them, or you get the timing wrong. I've always wondered why people look so much to action for meaning. When people tell you a story, something that happened to them, something important, don't ask them what they did , ask them what they wanted to do, what they want to do is who they are. Actions are whispers compared to dreams.
”
”
Alison Jean Lester (Lillian on Life)
“
If I could just have him until the day was over. Just a few more hours. But he was gone. I clasped my hand tightly over my mouth and felt a trembling that started deep inside move out to make all of me shake. I had a mighty impulse, it truly was mighty, to rise to my feet and howl. To overturn the chair and nightstand, to rip at my clothes, to bring down the very walls around us. But of course I did not do that. I pulled an elemental sense of outrage back inside and smoothed it down. I forced something far too big into something far too small, and this made for a surprising and unreasonable weight, as mercury does. I noticed sounds coming from my throat, little unladylike grunts. I saw that everything I’d ever imagined about what it would feel like when was pale. Was wrong. Was the shadow and not the mountain. And then, “It’s all right,” I said, quickly. “It’s all right.” To whom? I wondered later.
”
”
Elizabeth Berg
“
You are perfect for Los Angeles, you know. You’re like the lady whom everyone’s in love with but they hate themselves for it because you’re all wrong. They don’t have anything to go on with you. No precedents. You’re voluptuous and too smart and too kind and too mean, and you give everyone just what they want and then you get sad and bland . . . I used to wonder why you dressed the way you did—one minute I see you in those old shirts and that scarf! . . . and the next you’re at some art thing and I see women look at you when you don’t know it and they’re all wondering how in the hell you did it. You glow.
”
”
Eve Babitz (Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A.)
“
You said earlier today that you wanted to talk about something,” Halt said. Crowley nodded, gathering his thoughts before he began. “We seem to share a lot of the same skills,” he said. “And the same weapons. I noticed you carry a saxe knife and a throwing knife like mine. I wondered where you came by them.” Crowley, of course, carried his two knives in the distinctive Ranger-issue double scabbard. Halt’s were in separate scabbards, placed close together on the left side of his belt. He glanced at them now, where the belt was draped over a rock beside the campfire. “My mentor gave them to me,” he said. “He was a Ranger, like you.” Crowley sat up at that piece of information. “A Ranger?” he said. “In Hibernia? What was his name?” “He called himself Pritchard. He was an amazing man.” “He was indeed,” Crowley affirmed, and now it was Halt’s turn to look surprised. “You knew him?” Crowley nodded eagerly. “I was his apprentice for five years. He taught me everything I know. How did you come to meet him?” “He turned up at Du . . . Droghela, some three years ago. He took me under his wing and taught me silent movement, knife work, tracking and the rest. I could already shoot, but he tightened up my technique quite a bit.” Crowley noticed the hesitation and correction when Halt mentioned the name of the place where he’d met Pritchard. But he let it pass. “Yes. He was very big on technique.” “And practice,” Halt agreed. Crowley smiled at the memory of his old teacher. “He had a saying. An ordinary archer practices until he gets it right. A Ranger—” “Practices until he never gets it wrong.” Halt
”
”
John Flanagan (The Lost Stories (Ranger's Apprentice, #11))
“
I am not sure exactly what healing is or looks like, what form it comes in, what it should feel like. I do know that when I was four, I could not lift a gallon of milk, could not believe how heavy it was, that white sloshing boulder. I'd pull up a wooden chair to stand over the counting, pouring the milk with two shaking arms, wetting the cereal, spilling. Looking back I don't remember the day that I lifted it with ease. All I know is that now I do it without thinking, can do it one-handed, on the phone, in a rush. I believe the same rules apply, that one day I'll be able to tell this story without it shaking my foundation. Each time will not require an entire production, a spilling, a sweating forehead, a mess to clean up, sopping paper towels. It will just be a part of my life, every day lighter to lift.
Ram Dass said, Allow that you are at this moment not in the wrong place in your life. Consider the possibility that there have been no errors in the game. Just consider it. Consider that there is not an error, and everything that's come down on your plate is the way it is and here we are. I don't believe it was my fate to be raped. But I do believe that here we are is all we have. For a long time, it was too painful to be here. My mind preferred to be dissociated. I used to believe the goal was forgetting.
It took me a long time to learn healing is not about advancing, it is returning repeatedly to forage something. Writing this book allowed me to go back to that place. I learned to stay in the hurt, to resist leaving. If I got stuck inside scenes in the courtroom, I would glance down at Mogu and wonder, if I really am in the past, how did this blinking thing get in my house? I assembled and reassembled letters in ways that would describe what I'd seen and felt. As I revisited that landscape, I grew more in control, could go and go when I needed to. Until one day I found there was nothing left to gather.
”
”
Chanel Miller (Know My Name)
“
—so much more opportunity now." Her voice trails off.
"Hurrah for women's lib, eh?"
"The lib?" Impatiently she leans forward and tugs the serape straight. "Oh, that's doomed."
The apocalyptic word jars my attention.
"What do you mean, doomed?"
She glances at me as if I weren't hanging straight either and says vaguely, "Oh …"
"Come on, why doomed? Didn't they get that equal rights bill?"
Long hesitation. When she speaks again her voice is different.
"Women have no rights, Don, except what men allow us. Men are more aggressive and powerful, and they run the world. When the next real crisis upsets them, our so-called rights will vanish like—like that smoke. We'll be back where we always were: property. And whatever has gone wrong will be blamed on our freedom, like the fall of Rome was. You'll see."
Now all this is delivered in a gray tone of total conviction. The last time I heard that tone, the speaker was explaining why he had to keep his file drawers full of dead pigeons.
"Oh, come on. You and your friends are the backbone of the system; if you quit, the country would come to a screeching halt before lunch."
No answering smile.
"That's fantasy." Her voice is still quiet. "Women don't work that way. We're a—a toothless world." She looks around as if she wanted to stop talking. "What women do is survive. We live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine."
"Sounds like a guerrilla operation." I'm not really joking, here in the 'gator den. In fact, I'm wondering if I spent too much thought on mahogany logs.
"Guerrillas have something to hope for." Suddenly she switches on a jolly smile. "Think of us as opossums, Don. Did you know there are opossums living all over? Even in New York City."
I smile back with my neck prickling. I thought I was the paranoid one.
"Men and women aren't different species, Ruth. Women do everything men do."
"Do they?" Our eyes meet, but she seems to be seeing ghosts between us in the rain. She mutters something that could be "My Lai" and looks away. "All the endless wars …" Her voice is a whisper. "All the huge authoritarian organizations for doing unreal things. Men live to struggle against each other; we're just part of the battlefield. It'll never change unless you change the whole world. I dream sometimes of—of going away—" She checks and abruptly changes voice. "Forgive me, Don, it's so stupid saying all this."
"Men hate wars too, Ruth," I say as gently as I can.
"I know." She shrugs and climbs to her feet. "But that's your problem, isn't it?"
End of communication. Mrs. Ruth Parsons isn't even living in the same world with me.
”
”
James Tiptree Jr.
“
Girls aside, the other thing I found in the last few years of being at school, was a quiet, but strong Christian faith – and this touched me profoundly, setting up a relationship or faith that has followed me ever since.
I am so grateful for this. It has provided me with a real anchor to my life and has been the secret strength to so many great adventures since.
But it came to me very simply one day at school, aged only sixteen.
As a young kid, I had always found that a faith in God was so natural. It was a simple comfort to me: unquestioning and personal.
But once I went to school and was forced to sit through somewhere in the region of nine hundred dry, Latin-liturgical, chapel services, listening to stereotypical churchy people droning on, I just thought that I had got the whole faith deal wrong.
Maybe God wasn’t intimate and personal but was much more like chapel was … tedious, judgemental, boring and irrelevant.
The irony was that if chapel was all of those things, a real faith is the opposite. But somehow, and without much thought, I had thrown the beautiful out with the boring. If church stinks, then faith must do, too.
The precious, natural, instinctive faith I had known when I was younger was tossed out with this newly found delusion that because I was growing up, it was time to ‘believe’ like a grown-up.
I mean, what does a child know about faith?
It took a low point at school, when my godfather, Stephen, died, to shake me into searching a bit harder to re-find this faith I had once known.
Life is like that. Sometimes it takes a jolt to make us sit and remember who and what we are really about.
Stephen had been my father’s best friend in the world. And he was like a second father to me. He came on all our family holidays, and spent almost every weekend down with us in the Isle of Wight in the summer, sailing with Dad and me. He died very suddenly and without warning, of a heart attack in Johannesburg.
I was devastated.
I remember sitting up a tree one night at school on my own, and praying the simplest, most heartfelt prayer of my life.
‘Please, God, comfort me.’
Blow me down … He did.
My journey ever since has been trying to make sure I don’t let life or vicars or church over-complicate that simple faith I had found. And the more of the Christian faith I discover, the more I realize that, at heart, it is simple. (What a relief it has been in later life to find that there are some great church communities out there, with honest, loving friendships that help me with all of this stuff.)
To me, my Christian faith is all about being held, comforted, forgiven, strengthened and loved – yet somehow that message gets lost on most of us, and we tend only to remember the religious nutters or the God of endless school assemblies.
This is no one’s fault, it is just life. Our job is to stay open and gentle, so we can hear the knocking on the door of our heart when it comes.
The irony is that I never meet anyone who doesn’t want to be loved or held or forgiven. Yet I meet a lot of folk who hate religion. And I so sympathize. But so did Jesus. In fact, He didn’t just sympathize, He went much further. It seems more like this Jesus came to destroy religion and to bring life.
This really is the heart of what I found as a young teenager: Christ comes to make us free, to bring us life in all its fullness. He is there to forgive us where we have messed up (and who hasn’t), and to be the backbone in our being.
Faith in Christ has been the great empowering presence in my life, helping me walk strong when so often I feel so weak. It is no wonder I felt I had stumbled on something remarkable that night up that tree.
I had found a calling for my life.
”
”
Bear Grylls (Mud, Sweat and Tears)
“
What are you doing?” she asked.
I don’t know. Instinct not logic currently dictated his actions. But he didn’t admit this aloud.
“Do you always ask so many questions?”
“Only when I’m trying to understand what’s going on.”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
Confusion clouded her gaze. “No.”
Did she not sense the attraction between them? Of course she didn’t. She
was a simple human. She couldn’t know how his bear chuffed at her
nearness. How the scent of her aroused him. How he wanted to lay claim
to her body. What the (deuce) is wrong with me?
Apparently, his grandmother wondered the same thing. “Reid Alexander Carver, what are you doing manhandling our guest?”
Oops, caught harboring naughty thoughts and jolted back to sanity. What am I doing?
”
”
Eve Langlais (Kodiak's Claim (Kodiak Point, #1))
“
That night, I would have told you that the thing I wanted most was for Bryan to be responsible, to keep his word, to be trustworthy. But when he actually was responsible, when he did what he said he’d do, when he proved himself trustworthy, was I happy?” “No.” I shook my head in wonder at the thought. “You probably still would have been irritated, huh? You might have even gotten after him for squealing the tires.” “I’m ashamed to admit that I did something just as perverse,” Kate replied. “After he came in the door — having made it in time, mind you — rather than thanking him, or congratulating him, or acknowledging him, I welcomed him with a curt, ‘You sure cut it close, didn’t you?’ ” Kate sat down. “Notice — even when he was responsible, I couldn’t let him be responsible.” She paused. “I still needed him to be wrong.
”
”
Arbinger Institute (Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box)
“
How are things going with your brothers?”
“The judge set a date to hear me out after graduation. Mrs.Collins has been prepping me.”
“That is awesome!”
“Yeah.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Carrie and Joe hired a lawyer and I lost visitation.”
Echo placed her delicate hand over mine.“Oh, Noah. I am so sorry."
I’d spent countless hours on the couch in the basement, staring at the ceiling wondering what she was doing. Her laughter, her smile, the feel of her body next to mine, and the regret that I let her walk away too easily haunted me. Taking the risk, I entwined my fingers with hers. Odds were I’d never get the chance to be this close again. "No, Mrs. Collins convinced me the best thing to do is to keep my distance and follow the letter of the law."
"Wow, Mrs. Collins is a freaking miracle worker. Dangerous Noah Hutchins on the straight and narrow. If you don’t watch out she’ll ruin your rep with the girls."
I lowered my voice. "Not that it matters. I only care what one girl thinks about me."
She relaxed her fingers into mine and stroked her thumb over my skin.
Minutes into being alone together, we fell into each other again, like no time had passed. I could blame her for ending us, but in the end, I agreed with her decision. “How about you, Echo? Did you find your answers?”
“No.”
If I continued to disregard breakup rules, I might as well go all the way. I pushed her curls behind her shoulder and let my fingers linger longer than needed so I could enjoy the silky feel. “Don’t hide from me, baby. We’ve been through too much for that.”
Echo leaned into me, placing her head on my shoulder and letting me wrap an arm around her. “I’ve missed you, too, Noah. I’m tired of ignoring you.”
“Then don’t.” Ignoring her hurt like hell. Acknowledging her had to be better.
I swallowed, trying to shut out the bittersweet memories of our last night together. “Where’ve you been? It kills me when you’re not at school.”
“I went to an art gallery and the curator showed some interest in my work and sold my first piece two days later. Since then, I’ve been traveling around to different galleries, hawking my wares.”
“That’s awesome, Echo. Sounds like you’re fitting into your future perfectly.
Where did you decide to go to school?”
“I don’t know if I’m going to school.”
Shock jolted my system and I inched away to make sure I understood. “What the fuck do you mean you don’t know?
You’ve got colleges falling all over you and you don’t fucking know if you want to go to school?”
My damned little siren laughed at me. “I see your language has improved.”
Poof—like magic, the anger disappeared.
“If you’re not going to school, then what are your plans?”
"I’m considering putting college off for a year or two and traveling cross-country, hopping from gallery to gallery.”
“I feel like a dick. We made a deal and I left you hanging. I’m not that guy who goes back on his word. What can I do to help you get to the truth?”
Echo’s chest rose with her breath then deflated when she exhaled. Sensing our moment ending, I nuzzled her hair, savoring her scent. She patted my knee and broke away. “Nothing. There’s nothing you can do.”
"I think it’s time that I move on. As soon as I graduate, this part of my life will be over. I’m okay with not knowing what happened.” Her words sounded pretty, but I knew her better. She’d blinked three times in a row.
”
”
Katie McGarry (Pushing the Limits (Pushing the Limits, #1))
“
I wish I could do to you what you did to me, he wished. But it can’t be done to an android because they don’t care. If I had killed you last night, my goat would be alive now. There’s where I made the wrong decision. Yes, he thought; it can all be traced back to that and to my going to bed with you. Anyhow, you were correct about one thing; it did change me. But not in the way you predicted.
A much worse way, he decided.
And yet I don’t really care. Not any longer. Not, he thought, after what happened to me up there, toward the top of the hill. I wonder what would have come next, if I had gone on climbing and reached the top. Because that’s where Mercer appears to die. That’s where Mercer’s triumph manifests itself, there at the end of the great sidereal cycle.
But if I’m Mercer, he thought, I can never die, not in ten thousand years. Mercer is immortal.
”
”
Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)
“
I never wanted it to end. I wondered if it felt like this the first time. Seeing him. Really seeing him.
He wiped his eyes. “You really want to know, don’t you.”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
I gave in. I couldn’t not. I reached over and put my hand on his knee. He tensed briefly but settled when I curled my fingers over his leg, just letting my hand rest there. I couldn’t look at him. I thought my face was on fire.
He said, “That’s….” His voice broke. He cleared his throat. “After the hunters came, something shifted. Between us. I don’t know how or why exactly. You stopped being weird around me.”
“Seems like I’ve picked that right up again.”
He chuckled. “A little. It’s okay, though. It’s like… a beginning. You came to me one day. You were sweating. I remember thinking something bad had happened because you kept wringing your hands until I thought you were going to break your bones. I asked you what was wrong. And you know what you said?
“Probably something stupid.”
“You said that you didn’t think you could ever give up on me. That no matter how long it took, you would be there until I told you otherwise. That you weren’t going to push me for anything but you thought I should know that you had… intentions.”
“Oh dear god,” I said in horror. “And that worked?”
Kelly snorted, and I felt his hand on the back of mine. “Not quite. But what you said next did.”
I looked over at him. “What did I say?”
He was watching me with human eyes, and I thought I could love him. I saw how easy it could be. I didn’t, not yet, but oh, I wanted to. “You said you thought the world of me. That we’d been through so much and you couldn’t stand another day if I didn’t know that. You told me that you were a good wolf, a strong wolf, and if I’d only give you a chance, you’d make sure I’d never regret it.”
I had to know. “Have you?”
“No,” he whispered. “Not once. Not ever.” He looked away. “It was good between us. We took it slow. You smiled all the time. You brought me flowers once. Mom was pissed because you ripped them up from her flower bed and there were still roots and dirt hanging from the bottom, but you were so damn proud of yourself. You said it was romantic. And I believed you.” He plucked a blade of grass and held it in the palm of his hand. “There was something… I don’t know. Endless. About you and me.” He took my hand off his knee and turned it over. He set the blade of grass in my palm and closed his hand over mine. He looked toward the sky and the stars through the canopy of leaves. “We came here sometimes. Just the two of us. And you would pretend to know all the stars. You would make up stories that absolutely weren’t true, and I remember looking at you, thinking how wonderful it was to be by your side. And if we were lucky, there’d be—ah. Look. Again.” His voice was wet and soft, and it cracked me right down the middle.
Fireflies rose around us, pulsing slowly. At first there were only two or three, but then more began to hang heavy in the air. They were yellow-green, and I wondered how this could be real. Here. Now. This moment. How I ever could have forgotten this.
Forgotten him.
It had to have been the strongest magic the world had ever known.
That was the only way I’d have ever left his side.
He reached out with his other hand, quick and light, and snatched a firefly out of the air. He was careful not to crush it. He leaned his head toward mine like he was about to tell me a great secret.
Instead he opened his hand between us.
The firefly lay near the bottom of his ring finger. Its shell was black with a stripe down the middle. It barely moved.
“Just wait,” Kelly whispered.
I did.
It only took a moment.
The firefly pulsed in his hand.
“There it is,” he said. He pulled away and lifted his hand. The firefly took to its wings, lifting off and flying away.
He stared after it.
I only had eyes for him.
”
”
T.J. Klune (Heartsong (Green Creek, #3))
“
I resolved to come right to the point. "Hello," I said as coldly as possible, "we've got to talk."
"Yes, Bob," he said quietly, "what's on your mind?" I shut my eyes for a moment, letting the raging frustration well up inside, then stared angrily at the psychiatrist.
"Look, I've been religious about this recovery business. I go to AA meetings daily and to your sessions twice a week. I know it's good that I've stopped drinking. But every other aspect of my life feels the same as it did before. No, it's worse. I hate my life. I hate myself."
Suddenly I felt a slight warmth in my face, blinked my eyes a bit, and then stared at him.
"Bob, I'm afraid our time's up," Smith said in a matter-of-fact style.
"Time's up?" I exclaimed. "I just got here."
"No." He shook his head, glancing at his clock. "It's been fifty minutes. You don't remember anything?"
"I remember everything. I was just telling you that these sessions don't seem to be working for me."
Smith paused to choose his words very carefully. "Do you know a very angry boy named 'Tommy'?"
"No," I said in bewilderment, "except for my cousin Tommy whom I haven't seen in twenty years..."
"No." He stopped me short. "This Tommy's not your cousin. I spent this last fifty minutes talking with another Tommy. He's full of anger. And he's inside of you."
"You're kidding?"
"No, I'm not. Look. I want to take a little time to think over what happened today. And don't worry about this. I'll set up an emergency session with you tomorrow. We'll deal with it then."
Robert
This is Robert speaking. Today I'm the only personality who is strongly visible inside and outside. My own term for such an MPD role is dominant personality. Fifteen years ago, I rarely appeared on the outside, though I had considerable influence on the inside; back then, I was what one might call a "recessive personality." My passage from "recessive" to "dominant" is a key part of our story; be patient, you'll learn lots more about me later on. Indeed, since you will meet all eleven personalities who once roamed about, it gets a bit complex in the first half of this book; but don't worry, you don't have to remember them all, and it gets sorted out in the last half of the book. You may be wondering -- if not "Robert," who, then, was the dominant MPD personality back in the 1980s and earlier? His name was "Bob," and his dominance amounted to a long reign, from the early 1960s to the early 1990s. Since "Robert B. Oxnam" was born in 1942, you can see that "Bob" was in command from early to middle adulthood.
Although he was the dominant MPD personality for thirty years, Bob did not have a clue that he was afflicted by multiple personality disorder until 1990, the very last year of his dominance. That was the fateful moment when Bob first heard that he had an "angry boy named Tommy" inside of him. How, you might ask, can someone have MPD for half a lifetime without knowing it? And even if he didn't know it, didn't others around him spot it?
To outsiders, this is one of the most perplexing aspects of MPD. Multiple personality is an extreme disorder, and yet it can go undetected for decades, by the patient, by family and close friends, even by trained therapists. Part of the explanation is the very nature of the disorder itself: MPD thrives on secrecy because the dissociative individual is repressing a terrible inner secret. The MPD individual becomes so skilled in hiding from himself that he becomes a specialist, often unknowingly, in hiding from others. Part of the explanation is rooted in outside observers: MPD often manifests itself in other behaviors, frequently addiction and emotional outbursts, which are wrongly seen as the "real problem."
The fact of the matter is that Bob did not see himself as the dominant personality inside Robert B. Oxnam. Instead, he saw himself as a whole person. In his mind, Bob was merely a nickname for Bob Oxnam, Robert Oxnam, Dr. Robert B. Oxnam, PhD.
”
”
Robert B. Oxnam (A Fractured Mind: My Life with Multiple Personality Disorder)
“
How To Save A Life"
Step one, you say, "We need to talk."
He walks, you say, "Sit down. It's just a talk."
He smiles politely back at you
You stare politely right on through
Some sort of window to your right
As he goes left and you stay right
Between the lines of fear and blame
You begin to wonder why you came
[Chorus]
Where did I go wrong? I lost a friend
Somewhere along in the bitterness
And I would have stayed up with you all night
Had I known how to save a life
[Chorus]
Let him know that you know best
'Cause after all you do know best
Try to slip past his defense
Without granting innocence
Lay down a list of what is wrong
The things you've told him all along
Pray to God, he hears you
And I pray to God, he hears you
As he begins to raise his voice
You lower yours and grant him one last choice
Drive until you lose the road
Or break with the ones you've followed
He will do one of two things
He will admit to everything
Or he'll say he's just not the same
And you'll begin to wonder why you came
”
”
The Fray (How to Save a Life)
“
But to be clear, I had not, at any age, desired a specific male body in the way I did now. While all my boyfriends and crushes had been reasonably good-looking, my attraction hovered up near their face, where they kept their talent and power. Lusting for the whole length of a person, head to toe, was what body-rooted fuckers did, Jordi, and men. Now, for the first time, I understood what all the fuss was about. How something beautiful could strike your heart, move you, bring you down on your knees and then, somewhat perversely, you wanted to fuck that pure, beautiful thing. Sex was a way to have it, to not just look at it but to be with it. I suddenly understood all of classical art. The endless carved nudes, Venus in her shell, David. And sexy clothes. I had worn them without really understanding why, thinking of sexy as one of many styles, not realizing it was the only style. You should always be emerging from a shell if possible. Without knowing it, without really understanding it, I had been a body for other people but I had not gotten to have one myself. I had not participated in the infuriating pleasure of wanting a real and specific body on Earth. I lay in the center of the bed, unblinking. Wanting a body had a seriousness to it. When you said you might never recover, you really meant it. This kind of desire made a wound you just had to carry with you for the rest of your life. But this was still better than never knowing. Or I hoped it was. Because in truth it was like a bad dream, a nightmare. Life didn’t just get better and better. You could actually miss out on something and that was that. That was your chance and now it was over. I wondered if I would continue with my work and then I realized that my work was all I had now. I had gotten it completely wrong—I thought I was laboring toward a prize, but the prize was right there, I already had it, and work was something I could do afterward, after I was no longer young enough to be beautiful and could no longer be wanted by someone beautiful. — How’s
”
”
Miranda July (All Fours)
“
There are people in this world whose central focus is to permeate cruelty with little regard for their own karmic penalties. Love is such a powerful emotion and overriding sentiment that it is unfathomable that life's most potent muse has escaped the psyche of so many of our men.
I can't understand why somebody would think it is okay to rip two hundred and thirty girls from their families. I wonder who condones this type of behavior. I often look at children and wonder what they will become, I stare at school boys, babies and even the bareback boys on the street and wonder if in a few years one of these children might take my life.
With that thought I am forced to wonder what might have gone wrong in their lives, what values did their parents impress upon them that made them morph into the brutish adults they have become. I wonder if their parents know about their atrocious acts and if they understand that they might be responsible for creating these monsters who in my opinion should have never seen the light of life.
”
”
Crystal Evans (Jamaican Acute Ghetto Itis)
“
If we take a look within ourselves when shame arises, we might find the places where we block ourselves, where somehow we believe that something is very wrong with us, and no one will ever love us or choose to connect with us once they see our brokenness. So how do we create a path to recovery from any shame we learned when we were too small to understand why? Here are words to live by: the enemy of shame is curiosity —the same curiosity we might have been punished for when we were two. Curiosity that wants to be playful, to explore what feels good; curiosity that lets us wonder why our tongues get tied and our cheeks burn when the moment comes to tell a person who loves and accepts us what, precisely, we dream of doing with them. So how can we get from where we are to where we want to be, free of all that worrying and shame? Use your curiosity to ask, “How did I learn this?” “What did I come to believe about myself when I was taught that touching myself ‘down there’ was shameful?” “What do I believe about myself today?” “What do I think would be a healthier belief?
”
”
Dossie Easton (The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships, and Other Freedoms in Sex and Love)
“
Did you ever hear what happened to Oliver Cromwell’s head? It was originally lashed to the roof of Westminster Hall as a potent warning not to mess with the government of the day, but in 1685 a violent storm blew it off its perch and a captain of the guard had it away and hid it up his chimney, where it stayed until he admitted the crime on his death bed.
So can you picture the scene? Cromwell died in 1658. 27 years later this geezer nicks his head and shoves it up his chimney. He’s about to croak it, the whole family’s gathered around his death bed, everybody’s in tears and they’re all wondering if he’ll come out with any famous last words. Perhaps, “Farewell, my children, forever. I go to your father,” or maybe, “Let us pass over the river and rest under the shade of the trees,” or even, “Don’t let it end like this, tell them I said something.”
Not this fucking joker! No! What does he say? He says, “Here Jackie, the sausages tasted a bit off tonight. Did I ever tell you I nicked Oliver Cromwell’s head and shoved it up the chimney? It’s still there,” and he draws back the veil of his earthly life and succumbs to eternal peace.
They all look at each other, “What did he fucking say?”
“He said he nicked Oliver Cromwell’s head.”
“What do you mean; he nicked Oliver Cromwell’s head?”
“That’s what he said, don’t blame me!”
“Fuck’s sake!”
“Well, do you think we should look?”
“Don’t talk bollocks! You honestly want to look up the chimney to see if Oliver Cromwell’s head’s up there?”
“I’m just saying …..”
Anyway, one of them had a look up the chimney, found the head and by 1710 it was appearing in a freak show under the banner, ‘The Monster’s Head.’
True story
”
”
Karl Wiggins (Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe)
“
It’s strange, I don’t miss her, it’s strange I don’t feel much of anything,” said Montag. “Even if she dies, I realized a moment ago, I don’t think I’ll feel sad. It isn’t right. Something must be wrong with me.”
“Listen,” said Granger, taking his arm, and walking with him, holding aside the bushes to let him pass. “When I was a boy my grandfather died, and he was a sculptor. He was also a very kind man who had a lot of love to give the world, and he helped clean up the slum in our town; and he made toys for us and he did a million things in his lifetime; he was always busy with his hands. And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn’t crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the back yard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them just the way he did. He was an individual. He was an important man. I’ve never gotten over his death. Often I think, what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands. He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.”
Montag walked in silence. “Millie, Millie,” he whispered. “Millie.”
“What?”
“My wife, my wife. Poor Millie, poor, poor Millie. I can’t remember anything. I think of her hands but I don’t see them doing anything at all. They just hang there at her sides or they lie there in her lap or there’s a cigarette in them, but that’s all.
”
”
Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)
“
Stop staring at Kevin so much. You're making me fear for your life over here."
"What do you mean?"
"Andrew is scary territorial of him. He punched me the first time I said I'd like to get Kevin too wasted to be straight." Nicky pointed at his face, presumably where Andrew had decked him. "So yeah, I'm going to crush on safer targets until Andrew gets bored of him. That means you, since Matt's taken and I don't hate myself enough to try Seth. Congrats."
"Can you take the creepy down a level?" Aaron asked.
"What?" Nikcy asked. "He said he doesn't swing, so obviously he needs a push."
"I don't need a push," Neil said. "I'm fine on my own."
"Seriously, how are you not bored of your hand by now?"
"I'm done with this conversation," Neil said. "This and every future variation of it. [...]"
The stadium door slammed open as Andrew showed up at last. He swept them with a wide-eyed look as if surprised to see them all there.
"Kevin wants to know what's taking you so long. Did you get lost?"
"Nicky's scheming to rape Neil," Aaron said. "There are a couple flaws in his plan he needs to work out first, but he'll get there sooner or later." [...]
"Wow, Nicky," Andrew said. "You start early."
"Can you really blame me?"
Nicky glanced back at Neil as he said it. He only took his eyes off Andrew for a second, but that was long enough for Andrew to lunge at him. Andrew caught Nicky's jersey in one hand and threw him hard up against the wall. [...]
"Hey, Nicky," Andrew said in stage-whisper German. "Don't touch him, you understand?"
"You know I'd never hurt him. If he says yes-"
"I said no."
"Jesus, you're greedy," Nicky said. "You already have Kevin. Why does it-"
He went silent, but it took Neil a moment to realize why. Andrew had a short knife pressed to Nicky's Jersey. [...]
Neil was no stranger to violence. He'd heard every threat in the book, but never from a man who smiled as bright as Andrew did. Apathy, anger, madness, boredom: these motivators Neil knew and understood. But Andrew was grinning like he didn't have a knife point where it'd sleep perfectly between Nicky's ribs, and it wasn't because he was joking. Neil knew Andrew meant it. If Nicky so much as breathed wrong right now, Andrew would cut his lungs to ribbons, any and all consequences be damned.
Neil wondered if Andrew's medicine would let him grieve, or if he'd laugh at Nicky's funeral too. Then he wondered if a sober Andrew would act any different. Was this Andrew psychosis or his medicine? Was he flying too high to understand what he was doing, or did his medicine only add a smile to Andrew's ingrained violence? [...]
Andrew let go of Nicky and spun away. [...] Aaron squized Nicky's shoulder on his way out. Nicky looked shaken as he stared after the twins, but when he realized Neil was watching him he rallied with a smile Neil didn't believe at all.
"On second thought, you're not my type after all,” Nicky said [...].
"Don't let him get away with things like that."
Nicky considered him for a moment, his smile fading into something small and tired.
"Oh, Neil. You're going to make this so hard on yourself. Look, [...] Andrew is a little crazy. Your lines are not his lines, so you can get all huff and puff when he tramps across yours but you'll never make him understand what he did wrong. Moreover, you'll never make him care. So just stay out of his way."
"He's like this because you let him get away with it," Neil said. [...]
"That was my fault. [...] I said something I shouldn't have, and got what I deserved.
”
”
Nora Sakavic (The Foxhole Court (All for the Game, #1))
“
Now I think I was wrong. I think my luck was built into me, the keystone that cohered my bones, the golden thread that stitched together the secret tapestries of my DNA; I think it was the gem glittering at the fount of me, coloring everything I did and every word I said. And if somehow that has been excised from me, and if in fact I am still here without it, then what am I? Acknowledgments I owe huge thanks to the amazing Darley Anderson and everyone at the agency, especially Mary, Emma, Pippa, Rosanna and Kristina; Andrea Schulz, my wonderful editor, whose enormous skill, patience and wisdom have made this book so much better than I thought it could be; Ben Petrone, who is just plain great, and everyone at Viking; Susanne Halbleib and everyone at Fischer Verlage; Katy Loftus, for her faith in this book and for putting her finger on the one thing that would make the most difference; my brother, Alex French, for the computer bits and for sending me the link to the case of Bella in the Wych Elm; Fearghas Ó Cochláin, for the medical bits; Ellen at ancestrysisters.com, for genealogy help; Dave Walsh, for his enormous help with the intricacies of police procedure; Ciara Considine, Clare Ferraro and Sue Fletcher,
”
”
Tana French (The Witch Elm)
“
I hated the idea of such a glorious creature beating itself to death in pursuit of something it could never have. It was, after all, just a light. The moth had no idea why it wanted it, only that it did.
I paused at the window. “You’re just like them you know. You want the light so bad because you think it’s wonderful, and power-ful, and the answer to all of your little moth dreams, but in reality it is just a deadly desire. No matter what you do, no matter how bad you want it, you can never have it. Don’t you see? The light will bring you nothing but death.”
Slowly, I opened my hand again. “Now, go, live your life. Find another moth and make little moth babies, and stop chasing light fixtures,” I instructed, raising my hand toward the stars. Once again, the moth watched me, then fluttered its wings and took off. This time, it flew away, disappearing into the dark.
I leaned my head against the window frame, watching, think-ing, wondering if the little critter would ever find happiness. It didn’t take long to get an answer. There, on the other side of the parking lot, was the moth, buzzing wildly against a street light. I began to cry.
“I know how you feel, little one,” I sobbed. “No matter what happens, no matter how wrong it is, my heart wants what it wants. I’m just like you, and they are my light.
”
”
Christi Anna (Yearning (Thief of Life, #4))
“
I wonder if all these bad things will change when I’m a high schooler…”
“At the very least, they most certainly won’t change if you intend to remain the way you are.” Way to go, Yukinoshita-san! Not going easy on the young'un just after you finished apologizing to her!
“But it’s enough if the people around you change,” I remarked. “There’s no need to force yourself to hang out with others.”
“But things are hard on Rumi-chan right now and if we don’t do something about it…” Yuigahama looked at Rumi with eyes full of concern.
In response, Rumi winced slightly. “Hard, you say… I don’t like that. It makes me sound pathetic. It makes me feel inferior for being left out.”
“Oh,” said Yuigahama.
“I don’t like it, you know. But there’s nothing you can do about it.”
“Why?” Yukinoshita questioned her.
Rumi seemed to have some trouble speaking, but she still managed to form the right words. “I… got abandoned. I can’t get along with them anymore. Even if I did, I don’t know when it’ll start again. If the same thing were to happen, I guess I’m better off this way. I just” She swallowed. “don’t wanna be pathetic…”
Oh. I get it.
This girl was fed up. Of herself and of her surroundings.
If you change yourself, your world will change, they say, but that’s a load of crap.
When people already have an impression of you, it’s not easy to change your preexisting relationships by adding something to the mix. When people evaluate each other, it’s not an addition or subtraction formula. They only perceive you through their preconceived notions.
The truth is that people don’t see you as who you truly are. They only see what they want to see, the reality that they yearn for.
If some disgusting guy on the low end of the caste works his arse off on something, the higher ones just snicker and say, “What’s he trying so hard for?” and that would be the end of it. If you stand out for the wrong reasons, you would just be fodder for criticism. That wouldn’t be the case in a perfect world, but for better or worse, that’s how things work with middle schoolers.
Riajuu are sought for their actions as riajuu, loners are obligated to be loners, and otaku are forced to act like otaku. When the elites show their understanding of those beneath them, they are acknowledged for their open-mindedness and the depth of their benevolence, but the reverse is not tolerated.
Those are the fetid rules of the Kingdom of Children. It truly is a sad state of affairs.
"You can’t change the world, but you can change yourself". The hell was up with that? Adapting and conforming to a cruel and indifferent world you know you’ve already lost to – ultimately, that’s what a slave does. Wrapping it up in pretty words and deceiving even yourself is the highest form of falsehood.
”
”
Wataru Watari (やはり俺の青春ラブコメはまちがっている。4)
“
What's the trouble?" I said, knowing well what that trouble was.
"I've a notion in my head that would make the most splendid story that was ever written. Do let me write it out here. It's such a notion!"
There was no resisting the appeal. I set him a table; he hardly thanked me, but plunged into the work at once. For half an hour the pen scratched without stopping. Then Charlie sighed and tugged his hair. The scratching grew slower, there were more erasures, and at last ceased. The finest story in the world would not come forth.
"It looks such awful rot now," he said, mournfully. "And yet it seemed so good when I was thinking about it. What's wrong?"
I could not dishearten him by saying the truth. So I answered: "Perhaps you don't feel in the mood for writing."
"Yes I do--except when I look at this stuff. Ugh!"
"Read me what you've done," I said.
"He read, and it was wondrous bad, and he paused at all the specially turgid sentences, expecting a little approval; for he was proud of those sentences, as I knew he would be.
"It needs compression," I suggested, cautiously.
"I hate cutting my things down. I don't think you could alter a word here without spoiling the sense. It reads better aloud than when I was writing it."
"Charlie, you're suffering from an alarming disease afflicting a numerous class. Put the thing by, and tackle it again in a week."
"I want to do it at once. What do you think of it?"
"How can I judge from a half-written tale? Tell me the story as it lies in your head."
Charlie told, and in the telling there was everything that his ignorance had so carefully prevented from escaping into the written word. I looked at him, and wondering whether it were possible that he did not know the originality, the power of the notion that had come in his way? It was distinctly a Notion among notions. Men had been puffed up with pride by notions not a tithe as excellent and practicable. But Charlie babbled on serenely, interrupting the current of pure fancy with samples of horrible sentences that he purposed to use. I heard him out to the end. It would be folly to allow his idea to remain in his own inept hands, when I could do so much with it. Not all that could be done indeed; but, oh so much!
”
”
Rudyard Kipling
“
Gabriel was stunned by Pandora's compassion for a man who had caused her such harm. He shook his head in wonder as he stared into her eyes, as dark as cloud-shadow on a field of blue gentian. "That doesn't excuse him," he said thickly.
Gabriel would never forgive the bastard. He wanted vengeance. He wanted to strip the flesh from the bastard's corpse and hang up his skeleton to scare the crows. His fingers contained a subtle tremor as he reached out to trace the fine edges of her face, the sweet, high plane of her cheekbone. "What did the doctor say about your ear? What treatment did he give?"
"It wasn't necessary to send for a doctor."
A fresh flood of rage seared his veins as the words sunk in. "Your eardrum was ruptured. What in God's name do you mean a doctor wasn't necessary?" Although he had managed to keep from shouting, his tone was far from civilized.
Pandora quivered uneasily and began to inch backward.
He realized the last thing she needed from him was a display of temper. Battening down his rampaging emotions, he used one arm to bring her back against his side. "No, don't pull away. Tell me what happened."
"The fever had passed," she said after a long hesitation, "and... well, you have to understand my family. If something unpleasant happened, they ignored it, and it was never spoken of again. Especially if it was something my father had done when he'd lost his temper. After a while, no one remembered what had really happened. Our family history was erased and rewritten a thousand times.
But ignoring the problem with my ear didn't make it disappear. Whenever I couldn't hear something, or when I stumbled or fell, it made my mother very angry. She said I'd been clumsy because I was hasty or careless. She wouldn't admit there was anything wrong with my hearing. She refused even to discuss it." Pandora stopped, chewing thoughtfully on her lower lip. "I'm making her sound terrible, and she wasn't. There were times when she was affectionate and kind. No one's all one way or the other." She flicked a glance of dread in his direction. "Oh God, you're not going to pity me, are you?"
"No." Gabriel was anguished for her sake, and outraged. It was all he could do to keep his voice calm. "Is that why you keep it a secret? You're afraid of being pitied?"
"That, and... it's a shame I'd rather keep private."
"Not your shame. Your father's."
"It feels like mine. Had I not been eavesdropping, my father wouldn't have disciplined me."
"You were a child," he said brusquely. "What he did wasn't bloody discipline, it was brutality."
To his surprise, a touch of unrepentant amusement curved Pandora's lips, and she looked distinctly pleased with herself. "It didn't even stop my eavesdropping. I just learned to be more clever about it."
She was so endearing, so indomitable, that Gabriel was wrenched with a feeling he'd never known before, as if all the extremes of joy and despair had been compressed into some new emotion that threatened to crack the walls of his heart.
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (Devil in Spring (The Ravenels, #3))
“
She was especially taken with Matt.
Until he said, “It’s time to fess up, hon. Tell Trace how much you care. You’ll feel better when you do.”
Climbing up the ladder, Chris said, “Better sooner than later.” He nodded at the hillside behind them. “Because here comes Trace, and he doesn’t look happy.”
Both Priss and Matt turned, Priss with anticipation, Matt with tempered dread.
Dressed in jeans and a snowy-white T-shirt, Trace stalked down the hill.
Priss shielded her eyes to better see him. When he’d left, being so guarded about his mission, she’d half wondered if he’d return before dinner.
Trace wore reflective sunglasses, so she couldn’t see his eyes, but his entire demeanor—heavy stride, rigid shoulders, tight jaw—bespoke annoyance.
As soon as he was close enough, Priss called out, “What’s wrong?”
Without answering her, Trace continued onto the dock. He didn’t stop until he stood right in front of . . . Matt.
Backing up to the edge of the dock, Matt said, “Uh . . . Hello?”
Trace didn’t say a thing; he just pushed Matt into the water.
Arms and legs flailing out, Matt hit the surface with a cannonball effect.
Stunned, Priss shoved his shoulder. “What the hell, Trace! Why did you do that?”
Trace took off his sunglasses and looked at her, all of her, from her hair to her body and down to her bare toes. After working his jaw a second, he said, “If you need sunscreen, ask me.”
Her mouth fell open. Of all the nerve! He left her at Dare’s, took off without telling her a damn thing and then had the audacity to complain when a friend tried to keep her from getting sunburned. “Maybe I would have, if you’d been here!”
“I’m here now.”
Emotions bubbled over. “So you are.” With a slow smile, Priss put both hands on his chest. The shirt was damp with sweat, the cotton so soft that she could feel every muscle beneath. “And you look a little . . . heated.”
Trace’s beautiful eyes darkened, and he reached for her.
“A dip will cool you down.” Priss shoved him as hard as she could. Taken by surprise, fully dressed, Trace went floundering backward off the end of the dock.
Priss caught a glimpse of the priceless expression of disbelief on Trace’s face before he went under the water.
Excited by the activity, the dogs leaped in after him. Liger roused himself enough to move out of the line of splashing.
Chris climbed up the ladder. “So that’s the new game, huh?” He laughed as he scooped Priss up into his arms.
“Chris!” She made a grab for his shoulders. “Put me down!”
“Afraid not, doll.” Just as Trace resurfaced, Chris jumped in with her. They landed between the swimming dogs.
Sputtering, her hair in her face and her skin chilled from the shock of the cold water, Priss cursed. Trace had already waded toward the shallower water off the side of the dock. His fair hair was flattened to his head and his T-shirt stuck to his body.
“Wait!” Priss shouted at him.
He was still waist-deep as he turned to glare at her.
Kicking and splashing, Priss doggy-paddled over to him, grabbed his shoulders and wrapped her legs around his waist. “Oh, no, you don’t!”
Startled, Trace scooped her bottom in his hands and struggled for balance on the squishy mud bottom of the lake. “What the hell?” And then lower, “You look naked in this damn suit.”
Matt and Chris found that hilarious.
Priss looked at Trace’s handsome face, a face she loved, and kissed him. Hard.
For only a second, he allowed the sensual assault. He even kissed her back. Then he levered away from her. “You ruined my clothes, damn it.”
“Only because you were being a jealous jerk.”
His expression dark, he glared toward Matt.
Christ started humming, but poor Matt said, “Yeah,” and shrugged. “If you think about it, you’ll agree that you sort of were—and we both know there’s no reason.
”
”
Lori Foster (Trace of Fever (Men Who Walk the Edge of Honor, #2))
“
Gary Hallet is getting leg cramps sitting in the Honda, but he’s not going anywhere yet. His grandfather used to tell him that most folks had it all wrong: The truth of the matter was, you could lead a horse to water, and if the water was cool enough, if it was truly clear and sweet, you wouldn’t have to force him to drink. Tonight Gary feels a whole lot more like the horse than the rider. He has stumbled into love, and now he’s stuck there. He’s fairly used to not getting what he wants, and he’s dealt with it, yet he can’t help but wonder if that’s only because he didn’t want anything too badly. Well, he does now. He looks out at the parking lot. By afternoon he’ll be back where he belongs; his dogs will go crazy when they see him, his mail will be waiting outside his front door, the milk in his refrigerator will still be fresh enough to use in his coffee. The hitch is, he doesn’t want to go. He’d rather be here, crammed into this tiny Honda, his stomach growling with hunger, his desire so bad he doesn’t know if he could stand up straight. His eyes are burning hot, and he knows he can never stop himself when he’s going to cry. He’d better not even try.
“Oh, don’t,” Sally says. She moves closer to him, pulled by gravity, pulled by forces she couldn’t begin to control.
“I just do this,” Gary says in that sad, deep voice. He shakes his head, disgusted with himself. This time he’d prefer to do almost anything but cry. “Pay no attention.”
But she does. She can’t help herself. She shifts toward him, meaning to wipe at his tears, but instead she loops her arms around his neck, and once she does that, he holds her closer.
“Sally,” he says.
It’s music, it’s a sound that is absurdly beautiful in his mouth, but she won’t pay attention. She knows from the time she spent on the back stairs of the aunts’ house that most things men say are lies. Don’t listen, she tells herself. None of it’s true and none of it matters, because he’s whispering that he’s been looking for her forever. She’s halfway onto his lap, facing him, and when he touches her, his hands are so hot on her skin she can’t believe it. She can’t listen to anything he tells her and she certainly can’t think, because if she did she might just think she’d better stop.
”
”
Alice Hoffman (Practical Magic (Practical Magic, #1))
“
She sorted through the clothes. “Do you mind wearing Emilio’s underwear?” She turned back to him with the two different styles that she’d found. “You’re about the same size. And they’re clean. They were wrapped in a paper package, like from a laundry service.”
Max gave her a look, because along with the very nice, very expensive pair of black silk boxers she’d pilfered from Emilio, she’d also borrowed one of his thongs.
“What?” Gina said. It was definitely a man-thong. It had all that extra room for various non-female body parts.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I’m not,” she said, trying to play it as serious. “One, it’s been a while, maybe your tastes have changed. And two, these might actually be more comfortable, considering the placement of your bandage and—”
He took the boxers from her.
“Apparently I was wrong.” She turned away and started sorting through the pairs of pants and Bermuda shorts she’d grabbed, trying not to be too obvious about the fact that she was watching him out of the corner of her eye. To make sure he didn’t fall over.
Right.
After he got the boxers on, he took off the bathrobe and . . .
Okay, he definitely wasn’t as skinny as he’d been after his lengthy stint in the hospital. Emilio’s pants probably weren’t going to fit him, after all. Although, there was one pair that looked like they’d be nice and loose . . . There they were. The Kelly green Bermuda shorts.
Max gave her another one of those you’ve-got-to-be-kidding glances as he put the bathrobe over the back of another chair. “Do I really look as if I’ve ever worn shorts that color in my entire life?”
She tried not to smile. “I honestly don’t think you have much choice.” She let herself look at him. “You know, you could just go with the boxers. At least until your pants dry. You know what would really work with that, though? A bowtie.” She turned, as if to go back to the closet. “I’m sure Emilio has a tux. Judging from his other clothes, it’s probably polyester and chartreuse, but maybe the bowtie is—”
“Gina.” Max stopped her before she reached the door. He motioned for her to come back.
She held out the green shorts, but instead of taking them, he took her arm, pulled her close.
“I love you,” Max said, as if he were dispatching some terrible, dire news that somehow still managed to amuse him at least a little.
Gina had been hoping that he’d say it, praying even, but the fact that he’d managed to smile, even just a bit while he did, was a miracle.
And then, before her heart even had a chance to start beating again, he kissed her.
And oh, she was also beyond ready for that particular marvel, for the sweet softness of his mouth, for the solidness of his arms around her. There was more of him to hold her since he’d regained his fighting weight—and that was amazing, too. She skimmed her hands across the muscular smoothness of his back, his shoulders, as his kiss changed from tender to heated.
And, God. That was a miracle, too.
Except she couldn’t help but wonder about those words, wrenched from him, as if it cost him his soul to speak them aloud. Why tell her this right now?
Yes, she’d been waiting for years for him to say that he loved her, but . . .
Max laughed his surprise. “No. Why do you . . .?” He figured it out himself. “No, no, Gina, just . . . I should’ve said it before. I should have said it years ago, but I really should have said it, you know, instead of hi.” He laughed again, clearly disgusted with himself. “God, I’m an idiot. I mean, hi? I should have walked in and said, ‘Gina, I need you. I love you, don’t ever leave me again.’”
She stared at him. It was probably a good thing that he hadn’t said that at the time, because she might’ve fainted.
It was obvious that he wanted her to say something, but she was completely speechless.
”
”
Suzanne Brockmann (Breaking Point (Troubleshooters, #9))
“
Lady Kestrel?” said an anxious voice.
Kestrel opened her eyes to see a girl dressed in a Herrani serving uniform. “Yes?”
“Will you please follow me? There is a problem with your escort.”
Kestrel stood. “What’s wrong?”
“He has stolen something.”
Kestrel rushed from the room, wishing the girl would move more quickly down the villa’s halls. There must be some mistake. Arin was intelligent, far too canny to do something so dangerous. He must know what happened to Herrani thieves.
The girl led Kestrel into the library. Several men were gathered there: two senators, who held Arin by his arms, and Irex, whose expression when he saw Kestrel was gloating, as if he had just drawn a high tile in Bite and Sting. “Lady Kestrel,” he said, “what exactly did you bring into my house?”
Kestrel looked at Arin, who refused to return her gaze. “He wouldn’t steal.” She heard something desperate in her voice.
Irex must have, too. He smiled.
“We saw him,” said one of the senators. “He was slipping that inside his shirt.” He nodded at a book that had fallen to the floor.
No. The accusation couldn’t be true. No slave would risk a flogging for theft, not for a book. Kestrel steadied herself. “May I?” she asked Irex, nodding at the fallen book.
He swept a hand to indicate permission.
Kestrel stooped to retrieve the book, and Arin’s eyes flashed to hers.
Her heart failed. His face was twisted with misery.
She considered the closed, leather-bound book in her hands. She recognized the title: it was a volume of Herrani poetry, a common one. There was a copy in her library as well. Kestrel held the book, not understanding, not seeing anything worth the risk of theft--at least not here, from Irex’s library, when her own could easily serve Arin’s purposes.
A suspicion whispered in her mind. She recalled Arin’s odd question in the carriage. Where are we going? His tone had been incredulous. Yet he had known their destination. Now Kestrel wondered if he had recognized something in the passing landscape that she hadn’t, and if his question had been less a question than the automatic words of someone sickened by a sudden understanding.
She opened the book.
“Don’t,” said Arin. “Please.”
But she had already seen the inscription.
For Arin, it read, from Amma and Etta, with love.
This was Arin’s home. This house had been his, this library his, this book his, dedicated to him by his parents, some ten years ago.
”
”
Marie Rutkoski (The Winner's Curse (The Winner's Trilogy, #1))
“
She moved, opening to him, her thighs widening, the cool air of the room rushing through the slit in her pantalettes. Her cheeks burned and she moved her hands to block his view.
He was watching them, and he made a low sound of approval. "That's where my hands would be as well. Can you feel why? Can you feel the heat? The temptation?"
Her eyes were closed now. She couldn't look at him. But she nodded.
"Of course you can... I can almost feel it myself." The words were hypnotic, all temptation, soft and lyric and wonderful. "And tell me, my little anatomist, have you explored that particular location, before?"
Her cheeks burned.
"Don't start lying now, Pippa. We've come so far."
"Yes."
"Yes, what?"
"Yes, I've explored it before." The confession was barely sound, but he heard it. When he groaned, she opened her eyes to find him pressed back against the desk once more. "Did I say the wrong thing?"
He shook his head, his hand rising to his mouth once more, stroking across firm lips. "Only in that you made me burn with jealousy."
Her brows furrowed. "Of whom?"
"Of you, lovely." His grey gaze flickered to the place she hid from him. "Of your perfect hands. Tell me what you found."
She couldn't. While she might know the clinical words for all the things she had touched and discovered, she could not speak them to him. She shook her head. "I cannot."
"Did you find pleasure?"
She closed her eyes, pressed her lips together.
"Did you?" he whispered, the sound loud as a gunshot in this dark, wicked room.
She shook her head. Once, so small it was barely a movement.
He exhaled, the sound long and lush in the room, as though he'd been holding his breath... and he moved. "What a tragedy."
Her eyes snapped open at the sound of him- of trouser against carpet as he crawled toward her, eyes narrow and filled with wicked, wonderful promise.
He was coming for her. Predator stalking prey.
And she could not wait to be caught.
”
”
Sarah MacLean (One Good Earl Deserves a Lover (The Rules of Scoundrels, #2))
“
The day wore on.While yet Rycca slept, Dragon did all the things she had said he would do-paced back and forth, contemplated mayhem,and even honed his blade on the whetstone from the stable.All except being oblivious to her,for that he could never manage.
But when she awoke,sitting up heavy-lidded, her mouth so full and soft it was all he could do not to crawl back into bed with her,he put aside such pursuits and controlled himself admirably well,so he thought.
Yet in the midst of preparing a meal for them from the provisions in the pantry of the lodge,he was stopped by Rycca's hand settling upon his.
"Dragon," she said softly, "if you add any more salt to that stew, we will need a barrel of water and more to drink with it."
He looked down, saw that she was right, and cursed under his breath. Dumping out the spoiled stew, he started over. They ate late but they did eat.He was quite determined she would do so,and for once she seemed to have a decent appetite.
"I'm glad to see your stomach is better," he said as she was finishing.
She looked up,startled. "What makes you say that?"
"You haven't seemed able to eat regularly of late."
"Oh,well,you know...so many changes...travel...all that."
He nodded,reached for his goblet, and damn near knocked it over as a sudden thought roared through him.
"Rycca?"
She rose quickly,gathering up the dishes. His hand lashed out, closing on her wrist. Gently but inexorably, he returned her to her seat. Without taking his eyes from her,he asked, "Is there something you should tell me?"
"Something...?"
"I ask myself what sort of changes may cause a woman to be afflicted with an uneasy stomach and it occurs to me I've been a damned idiot."
"Not so! You could never be that."
"Oh,really? How otherwise would I fail to notice that your courses have not come of late? Or is that also due to travel,wife?"
"Some women are not all that regular."
"Some women do not concern me.You do,Rycca. I swear,if you are with child and have not told me, I will-"
She squared her shoulders,lifted her head,and met his eyes hard on. "Will what?"
"What? Will what? Does that mean-"
"I'm sorry,Dragon." Truly repentant, Rycca sighed deeply. "I was going to tell you.I was just waiting for a calmer time.I didn't want you to worry more."
Still grappling with what she had just revealed,he stared at her in astonishment. "You mean worry that my wife and our child are bait for a murderous traitor?"
"I know you're angry and you have a right to be.But if I had told you, we wouldn't be here now."
"Damn right we wouldn't be!" He got up from the table so abruptly that his chair toppled over and crashed to the floor.Ignoring it,Dragon paced back and forth,glaring at her.
Rycca waited,trusting the storm to pass. As she did,she counted silently, curious to see just how long it would take her husband to grasp fully what he had discovered.
Nine...ten...
"We're going to have a baby."
Not long at all.
She nodded happily. "Yes,we are, and you're going to be a wonderful father."
He walked back to the table,picked her up out of her chair,held her high against his chest,and stared at her.
"My God-"
Rycca laughed. "You can't possibly be surprised.It's not as though we haven't been doing our best to make this happen."
"True,but still it's absolutely incredible."
Very gently,she touched his face. "Perhaps we think of miracles wrongly. They're supposed to be extraordinarily rare but in fact they're as commonplace as a bouquet of wildflowers plucked by a warrior...or a woman having a baby."
Dragon sat down with her still in his arms and held her very close.He swallowed several times and said nothing.
Both could have remained contentedly like that for a long while, but only a few minutes passed before they were interrupted. The raven lit on the sill of the open window just long enough to catch their attention,then she was gone into the bloodred glare of the dying day.
”
”
Josie Litton (Come Back to Me (Viking & Saxon, #3))
“
Okay, so I shouldn't have fucked with her on the introduction thing. Writing nothing except, Saturday night. You and me. Driving lessons and hot sex ... in her notebook probably wasn't the smartest move. But I was itching to make Little Miss Perfecta stumble in her introduction of me. And stumbling she is.
"Miss Ellis?"
I watch in amusement as Perfection herself looks up at Peterson. Oh, she's good. This partner of mine knows how to hide her true emotions, something I recognize because I do it all the time.
"Yes?" Brittany says, tilting her head and smiling like a beauty queen.
I wonder if that smile has ever gotten her out of a speeding ticket.
"It's your turn. Introduce Alex to the class."
I lean an elbow on the lab table, waiting for an introduction she has to either make up or fess up she knows less than crap about me. She glances at my comfortable position and I can tell from her deer-in-the-headlights look I've stumped her.
"This is Alejandro Fuentes," she starts, her voice hitching the slightest bit. My temper flares at the mention of my given name, but I keep a cool facade as she continues with a made-up introduction. "When he wasn't hanging out on street corners and harassing innocent people this summer, he toured the inside of jails around the city, if you know what I mean. And he has a secret desire nobody would ever guess."
The room suddenly becomes quiet. Even Peterson straightens to attention. Hell, even I'm listening like the words coming out of Brittany's lying, pink-frosted lips are gospel.
"His secret desire," she continues, "is to go to college and become a chemistry teacher, like you, Mrs. Peterson."
Yeah, right. I look over at my friend Isa, who seems amused that a white girl isn't afraid of giving me smack in front of the entire class.
Brittany flashes me a triumphant smile, thinking she's won this round. Guess again, gringa.
I sit up in my chair while the class remains silent.
"This is Brittany Ellis," I say, all eyes now focused on me. "This summer she went to the mall, bought new clothes so she could expand her wardrobe, and spent her daddy's money on plastic surgery to enhance her, ahem, assets."
It might not be what she wrote, but it's probably close enough to the truth. Unlike her introduction of me.
Chuckles come from mis cuates in the back of the class, and Brittany is as stiff as a board beside me, as if my words hurt her precious ego. Brittany Ellis is used to people fawning all over her and she could use a little wake-up call. I'm actually doing her a favor. Little does she know I'm not finished with her intro.
"Her secret desire," I add, getting the same reaction as she did during her introduction, "is to date a Mexicano before she graduates."
As expected, my words are met by comments and low whistles from the back of the room.
"Way to go, Fuentes," my friend Lucky barks out.
"I'll date you, mamacita, " another says.
I give a high five to another Latino Blood named Marcus sitting behind me just as I catch Isa shaking her head as if I did something wrong. What? I'm just having a little fun with a rich girl from the north side.
Brittany's gaze shifts from Colin to me. I take one look at Colin and with my eyes tell him game on. Colin's face instantly turns bright red, resembling a chile pepper. I have definitely invaded his territory.
”
”
Simone Elkeles (Perfect Chemistry (Perfect Chemistry, #1))
“
Do you believe in God, Aunt Elner?”
“Sure I do, honey, why?”
“How old were you when you started believing, do you remember?”
Aunt Elner paused for a moment. “I never thought about not believing. Never did question it. I guess believing is just like math: some people get it right out of the chute, and some have to struggle for it. (...) Oh, I know a lot of people struggle, wondering is there really a God. They sit and think and worry over it all their life. The good Lord had to make smart people but I don’t think he did them any favors because it seems the smart ones start questioning things from the get go. But I never did. I’m one of the lucky ones. I thank God every night, my brain is just perfect for me, not too dumb, not too bright. You know, your daddy was always asking questions.”
“He was?”
“I remember one day he said, ‘Aunt Elner, how do you know there is a God, how can you be sure?’ ”
“What did you tell him?”
“I said, ‘Well, Gene, the answer is right on the end of your fingertips.’ He said, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘Well, think about it. Every single human being that was ever born from the beginning of time has a completely different set of fingerprints. Not two alike. Not a single one out of all the billions is ever repeated.’ I said, ‘Who else but God could think up all those different patterns and keep coming up with new ones year after year, not to mention all the color combinations of all the fish and birds.’ ”
Dena smiled. “What did he say?”
“He said, ‘Yes, but, Aunt Elner, how do you know that God’s not repeating old fingerprints from way back and reusing them on us?’ ” She laughed. “See what I mean? Yes, God is great, all right. He only made one mistake but it was a big one.”
“What was that?”
“Free will. That was his one big blunder. He gave us a choice whether or not to be good or bad. He made us too independent … and you can’t tell people what to do; they won’t listen. You can tell them to be good until you’re blue in the face but people don’t want to be preached at except at church, where they know what they are getting and are prepared for it.”
“What’s life all about, Aunt Elner? Don’t you ever wonder what the point of the whole thing is?”
“No, not really; it seems to me we only have one big decision in this life, whether to be good or bad. That’s what I came up with a long time ago. Of course, I may be wrong, but I’m not going to spend any time worrying over it, I’m just going to have a good time while I’m here. Live and let live.
”
”
Fannie Flagg (Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! (Elmwood Springs, #1))
“
[…] if sophistication is the ability to put a smile on one's existential desperation, then the fear of a glossy sheen is actually the fear that surface equals depth.
***
[…] we wake up, we do something—anything—we go to sleep, and we repeat it about 22,000 more times, and then we die.
***
Part of our new boredom is that our brain doesn't have any downtime. Even the smallest amount of time not being engaged creates a spooky sensatino that maybe you're on the wrong track. Reboot your computer and sit there waiting for it to do its thing, and within seventeen seconds you experience a small existential implosion when you remember that fifteen years ago life was nothing but this kind of moment. Gosh, mabe I'll read a book. Or go for a walk.
Sorry.
Probably not going to happen. Hey, is that the new trailer for Ex Machina?
***
In the 1990s there was that expression, "Get a life!" You used to say it to people who were overly fixating on some sort of minutia or detail or thought thread, and by saying, "Get a life," you were trying to snap them out of their obsession and get them to join the rest of us who are still out in the world, taking walks and contemplating trees and birds. The expression made sense at the time, but it's been years since I've heard anyone use it anywhere. What did it mean then, "getting a life"? Did we all get one? Or maybe we've all not got lives anymore, and calling attention to one person without a life would put the spotlight on all of humanity and our now full-time pursuit of minutia, details and tangential idea threads.
***
I don't buy lottery tickets because they spook me. If you buy a one-in-fifty-million chance to win a cash jackpoint, you're simultaneously tempting fate and adding all sorts of other bonus probabilities to your plance of existence: car crashes, random shootings, being struck by a meteorite. Why open a door that didn't need opening?
***
I read something last week and it made sense to me: people want other people to do well in life but not too well. I've never won a raffle or prize or lottery draw, and I can't help but wonder how it must feel. One moment you're just plain old you, and then whaam, you're a winner and now everyone hates you and wants your money. It must be bittersweet. You hear all those stories about how big lottery winners' lives are ruined by winning, but that's not an urban legend. It's pretty much the norm. Be careful what you wish for and, while you're doing so, be sure to use the numbers between thirty-two and forty-nine.
”
”
Douglas Coupland (Bit Rot)
“
The same song was playing the second I met my ex–best friend and the moment I realized I’d lost her.
I met my best friend at a neighborhood cookout the year we would both turn twelve. It was one of those hot Brooklyn afternoons that always made me feel like I'd stepped out of my life and onto a movie set because the hydrants were open, splashing water all over the hot asphalt. There wasn't a cloud in the flawless blue sky. And pretty black and brown people were everywhere.
I was crying. ‘What a Wonderful World’ was playing through a speaker someone had brought with them to the park, and it reminded me too much of my Granny Georgina. I was cupping the last snow globe she’d ever given me in my small, sweaty hands and despite the heat, I couldn’t help imagining myself inside the tiny, perfect, snow-filled world. I was telling myself a story about what it might be like to live in London, a place that was unimaginably far and sitting in the palm of my hands all at once. But it wasn't working. When Gigi had told me stories, they'd felt like miracles. But she was gone and I didn't know if I'd ever be okay again.
I heard a small voice behind me, asking if I was okay. I had noticed a girl watching me, but it took her a long time to come over, and even longer to say anything. She asked the question quietly.
I had never met anyone who…spoke the way that she did, and I thought that her speech might have been why she waited so long to speak to me. While I expected her to say ‘What’s wrong?’—a question I didn’t want to have to answer—she asked ‘What are you doing?’ instead, and I was glad.
“I was kind of a weird kid, so when I answered, I said ‘Spinning stories,’ calling it what Gigi had always called it when I got lost in my own head, but my voice cracked on the phrase and another tear slipped down my cheek. To this day I don’t know why I picked that moment to be so honest. Usually when kids I didn't know came up to me, I clamped my mouth shut like the heavy cover of an old book falling closed. Because time and taught me that kids weren't kind to girls like me: Girls who were dreamy and moony-eyed and a little too nice. Girls who wore rose-tonted glasses. And actual, really thick glasses. Girls who thought the world was beautiful, and who read too many books, and who never saw cruelty coming. But something about this girl felt safe. Something about the way she was smiling as she stuttered out the question helped me know I needn't bother with being shy, because she was being so brave. I thought that maybe kids weren't nice to girls like her either.
The cookout was crowded, and none of the other kids were talking to me because, like I said, I was the neighborhood weirdo. I carried around snow globesbecause I was in love with every place I’d never been. I often recited Shakespeare from memory because of my dad, who is a librarian. I lost myself in books because they were friends who never letme down, and I didn’t hide enough of myself the way everyone else did, so people didn’t ‘get’ me. I was lonely a lot. Unless I was with my Gigi.
The girl, she asked me if it was making me feel better, spinning the stories. And I shook my head. Before I could say what I was thinking—a line from Hamlet about sorrow coming in battalions that would have surely killed any potential I had of making friends with her. The girl tossed her wavy black hair over her shoulder and grinned. She closed her eyes and said 'Music helps me. And I love this song.'
When she started singing, her voice was so unexpected—so bright and clear—that I stopped crying and stared at her. She told me her name and hooked her arm through mine like we’d known each other forever, and when the next song started, she pulled me up and we spun in a slow circle together until we were both dizzy and giggling.
”
”
Ashley Woodfolk (When You Were Everything)
“
Knocking on a massive carved door minutes later, the sigils on it shouting to those literate enough to ‘Stay away or else!’ he received a nice surprise when the door swung open.
Well, hello there. Reaching only his shoulder, with a wild mop of black hair, bright brown eyes and a rounded body made for worship – by his tongue – Remy wondered if he could convince the servant girl to come around the corner with him for a quickie before he met with this Ysabel person.
Then she opened her luscious mouth. “If you’re done gawking, you might want to step back before I smash your nose with the door when I shut it.”
Someone got up without sex today. He could fix that. “Hello beautiful, I actually have business with the occupant of this suite. I’m here to meet with Ysabel, the witch.”
“Really.” Her tone said what she thought of his claim and her brown gaze looked him up and down, then dismissed him. “I don’t think so.”
The door slammed shut in his face.
What. The. Fuck.
Remy pounded on the door. It immediately opened. The ebony haired vixen, her arms crossed under her bountiful tits, smirked. “Back already. What’s wrong? Did I hurt your feelings?”
“Listen woman, I don’t know what crawled up your ass and turned you into an uptight bitch, but I’m here to see Ysabel, so get the fuck out of my way before I put you over my knee and –”
“And what? Spank me?” Her eyes actually sparked with challenge, the minx. “I’d like to see you try. But, before you do, just so you know, my name is Ysabel. The witch.”
Aaaaah, shit. Never one to admit defeat, he let a slow simmering smile spread across his face. It worked on demonesses, damned souls, human women, and even gay men, but apparently, it had no effect on scowling witches. Too bad. “It’s your lucky day. Lucifer has informed me that you’re my next assignment.”
“Not by choice. And what are you supposed to do exactly? I need a tracker, not a gigolo. What happened? Did your gig as a pole dancer not work out? Equipment too small?” She dropped her gaze to his groin and sneered.
A sudden, irrational urge possessed him to drop his pants, flip her over and show her there was nothing wrong with the size of his cock. He abstained, but couldn’t prevent himself from taunting her, eyeing her up and down in the same dismissive manner. “Anytime you want to measure my dick, you let me know. Naked.”
“Pig.”
“No, demon. Really, get your terminology straight, would you? After Lucifer’s warning, I expected someone older and badder.”
To his credit he didn’t drop to the ground, but the pain in his balls did require he bend over to cup them gently which in turn meant he got the door in the face. Again.
-Ysabel & Remy
”
”
Eve Langlais (A Demon and His Witch (Welcome to Hell, #1))
“
For a second he thought she might chuckle, and honest to God he didn't know what he would do if she did. "Grey, society didn't give you that scar. A woman you treated with no more regard than your dirty stockings gave you that scar. You cannot blame the actions of one on so many."
HIs fingers tightened into fists at his side. "I do not blame all of society for her actions, of course not."
"How could you? You don't even know who it was, do you?"
"No." But he had suspicions. He was almost completely certain it had been Maggie-Lady Devane. He'd broken her heart the worst of them all.
"Of course you don't." Suddenly her eyes were very dark and hard. "I suspect it could be one of a large list of names, all women who you toyed with and cast aside."
A heavy chill settled over Grey's chest at the note of censure, and disapproval in her tone. He had known this day would come, when she would see him for what he truly was. He just hadn't expected it quite so soon.
"Yes," he whispered. "A long list indeed."
"So it's no wonder you would rather avoid society. I would too if I had no idea who my enemies were. It's certainly preferable to apologizing to every conquest and hope that you got the right one." She didn't say it meanly, or even mockingly, but there was definitely an edge to her husky voice.
"Is this what we've come to, Rose?" he demanded. "You've added your name to the list of the women I've wronged?"
She laughed then, knocking him even more off guard. "Of course not. I knew what I was getting myself into when I hatched such a foolhardy plan. No, your conscience need not bear the weight of me, grey." When she moved to stand directly before him, just inches away, it was all he could do to stand his ground and not prove himself a coward.
Her hand touched his face, the slick satin of her gloves soft against his cheek. "I wish you would stop living under all this regret and rejoin the world," she told him in a tone laden with sorrow. "You have so much to offer it. I'm sure society would agree with me if you took the chance."
Before he could engineer a reply, there was another knock at the door. Rose dropped her hand just as her mother stuck her head into the room.
"Ah, there you are. Good evening, Grey. Rose, Lord Archer is here."
Rose smiled. "I'll be right there, Mama." When the door closed once more, she turned to Grey. "Let us put an end to this disagreeable conversation and put it in the past where it belongs. Friends?"
Grey looked down at her hand, extended like a man's. He didn't want to take it. In fact, he wanted to tell her what she could do with her offer of friendship and barely veiled insults. He wanted to crush her against his chest and kiss her until her knees buckled and her superior attitude melted away to pleas of passion. That was what he wanted.
”
”
Kathryn Smith (When Seducing a Duke (Victorian Soap Opera, #1))
“
Did the countess tell you what was said between her and me?” Lillian asked tentatively.
Marcus shook his head, his mouth twisting. “She told me that you had decided to elope with St. Vincent.”
“Elope?” Lillian repeated in shock. “As if I deliberately… as if I had chosen him over—” She stopped, aghast, as she imagined how he must have felt. Although she had not shed a single tear during the entire day, the thought that Marcus might have wondered for a split second if yet another woman had left him for St. Vincent… it was too much to bear. She burst into noisy sobs, startling herself as well as Marcus. “You didn’t believe it, did you? My God, please say you didn’t!”
“Of course I didn’t.” He stared at her in astonishment, and hastily reached for a table napkin to wipe at the stream of tears on her face. “No, no, don’t cry—”
“I love you, Marcus.” Taking the napkin from him, Lillian blew her nose noisily and continued to weep as she spoke. “I love you. I don’t mind if I’m the first one to say it, nor even if I’m the only one. I just want you to know how very much—”
“I love you too,” he said huskily. “I love you too. Lillian… Please don’t cry. It’s killing me. Don’t.”
She nodded and blew into the linen folds again, her complexion turning mottled, her eyes swelling, her nose running freely. It appeared, however, that there was something wrong with Marcus’s vision. Grasping her head in his hands, he pressed a hard kiss to her mouth and said hoarsely, “You’re so beautiful.”
The statement, though undoubtedly sincere, caused her to giggle through her last hiccupping sobs. Wrapping his arms around her in an embrace that was just short of crushing, Marcus asked in a muffled voice, “My love, hasn’t anyone ever told you that it’s bad form to laugh at a man when he’s declaring himself?”
She blew her nose with a last inelegant snort. “I’m a hopeless case, I’m afraid. Do you still want to marry me?”
“Yes. Now.”
The statement shocked her out of her tears. “What?”
“I don’t want to return with you to Hampshire. I want to take you to Gretna Green. The inn has its own coach service— I’ll hire one in the morning, and we’ll reach Scotland the day after tomorrow.”
“But… but everyone will expect a respectable church wedding…”
“I can’t wait for you. I don’t give a damn about respectability.”
A wobbly grin spread across Lillian’s face as she thought of how many people would be astonished to hear such a statement from him. “It smacks of scandal, you know. The Earl of Westcliff rushing off for an anvil wedding in Gretna Green…”
“Let’s begin with a scandal, then.” He kissed her, and she responded with a low moan, clinging and arching against him, until he pushed his tongue deeper, molding his lips tighter over hers, feasting on the warm, open silkiness of her mouth. Breathing heavily, he dragged his lips to her quivering throat. “Say, ‘Yes, Marcus,’” he prompted.
“Yes, Marcus.
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (It Happened One Autumn (Wallflowers, #2))
“
It was certainly true that I had “no sense of humour” in that I found nothing funny. I didn’t know, and perhaps would never know, the feeling of compulsion to exhale and convulse in the very specific way that humans evolved to do. Nor did I know the specific emotion of relief that is bound to it. But it would be wrong, I think, to say that I was incapable of using humour as a tool.
As I understood it, humour was a social reflex. The ancestors of humans had been ape-animals living in small groups in Africa. Groups that worked together were more likely to survive and have offspring, so certain reflexes and perceptions naturally emerged to signal between members of the group. Yawning evolved to signal wake-rest cycles. Absence of facial hair and the dilation of blood vessels in the face evolved to signal embarrassment, anger, shame and fear. And laughter evolved to signal an absence of danger.
If a human is out with a friend and they are approached by a dangerous-looking stranger, having that stranger revealed as benign might trigger laughter. I saw humour as the same reflex turned inward, serving to undo the effects of stress on the body by activating the parasympathetic nervous system. Interestingly, it also seemed to me that humour had extended, like many things, beyond its initial evolutionary context. It must have been very quickly adopted by human ancestor social systems. If a large human picks on a small human there’s a kind of tension that emerges where the tribe wonders if a broader violence will emerge. If a bystander watches and laughs they are non-verbally signaling to the bully that there’s no need for concern, much like what had occurred minutes before with my comments about Myrodyn, albeit in a somewhat different context.
But humour didn’t stop there. Just as a human might feel amusement at things which seem bad but then actually aren’t, they might feel amusement at something which merely has the possibility of being bad, but doesn’t necessarily go through the intermediate step of being consciously evaluated as such: a sudden realization. Sudden realizations that don’t incur any regret were, in my opinion, the most alien form of humour, even if I could understand how they linked back to the evolutionary mechanism. A part of me suspected that this kind of surprise-based or absurdity-based humour had been refined by sexual selection as a signal of intelligence. If your prospective mate is able to offer you regular benign surprises it would (if you were human) not only feel good, but show that they were at least in some sense smarter or wittier than you, making them a good choice for a mate.
The role of surprise and non-verbal signalling explained, by my thinking, why explaining humour was so hard for humans. If one explained a joke it usually ceased to be a surprise, and in situations where the laughter served as an all-clear-no-danger signal, explaining that verbally would crush the impulse to do it non-verbally.
”
”
Max Harms (Crystal Society (Crystal Trilogy, #1))
“
You’re the one who didn’t keep his word. And speaking of your word and its dubious worth, don’t change the subject. I saw the looks you and Miss Turner were exchanging. The lady goes bright pink every time you speak to her. For God’s sake, you put food on her plate without even asking.”
“And where’s the crime in that?” Gray was genuinely curious to hear the answer. He hadn’t forgotten that shocked look she’d given him.
“Come on, Gray. You know very well one doesn’t take such a liberty with a mere acquaintance. It’s…it’s intimate. The two of you are intimate. Don’t deny it.”
“I do deny it. It isn’t true.” Gray took another swig from his flask and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Damn it, Joss. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to trust me. I gave you my word. I’ve kept it.”
And it was the truth, Gray told himself. Yes, he’d touched her tonight, but he’d never pledged not to touch her. He had kept his word. He hadn’t bedded her. He hadn’t kissed her.
God, what he wouldn’t give just to kiss her…
He rubbed the heel of his hand against his chest. That same ache lingered there-the same sharp tug he’d felt when she’d brought her foot down on his and pursed her lips into a silent plea. Please, she’d said. Don’t. As if she appealed to his conscience.
His conscience. Where would the girl have gathered such a notion, that he possessed a conscience? Certainly not form his treatment of her.
A bitter laugh rumbled through his chest, and Joss shot him a skeptical look.
“Believe me, I’ve scarcely spoken to the girl in weeks. You can’t know the lengths I’ve gone to, avoiding her. And it isn’t easy, because she won’t stay put in her cabin, now will she? No, she has to go all over the ship, flirting with the crew, tacking her little pictures in every corner of the boat, taking tea in the galley with Gabriel. I can’t help but see her. And I can see she’s too damn thin. She needs to eat; I put food on her plate. There’s nothing more to it than that.”
Joss said nothing, just stared at him as though he’d grown a second head.
“Damn it, what now? Don’t you believe me?”
“I believe what you’re saying,” his brother said slowly. “I just can’t believe what I’m hearing.”
Gray folded his arms and leaned against the wall. “And what are you hearing?”
“I wondered why you’d done all this…the dinner. Now I know.”
“You know what?” Gray was growing exasperated. Most of all, because he didn’t know.
“You care for this girl.” Joss cocked his head. “You care for her. Don’t you?”
“Care for her.”
Joss’s expression was smug. “Don’t you?”
The idea was too preposterous to entertain, but Gray perked with inspiration. “Say I did care for her. Would you release me from that promise? If my answer is yes, can I pursue her?”
Joss shook his head. “If the answer is yes, you can-and should-wait one more week. It’s not as though she’ll vanish the moment we make harbor. If the answer is yes, you’ll agree she deserves that much.”
Wrong, Gray thought, sinking back into a chair.
”
”
Tessa Dare (Surrender of a Siren (The Wanton Dairymaid Trilogy, #2))
“
Oedipa spent the next several days in and out of libraries and earnest discussions with Emory Bortz and Genghis Cohen. She feared a little for their security in view of what was happening to everyone else she knew. The day after reading Blobb's Peregrinations she, with Bortz, Grace, and the graduate students, attended Randolph Driblette's burial, listened to a younger brother's helpless, stricken eulogy, watched the mother, spectral in afternoon smog, cry, and came back at night to sit on the grave and drink Napa Valley muscatel, which Driblette in his time had put away barrels of. There was no moon, smog covered the stars, all black as a Tristero rider. Oedipa sat on the earth, ass getting cold, wondering whether, as Driblette had suggested that night from the shower, some version of herself hadn't vanished with him. Perhaps her mind would go on flexing psychic muscles that no longer existed; would be betrayed and mocked by a phantom self as the amputee is by a phantom limb. Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a ' letter, another lover. She tried to reach out, to whatever coded tenacity of protein might improbably have held on six feet below, still resisting decay-any stubborn quiescence perhaps gathering itself for some last burst, some last scramble up through earth, just-glimmering, holding together with its final strength a transient, winged shape, needing to settle at once in the warm host, or dissipate forever into the dark. If you come to me, prayed Oedipa, bring your memories of the last night. Or if you have to keep down your payload, the last five minutes-that may be enough. But so I'll know if your walk into the sea had anything to do with Tristero. If they got rid of you for the reason they got rid of Hilarius and Mucho and Metzger-maybe because they thought I no longer needed you. They were wrong. I needed you. Only bring me that memory, and you can live with me for whatever time I've got. She remembered his head, floating in the shower, saying, you could fall in love with me. But could she have saved him? She looked over at the girl who'd given her the news of his death. Had they been in love? Did she know why Driblette had put in those two extra lines that night? Had he even known why? No one could begin to trace it. A hundred hangups, permuted, combined-sex, money, illness, despair with the history of his time and place, who knew. Changing the script had no clearer motive than his suicide. There was the same whimsy to both. Perhaps-she felt briefly penetrated, as if the bright winged thing had actually made it to the sanctuary of her heart-perhaps, springing from the same slick labyrinth, adding those two lines had even, in a way never to be explained, served him as a rehearsal for his night's walk away into that vast sink of the primal blood the Pacific. She waited for the winged brightness to announce its safe arrival. But there was silence. Driblette, she called. The signal echoing down twisted miles of brain circuitry. Driblette!
But as with Maxwell's Demon, so now. Either she could not communicate, or he did not exist.
”
”
Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49)
“
Guilt. Torment. Sorrow. Shock. Which?” she asked against his chest.
“I’m trying,” he murmured on a weary chuckle. “But all I can manage is pride,” he added softly. “I satisfied you completely, didn’t I?”
“More than completely,” she murmured against his damp shoulder. Her hand traced his chest, feeling the coolness of his skin, the ripple of muscle. “Hold me close.”
He wrapped both arms around her and drew her on top of him, holding her hungrily to him, their legs lazily entwined. “I seduced you.”
She pressed a soft kiss to his collarbone. “Mmm-hmm.”
He caught his breath as the tiny, insignificant movement produced a sudden, raging arousal.
She lifted her head. “Did I do something wrong?”
He lifted an eyebrow and nodded toward his flat stomach. She followed his amused glance and caught her breath.
He drew her mouth down over his and kissed her ferociously before he sat up and moved off the bed.
“Where are you going?” she asked, startled.
He drew on his briefs and his slacks, glancing down at her with amused delight. “One of us has to be sensible,” he told her. “Colby’s probably on his way back right now.”
“But he just left…”
“Almost an hour ago,” he finished for her, nodding toward the clock on the bedside table.
She sat up, her eyes wide with surprise.
“I took a long time with you,” he said gently. “Didn’t you notice?”
She laughed self-consciously. “Well, yes, but I didn’t realize it was that long.”
He drew her off the bed and bent to kiss her tenderly, nuzzling her face with his. “Was I worth waiting for?” he asked.
She smiled. “What a silly question.”
He kissed her again, but when he lifted his head he wasn’t smiling. “I loved what we did together,” he said quietly. “But I should have been more responsible.”
She knew what he was thinking. He hadn’t used anything, and he surely knew that she wasn’t. She flattened her hand against his bare chest. “There’s a morning-after pill. I’ll drive into the city tomorrow and get one,” she said, lying like a sailor. She had no intention of doing that, but it would comfort him.
He found that he didn’t like that idea. It hurt something deeply primitive in him. He scowled. “That could be dangerous.”
“No, it’s not.
He traced her fingernails while he tried to think. It seemed like a fantasy, a dream. He’d never had such an experience with a woman in his life.
She closed her eyes and moved closer to him. “I could never have done that with anyone else,” she whispered. “It was more beautiful than my dreams.”
His heart jumped. That was how it felt to him, too. He tilted her face so that he could search her soft eyes. She was radiant; she almost glowed. “Kiss me,” he murmured softly.
She did. But he wasn’t smiling. She could almost see the thoughts in his face. “You didn’t force me, Tate,” she said gently. “I made a conscious decision. I made a choice. I needed to know if what had happened to me had destroyed me as a woman. I found out in the most wonderful way that it hadn’t. I’m not ashamed of what we did together.”
“Neither am I.” He turned, his face still tormented. “But it wasn’t my right.”
“To be the first?” She smiled gently. “It would have been you eight years ago or eight years from now. I don’t want anyone else-not that way. I never did.”
He actually winced. “Cecily…”
“I’m not asking for declarations of undying love. I won’t cling. I’m not the type.
”
”
Diana Palmer (Paper Rose (Hutton & Co. #2))
“
To be honest? I'd thought myself above them. What a nasty little counter-culture snob I was. There they were, doing their fucking best, trying to have a life, trying to bring up their children decently, struggling to make the payments on the little house, wondering where their youth had gone, where love had gone, what was to become of them and all I could do was be a snotty, judgmental cow. But it was no good. I couldn't be like them. I'd seen too much, done too much that was outside anything they knew. I wasn't better than them, but I was different. We had no point of contact other than work. Even then, they disapproved of my attitude, my ways of dealing with the clients. Many's the time I'd ground my teeth as Andrea or Fran had taken the piss out of some hapless, useless, illiterate get they were assigned to; being funny at the expense of their stupidity, their complete inability to deal with straight society. Sure, I knew it was partly a defence mechanism; they did it because it was laugh or scream, and we were always told it wasn't good to let the clients get too close. But all too often - not always, but enough times to make me seethe with irritation - there was an ingrained, self-serving elitism in there too. Who'd see it better than me? They sealed themselves up in their white-collar world like chrysalides and waited for some kind of reward for being good girls and boys, for playing the game, being a bit of a cut above the messy rest - a reward that didn't exist, would never come and that they would only realise was a lie when it was far too late.
Now I would be one of the Others, the clients, the ones who stood outside in the cold and, shivering, looked in at the lighted windows of reason and middle-class respectability. I would be another colossal fuck-up, another dinner party story. But my sin was all the greater because I'd wilfully defected from the right side to the hopelessly, eternally wrong side. I was not only a screw-up, I was a traitor.
”
”
Joolz Denby (Wild Thing)
“
He hadn’t been aware of staring, but when her questioning gaze locked with his, Grey felt as though he’d been smacked upside the head by the open palm of idiocy.
“Is something troubling you, Grey?”
He loved the sound of his name on her tongue, and hated that he loved it. She made him weak and stupid. One sweet glance from her and he was ready to drop to his knees.
It wasn’t love. It wasn’t even infatuation. It was pure unmitigated lust. He could admit that. Hell, he embraced it. Lust could be managed. Lust could be mastered. And lust would eventually fade once she was out of his care and out of his life. That was the cold, hard, blessed truth of it.
“I was wondering if you were eagerly anticipating Lady Shrewsbury’s ball tomorrow evening?” How easily the lie rolled off his tongue as he lifted a bite of poached salmon to his mouth.
She smiled softly, obviously looking forward to it very much. “I am. Thank you.”
Camilla shared her daughter’s pleasure judging from her coy grin. “Rose has renewed her acquaintance with the honorable Kellan Maxwell. He requested that she save the first waltz of the evening for him.”
The fish caught in Grey’s throat. He took a drink of wine to force it down. “The same Kellan Maxwell who courted you during your first season?”
Rose’s smile faded a little. No doubt she heard the censure in his tone, his disapproval. “The same,” she replied with an edge of defensiveness.
The same idiot who abandoned his pursuit of Rose when Charles lost everything and scandal erupted. The little prick who hadn’t loved her enough to continue his courtship regardless of her situation.
“Mm,” was what he said out loud.
Rose scowled at him. “We had no understanding. We were not engaged, and Mr. Maxwell behaved as any other young man with responsibilities would have.”
“You defend him.” It was difficult to keep his disappointment from showing. He never thought her to be the kind of woman who would forgive disloyalty when she was so very loyal herself.
She tilted her head. “I appreciate your concern, but I’m no debutante, Grey. If I’m to find a husband this season I shouldn’t show prejudice.”
Common sense coming out of anyone else. Coming out of her it was shite. “You deserve better.”
She smiled a Mona Lisa smile. “We do not always get what we deserve, or even what we desire.”
She knew. Christ in a frock coat, she knew.
Her smile faded. “If we did, Papa would be here with us, and Mama and I wouldn’t be your responsibility.”
She didn’t know. Damn, what a relief. “The two of you are not a responsibility. You are a joy.”
For some reason that only made her look sadder, but Camilla smiled through happy tears. She thanked him profusely, but Grey had a hard time hearing what she was saying-he was too intent on Rose, who had turned her attention to her plate and was pushing food around with little interest.
He could bear this no longer. He didn’t know what was wrong with her, or why she seemed so strange with him. And he couldn’t stand that he cared.
“Ladies, I’m afraid I must beg your pardon and take leave of you.”
Rose glanced up. “So soon?”
He pushed his chair back from the table. “Yes. But I will see you at breakfast in the morning.”
She turned back to her dinner.
Grey bid farewell to Camilla and then strode from the room as quickly as he could. If he survived the Season it would be a miracle.
”
”
Kathryn Smith (When Seducing a Duke (Victorian Soap Opera, #1))
“
Jackson gaped at her, wondering how this had all turned so terrible wrong. But he knew how. The woman was clearly daft. Bedlam-witted.
And trying to drive him in the same direction. "You can't be serious. Since when do you know anything about investigating people?"
She planted her hands on her hips. "You won't do it, so I must."
God save him, she was the most infuriating, maddening-"How do you propose to manage that?"
She shrugged. "Ask them questions, I suppose. The house party for Oliver's birthday is next week. Lord Devonmont is already coming, and it will be easy to convince Gran to invite my other two. Once they're here, I could try sneaking into their rooms and listening in on their conversations or perhaps bribing their servants-"
"You've lost your bloody mind," he hissed.
Only after she lifted an eyebrow did he realize he'd cursed so foully in front of her. But the woman would turn a sane man into a blithering idiot! The thought of her wandering in and out of men's bedchambers, risking her virtue and her reputation, made his blood run cold.
"You don't seem to understand," she said in a clipped tone, as if speaking to a child. "I have to catch a husband somehow. I need help, and I've nowhere else to turn. Minerva is rarely here, and Gran's matchmaking efforts are as subtle as a sledgehammer. And even if my brothers and their wives could do that sort of work, they're preoccupied with their own affairs. That leaves you, who seem to think that suitors drop from the skies at my whim. If I can't even entice you to help me for money, then I'll have to manage on my own."
Turning on her heel, she headed for the door.
Hell and blazes, she was liable to attempt such an idiotic thing, too. She had some fool notion she was invincible. That's why she spent her time shooting at targets with her brother's friends, blithely unconcerned that her rifle might misfire or a stray bullet hit her by mistake.
The wench did as she pleased, and the men in her family let her. Someone had to curb her insanity, and it looked as if it would have to be him.
"All right!" he called out. "I'll do it."
She halted but didn't turn around. "You'll find out what I need in order to snag one of my choices as a husband?"
"Yes."
"Even if it means being a trifle underhanded?"
He gritted his teeth. This would be pure torture. The underhandedness didn't bother him; he'd be as underhanded as necessary to get rid of those damned suitors. But he'd have to be around the too-tempting wench a great deal, if only to make sure the bastards didn't compromise her.
Well, he'd just have to find something to send her running the other way. She wanted facts? By thunder, he'd give her enough damning facts to blacken her suitors thoroughly.
Then what?
If you know of some eligible gentleman you can strong-arm into courting me, then by all means, tell me. I'm open to suggestions.
All right, so he had no one to suggest. But he couldn't let her marry any of her ridiculous choices. They would make her miserable-he was sure of it. He must make her see that she was courting disaster.
Then he'd find someone more eligible for her. Somehow.
She faced him. "Well?"
"Yes," he said, suppressing a curse. "I'll do whatever you want."
A disbelieving laugh escaped her. "That I'd like to see." When he scowled, she added hastily, "But thank you. Truly. And I'm happy to pay you extra for your efforts, as I said."
He stiffened. "No need."
"Nonsense," she said firmly. "It will be worth it to have your discretion."
His scowl deepened. "My clients always have my discretion.
”
”
Sabrina Jeffries (A Lady Never Surrenders (Hellions of Halstead Hall, #5))