“
Your friend's poetry is terrible," he said.
Clary blinked, caught momentarily off guard. "What?"
"I said his poetry was terrible. It sounds like he ate a dictionary and started vomiting up words at random.
”
”
Cassandra Clare (City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments, #1))
“
After a while you'll think no thought the others do not think. You'll know no word the others can't say. And you'll do things because the others do them. You'll feel the danger in any difference whatever-a danger to the crowd of like-thinking, like-acting men...Once in a while there is a man who won't do what is demanded of him, and do you know what happens? The whole machine devotes itself coldly to the destruction of his difference. They'll beat your spirit and your nerves, your body and your mind, with iron rods until the dangerous difference goes out of you. And if you can't finally give in, they'll vomit you up and leave you stinking outside--neither part of themselves, nor yet free...They only do it to protect themselves. A thing so triumphantly illogical, so beautifully senseless as an army can't allow a question to weaken it.
”
”
John Steinbeck (East of Eden)
“
These words are vomit.
This shaky pen is my esophagus.
This sheet of paper is my porcelain bowl.
”
”
Tahereh Mafi (Shatter Me (Shatter Me, #1))
“
It's the injustice that I hate, more than anything," he'd said to Smee one night, his eyes red and glassy, slurring his words, his head lolling as he tried to focus. He'd vomited, and then promptly passed out on a bush. "I hate the world that does not work out fair.
”
”
Jodi Lynn Anderson (Tiger Lily)
“
Scramblers deactivated, then?
Well here's some good news.
You feel no pain.
You will go straight to a hospital. Remember nothing of this place.
And every time you hear the words "parsley", "intractable" or "longitude", you will vomit uncontrollably for forty-eight hours.
”
”
Joss Whedon (Astonishing X-Men, Vol. 1: Gifted)
“
I have in my mind an obscenity so great that I could vomit the most dreadful words and it wouldn’t be enough!
”
”
Georges Bataille (L'Abbé C)
“
I put my hand out and wiped the vomit from his lips, and cooed soothing words to him. It squeezed my heart to see him suffer like this - but where my genuine concern for him ended and where my self-interest began, I could not tell: no servant can ever tell what the motives of his heart are.
"Do we loathe our masters behind a facade of love - or do we love them behind a facade of loathing?
"We are made mysteries to ourselves by the Rooster Coop we are locked in.
”
”
Aravind Adiga (The White Tiger)
“
I said his poetry was terrible. It sounds like he ate a dictionary and started vomiting up words at random.
”
”
Cassandra Clare (City of Bones (The Mortal Instruments, #1))
“
Bethyl Ann has vomited words like she ate the dictionary.
”
”
Jennifer Archer (Through Her Eyes)
“
The pain is stronger than ever. I've seen bits of lost Paradises and I know I'll be hopelessly trying to return even if it hurts. The deeper I swing into the regions of nothingness the further I'm thrown back into myself, each time more and more frightening depths below me, until my very being becomes dizzy. There are brief glimpses of clear sky, like falling out of a tree, so I have some idea where I'm going, but there is still too much clarity and straight order of things, I am getting always the same number somehow. So I vomit out broken bits of words and syntaxes of the countries I've passed through, broken limbs, slaughtered houses, geographies. My heart is poisoned, my brain left in shreds of horror and sadness. I've never let you down, world, but you did lousy things to me.
(from "As I was moving ahead occasionally I saw brief glimpses of beauty", 2000)
”
”
Jonas Mekas
“
Have a day when you wish you could vomit words, but can only dry heave.
”
”
Brick Marlin
“
It was raining in the quadrangle, and the quadrangular sky looked like a grimace of a robot or a god made in our own likeness. The oblique drops of rain slid down the blades of grass in the park, but it would have made no difference if they had slid up. Then the oblique (drops) turned round (drops), swallowed up by the earth underpinning the grass, and the grass and the earth seemed to talk, no, not talk, argue, their comprehensible words like crystallized spiderwebs or the briefest crystallized vomitings, a barely audible rustling, as if instead of drinking tea that afternoon, Norton had drunk a steaming cup of peyote.
”
”
Roberto Bolaño (2666)
“
This was not me. I was spilling my guts, as some people called it; divulging. It was word vomit and Saphira Elgin had her fingers down my throat. I discovered that private things were mostly sour. They sat spoiling in the corners of your hear for so long that by the time you acknowledged them you were dealing with something rancid. And that's what I did; I threw every rotting thing at her, and she absorbed each one.
”
”
Tarryn Fisher (Mud Vein)
“
Even with her covered in vomit, close to her was the only place I wanted to be. Her words at the party replayed in my mind.
In another life, I could love you.
”
”
Jamie McGuire (Walking Disaster (Beautiful, #2))
“
Do you always talk this much?” he asks, his hard stare shifts gears to slightly amused. I swallow hard. “Yep. I have anxiety. The need to fill the silence with word vomit is one of the sexier side-effects. You don’t like it? I’ll be happy to be on my merry, babbling way.
”
”
T.M. Frazier (N9ne: The Tale of Kevin Clearwater (King, #9))
“
Mason knew what it was like to say things you didn’t mean, to just have them vomit out, and then feel that crushing ache when you realized you could never pull them back.
”
”
Dan Krokos (The Planet Thieves (The Planet Thieves, #1))
“
One thing that pisses me off royally is hearing drug companies denounced as the devil. I don't like giant corporations (or, in the words of Spalding Gray, "the big indifferent machine") any more than anyone else, but I really don't like wanting to kill myself. A person who denounces psychopharmaceuticals based on a political agenda is a person who has never lain crumpled in a ball in the closet, sobbing uncontrollably, face covered in Sharpie, throat raw from induced vomiting. Accordingly, that person should be thankful and shut the hell up.
”
”
Stacy Pershall (Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl)
“
Social media is basically standing at a bucket filled with other people’s vomit and you suck the vomit through a straw, and gag and wince at the unbearable taste of other people’s vomit. Yet strangely we continue to suck through the straw as if we’ve never tasted such lovely vomit. And then before you know it you’re old and you’re grey. And that’s the end of you. A lonely death. Your gravestone is marked with the six saddest words:
Social Media Drained My Soul Away
And they all mourn your loss at a budget funeral service while updating their social media statuses on mobile phones apps. And in years to come nobody remembers any of your updates; even those updates that you deep-down believed were going to bring about world peace. The Digital Age is more disposable than nappies and just as full of shit.
”
”
Rupert Dreyfus (The Rebel's Sketchbook)
“
Love that bore me I bear back to my Origin with no loss, I float over the vomiter
thrilled with my deathlessness, thrilled with this endlessness I dice and bury,
come Poet shut up eat my word, and taste my mouth in your ear.
”
”
Allen Ginsberg (Kaddish and Other Poems)
“
Sometimes when I’m nervous I talk too much and it’s just a bad case of word vomit.
”
”
Ella Maise (The Hardest Fall)
“
Safe Sex
If he and she do not know each other, and feel confident
they will not meet again; if he avoids affectionate words;
if she has grown insensible skin under skin; if they desire
only the tribute of another’s cry; if they employ each other
as revenge on old lovers or families of entitlement and steel—
then there will be no betrayals, no letters returned unread,
no frenzy, no hurled words of permanent humiliation,
no trembling days, no vomit at midnight, no repeated
apparition of a body floating face-down at the pond’s edge
”
”
Donald Hall
“
Title: Blue Light Lounge Sutra For The Performance Poets At Harold Park Hotel
the need gotta be
so deep words can't
answer simple questions
all night long notes
stumble off the tongue
& color the air indigo
so deep fragments of gut
& flesh cling to the song
you gotta get into it
so deep salt crystalizes on eyelashes
the need gotta be
so deep you can vomit up ghosts
& not feel broken
till you are no more
than a half ounce of gold
in painful brightness
you gotta get into it
blow that saxophone
so deep all the sex & dope in this world
can't erase your need
to howl against the sky
the need gotta be
so deep you can't
just wiggle your hips
& rise up out of it
chaos in the cosmos
modern man in the pepperpot
you gotta get hooked
into every hungry groove
so deep the bomb locked
in rust opens like a fist
into it into it so deep
rhythm is pre-memory
the need gotta be basic
animal need to see
& know the terror
we are made of honey
cause if you wanna dance
this boogie be ready
to let the devil use your head
for a drum
”
”
Yusef Komunyakaa
“
If we truly knew what the word love meant...we would never hurt others or ourselves. Never✌
Bullying Ben
”
”
Timothy Pina (Soul Vomit: Beating Down Domestic Violence)
“
Gray stood up and came round the desk. "Think of the words on that memorial, Wraysford. Think of those stinking towns and foul bloody villages whose names will be turned into some bogus glory by fat-arsed historians who have sat in London. We were there. As our punishment for God knows what, we were there, and our men died in each of those disgusting places. I hate their names. I hate the sound of them and the thought of them, which is why I will not bring myself to remind you. But listen." He put his face close to Stephen's. "There are four words they will chisel beneath them at the bottom. Four words that people will look at one day. When they read the other words they will want to vomit. When they read these, they will bow their heads, just a little. 'Final advance and pursuit.' Don't tell me you don't want to put your name to those words.
”
”
Sebastian Faulks (Birdsong)
“
Seasickness… is caused… by the disturbance… to the inner ear ” he said. “ You just need… to… look… at… the horizon…” His last words disappeared as he vomited violently over the side of the boat. “What’s wrong ” “Doctor Death is seasick.
”
”
Kate Forsyth (The Puzzle Ring)
“
I trained. I punished myself. I thought making myself suffer on a day-to-day basis would prepare me for climbing hard at high altitude. I slept on the floor. I carried ice in my bare hands. I beat them against the concrete just to see if I could handle it. I never missed an opportunity to train. I ran stairs until I vomited, then ran more.
I ruined relationships to get used to the feeling of failure and sacrifice (it was much easier than holding on). I trained in the gym on an empty diet to learn how far I could push myself without food or water. I imitated and plagiarized the heroes who lived and died before me. I spoke only strong words and ignored weakness at every turn. I subdued my fears. I was opinionated and direct. I became a man either well loved or truly hated. I was ready for anything.
”
”
Mark Twight (Kiss or Kill: Confessions of a Serial Climber)
“
Prince Humperdinck: First things first, to the death.
Westley: No. To the pain.
Prince Humperdinck: I don't think I'm quite familiar with that phrase.
Westley: I'll explain and I'll use small words so that you'll be sure to understand, you warthog faced buffoon.
Prince Humperdinck: That may be the first time in my life a man has dared insult me.
Westley: It won't be the last. To the pain means the first thing you will lose will be your feet below the ankles. Then your hands at the wrists. Next your nose.
Prince Humperdinck: And then my tongue I suppose, I killed you too quickly the last time. A mistake I don't mean to duplicate tonight.
Westley: I wasn't finished. The next thing you will lose will be your left eye followed by your right.
Prince Humperdinck: And then my ears, I understand let's get on with it.
Westley: WRONG. Your ears you keep and I'll tell you why. So that every shriek of every child at seeing your hideousness will be yours to cherish. Every babe that weeps at your approach, every woman who cries out, "Dear God! What is that thing," will echo in your perfect ears. That is what to the pain means. It means I leave you in anguish, wallowing in freakish misery forever.
Prince Humperdinck: I think you're bluffing.
Westley: It's possible, Pig, I might be bluffing. It's conceivable, you miserable, vomitous mass, that I'm only lying here because I lack the strength to stand. But, then again... perhaps I have the strength after all.
[slowly rises and points sword directly at the prince]
Westley: DROP... YOUR... SWORD!
”
”
-Princess Bride
“
the word humanism made me want to vomit,
”
”
Michel Houellebecq (Submission)
“
These words are vomit.
”
”
Tahereh Mafi (Shatter Me (Shatter Me, #1))
“
These words are vomit. This shaky pen is my esophagus. This sheet of paper is my porcelain bowl. “Why won’t you answer
”
”
Tahereh Mafi (Shatter Me (Shatter Me, #1))
“
Sorry—I get word vomit. You know, where you can’t stop talking? It’s like diarrhea, but vomit? You know?
”
”
Sara DiVello (Where in the OM Am I?)
“
It all came out like word vomit — inadequacy, embarrassment, insecurity, neediness, and an attempt at a joke. But this last fell flat.
”
”
Eric Gansworth (If I Ever Get Out of Here)
“
Word vomit is generally ~my~ thing
”
”
Mazey Eddings (Tilly in Technicolor)
“
That’s the trouble with hiding in your safe place and hearing but not hearing a verbal hammering. You do hear the words, and with the right trigger, all your feelings come out as word vomit or lava— a hot projectile that can’t be controlled at all.
”
”
Anne Bishop (Lake Silence (The World of the Others, #1; The Others, #6))
“
Seems like I can’t stop the word vomit when I’m with her. There’s just something about Ally that distracts me just enough to forget myself, beckoning my truth like a siren’s call. I just want to tell her…everything.
Maybe we were friends in a past life. Or lovers.
”
”
S.L. Jennings (Taint (Sexual Education, #1))
“
Regan’s pulse was astonishing. It hammered at a speed too rapid to gauge. Across the bed, Merrin reached out calmly and with the end of his thumb traced the sign of the cross on Regan’s vomit-covered chest. The words of his prayer were swallowed up in the poundings.
”
”
William Peter Blatty (The Exorcist)
“
Throw up" Victor said.
Bacteria, he believed, would run up his arms and gain access to his brain through his ear canals. "Vomit. Puke. Spew. Disgorge. Regorge. Discharge- like excrement."
"Victor, stop it!" Doll snapped. "You're making me nauseous."
"Talk--vomit words. Sound and sound alike," he said.
”
”
Tami Hoag
“
I then had an evil case of word vomit. "I almost hooked up with Aiden."
Caleb's mouth dropped open. It took him a couple of tries to say something coherent. "You do mean you almost hooked him like, say, with a fishing pole or something?"
My brows furrowed at that imagery. "No."
"A right hook to the jaw then?
”
”
Jennifer L. Armentrout (Half-Blood (Covenant, #1))
“
...the presence of others has become even more intolerable to me, their conversation most of all. Oh, how it all annoys and exasperates me: their attitudes, their manners, their whole way of being! The people of my world, all my unhappy peers, have come to irritate, oppress and sadden me with their noisy and empty chatter, their monstrous and boundless vanity, their even more monstrous egotism, their club gossip... the endless repetition of opinions already formed and judgments already made; the automatic vomiting forth of articles read in those morning papers which are the recognised outlet of the hopeless wilderness of their ideas; the eternal daily meal of overfamiliar cliches concerning racing stables and the stalls of fillies of the human variety... the hutches of the 'petites femmes' - another worn out phrase in the dirty usury of shapeless expression!
Oh my contemporaries, my dear contemporaries...
Their idiotic self-satisfaction; their fat and full-blown self-sufficiency: the stupid display of their good fortune; the clink of fifty- and a hundred-franc coins forever sounding out their financial prowess, according their own reckoning; their hen-like clucking and their pig-like grunting, as they pronounce the names of certain women; the obesity of their minds, the obscenity of their eyes, and the toneless-ness of their laughter! They are, in truth, handsome puppets of amour, with all the exhausted despondency of their gestures and the slackness of their chic...
Chic! A hideous word, which fits their manner like a new glove: as dejected as undertakers' mutes, as full-blown as Falstaff...
Oh my contemporaries: the ceusses of my circle, to put it in their own ignoble argot. They have all welcomed the moneylenders into their homes, and have been recruited as their clients, and they have likewise played host to the fat journalists who milk their conversations for the society columns. How I hate them; how I execrate them; how I would love to devour them liver and lights - and how well I understand the Anarchists and their bombs!
”
”
Jean Lorrain (Monsieur De Phocas)
“
As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.
We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.
With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.
When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."
On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."
Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
”
”
Rudyard Kipling
“
Vomit will always be vomit even if drizzled with chocolate, sliced almonds, and a cherry on top (2 Peter 2:21-22). When the temptation to see sin as what it is not arrives, the Scriptures are our light, our final truth, our escape out of the shadow moving toward our feet. The Word of God and not the word of the enemy is where we see the true identity of sin.
”
”
Jackie Hill Perry (Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was and Who God Has Always Been)
“
Never in the history of humanity have we vomited more words in more places with more velocity.
”
”
Jim Vandehei (Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less)
“
He hoped Harold wouldn’t say one more word, because if he did, he would cry, or vomit, or pass out, or scream, or combust.
”
”
Hanya Yanagihara (A Little Life)
“
the softness of his face or the way his eyes make me melt when he’s giving me his full attention, or those freaking dimples—that makes me want to word-vomit my insecurities all over him.
”
”
Hannah Grace (Wildfire (Maple Hills, #2))
“
That was the next-to-last time I felt any desire. And he was pale and tall (how disgusting tall men are, such a waste of space and flesh, so uncompact). (I am hideous myself now. Discovered in new, M.C., mirror that skin is a jungle of pearly stretch marks all over. Face sags too. Always new awful discoveries. If could only vomit up age like the food I relentlessly wolf.)
”
”
Maryse Holder (Give Sorrow Words: Maryse Holder's Letters From Mexico)
“
The father threw up on the ground. In the vomit, there were errors--strings not vomit, but language, light. The bunched up bits were writing something, words at once sunk into the ground.
”
”
Blake Butler (There Is No Year)
“
Takamasa Saegusa: 'Seigen, a mere member of the Toudouza, had the effrontery to sully the sacred dueling ground. For that reason, our lord had already decided to subject him to tu-uchi before long. Cut off his head immediately, and stick it on a pike!'
Gennosuke could hardly believe his ears. Such an insult to Irako Seigen was unwarranted. It was pride. For Gennosuke, Irako Seigen was pride itself.
Takamasa Saegusa: 'Fujiki Gennosuke! It is the way of the samurai to take the head of the defeated enemy on the battleground. Do not hesitate! If you are a samurai, you must carry out the duty of a samurai!'
Samurai...
Saegusa, Lord of Izu, continued shouting, but Gennosuke did not attend. That word 'samurai' alone reverberated through his body.
If one aims at the juncture between the base of the skull and the spine, decapitation is not that difficult, but Gennosuke could muster no more strength than a baby. He grew pale and trembled with the strain. He could only hack with his sword as if he were sawing wood. He felt nauseated, as if his own cells one after another were being annihilated. But this...
Lord Tokugawa Tadanaga: 'I approve.'
Takamasa Saegusa: 'Fujiki Gennosuke, for this splendid action you have received words of thanks from our lord. As a sign of his exceptional approval, you shall be given employment at Sunpu Castle. This great debt will by no means be forgotten. From this day forward you must offer your life to our lord!'
Prostrating himself, Gennosuke vomited.
”
”
Takayuki Yamaguchi (シグルイ 15(Shigurui, #15))
“
Why? Why didn’t you just sell your soul or something less valuable than your cock?” I word-vomit my thoughts out, and he nods his head as if he agrees completely in this terrible moment we’re both suffering through.
”
”
A.K. Koonce (Hellish Fae (Monsters and Miseries #1))
“
There was no particular reason to do so, but your mind automatically assumed a temporal sequence and a causal connection between the words bananas and vomit, forming a sketchy scenario in which bananas caused the sickness.
”
”
Daniel Kahneman
“
The brain responds quickly even to purely symbolic threats. Emotionally loaded words quickly attract attention, and bad words (war, crime) attract attention faster than do happy words (peace, love). There is no real threat, but the mere reminder of a bad event is treated in System 1 as threatening. As we saw earlier with the word vomit, the symbolic representation associatively evokes in attenuated form many of the reactions to the real thing, including physiological indices of emotion and even fractional tendencies to avoid
”
”
Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
“
Want to know what else I heard you did at the bar?”
“I don’t think I do.”
“You used your red lipstick to scribble ‘Alethea is a skanky hoe’ on the bathroom mirror.”
In her opinion, truer words had never been spoken – well, scribbled. Her demon agreed.
“You almost yacked in the Bentley.”
Oh, God. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut. “Stop.”
“We had to pull over so you could vomit in a bush.”
“Stop.”
“Then you got back in the car and said, ‘Taco Bell, anyone?’”
“Stop.”
Knox chuckled. “But I haven’t told you what you did when you got home yet.”
She buried her face deeper into the pillow. “I don’t want to hear it.”
He spoke into her ear. “You told me you love me, you’d always love me, and that you even love my demon… which would have been really sweet if you weren’t bent over the toilet with vomit in your hair.
”
”
Suzanne Wright (Blaze (Dark in You, #2))
“
Clifford’s servant, however, had looked in ‘through the key-hole, and seeing his master hanging, brake in before he was quite dead, and taking him down, vomiting a good deal of blood’. He was just in time to hear Lord Clifford’s last words, which were ‘there is a God, a just God above’.
”
”
Lucy Worsley (If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home)
“
I say is someone in there?’ The voice is the young post-New formalist from
Pittsburgh who affects Continental and wears an ascot that won’t stay tight, with that
hesitant knocking of when you know perfectly well someone’s in there, the
bathroom door composed of thirty-six that’s three times a lengthwise twelve
recessed two-bevelled squares in a warped rectangle of steam-softened wood, not
quite white, the bottom outside corner right here raw wood and mangled from
hitting the cabinets’ bottom drawer’s wicked metal knob, through the door and
offset ‘Red’ and glowering actors and calendar and very crowded scene and pubic
spirals of pale blue smoke from the elephant-colored rubble of ash and little
blackened chunks in the foil funnel’s cone, the smoke’s baby-blanket blue that’s sent
her sliding down along the wall past knotted washcloth, towel rack, blood-flower
wallpaper and intricately grimed electrical outlet, the light sharp bitter tint of a heated
sky’s blue that’s left her uprightly fetal with chin on knees in yet another North
American bathroom, deveiled, too pretty for words, maybe the Prettiest Girl Of All
Time (Prettiest G.O.A.T.), knees to chest, slew-footed by the radiant chill of the
claw-footed tub’s porcelain, Molly’s had somebody lacquer the tub in blue, lacquer,
she’s holding the bottle, recalling vividly its slogan for the past generation was The
Choice of a Nude Generation, when she was of back-pocket height and prettier by
far than any of the peach-colored titans they’d gazed up at, his hand in her lap her
hand in the box and rooting down past candy for the Prize, more fun way too much
fun inside her veil on the counter above her, the stuff in the funnel exhausted though
it’s still smoking thinly, its graph reaching its highest spiked prick, peak, the arrow’s
best descent, so good she can’t stand it and reaches out for the cold tub’s rim’s cold
edge to pull herself up as the white- party-noise reaches, for her, the sort of
stereophonic precipice of volume to teeter on just before the speaker’s blow, people
barely twitching and conversations strettoing against a ghastly old pre-Carter thing
saying ‘We’ve Only Just Begun,’ Joelle’s limbs have been removed to a distance
where their acknowledgement of her commands seems like magic, both clogs simply
gone, nowhere in sight, and socks oddly wet, pulls her face up to face the unclean
medicine-cabinet mirror, twin roses of flame still hanging in the glass’s corner, hair
of the flame she’s eaten now trailing like the legs of wasps through the air of the
glass she uses to locate the de-faced veil and what’s inside it, loading up the cone
again, the ashes from the last load make the world's best filter: this is a fact. Breathes
in and out like a savvy diver…
–and is knelt vomiting over the lip of the cool blue tub, gouges on the tub’s
lip revealing sandy white gritty stuff below the lacquer and porcelain, vomiting
muddy juice and blue smoke and dots of mercuric red into the claw-footed trough,
and can hear again and seems to see, against the fire of her closed lids’ blood, bladed
vessels aloft in the night to monitor flow, searchlit helicopters, fat fingers of blue
light from one sky, searching.
”
”
David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest)
“
If you ever get married again, don't tell your husband anything. Do you hear me?'
'Why?' said Mary Jane.
'Because I say so, that's why,' said Eloise. 'They wanna think you spent your whole life vomiting every time a boy came near you. I'm not kidding, either. Oh, you can tell them stuff. But never honestly. I mean never honestly. If you tell 'em you once knew a handsome boy, you gotta say in the same breath he was too handsome. And if you tell 'em you knew a witty boy, you gotta tell 'em he was kind of a smart aleck, though, or a wise guy. If you don't, they hit you over the head with the poor boy every time they get a chance.' Eloise paused to drink from her glass and to think. 'Oh,' she said, 'they'll listen very maturely and all that. They'll even look intelligent as hell. But don't let it fool you. Believe me. You'll go through hell if you ever give 'em any credit for intelligence. Take my word.
”
”
J.D. Salinger (Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut)
“
Shelton pushed Ben lightly. “Remember when you couldn’t flare without losing your temper? So Hi kicked you from behind to get you mad, and you threw him in the ocean?”
Ben snorted. “He deserved it.”
“I was providing a service,” Hi protested. “I recall Tory once trying to eat a mouse.”
I pinched my nose. “Ugh, don’t remind me.”
Ella giggled. “One time Cole lost his flare while carrying a boulder. It pinned his leg for an hour.”
Then everyone had a story. Our funeral became a wake.
The mood lifted as we swapped flare stories. It was cathartic. A way to say good-bye.
I caught Ben smiling at me. “I remember when Tory sniffed that mound of bird crap in the old lighthouse. I thought she’d vomit on the spot.”
Chance laughed. “I knew she was too clever. Always with a trick up her sleeve.”
The boys glanced at each other. Their smiles faded.
Something passed between them.
Abruptly, both looked at me.
I could see a question in their eyes. A resolve to see something through.
They talked. Oh God, they talked about me.
They’re going to make me choose.
In a flash of dread, I realized I could delay this no longer.
With another jolt, I realized I didn’t need to.
There was no point putting it off.
There was also no decision to make.
My eyes met a dark, intense pair staring back earnestly. Longingly. Fearfully.
I smiled. Even as my heart pounded.
Before anyone spoke, I stepped forward, legs shaking so badly I worried I might fall.
But my second foot successfully followed the first.
I walked over to Ben’s side.
Slipped my hand inside his.
Squeezed for dear life.
Ben’s eyes widened. He gasped quietly, his chest rising and falling.
I met his startled gaze. Smiled through my blushes.
A goofy smile split Ben’s face, one I’d never seen before. His fingers crushed mine.
No decision to make.
Tearing my eyes from Ben, I looked at Chance, found him watching me with a glum expression. Then he sighed, a wry smile twisting his lips.
Chance nodded slightly.
Not one word spoken. Volumes exchanged.
The silence stretched, like a living breathing force.
Finally, Hi cleared his throat. “Um.”
My face burned scarlet as I remembered our audience. Ella was gaping at me, a delighted grin on her face. Shelton looked like he might turn and run. Hi was rubbing the back of his neck, his face twisted in an uncomfortable grimace.
Still no one said a word.
This was the most painful moment of my life.
“So . . .” Hi drummed his thighs, eyes fixed to the pavement. “Right. A lot just happened there. Weirdly without anyone talking, but, um, yeah.
”
”
Kathy Reichs (Terminal (Virals, #5))
“
Like, no parent would say, “I can tell I love my daughter because I believe certain things about her.” That’s not how love works. First John 3:18 says, “Let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.” Loving a kid means cleaning up vomit and holding your tongue when they’re fourteen and think you’re the enemy.
”
”
Daniel Fusco (Upward, Inward, Outward: Love God, Love Yourself, Love Others)
“
When engaging in simple everyday banter and communications, this rule of thumb can really help suppress a lot of our negative word ‘vomit’ since we often mindlessly chat about the things we don’t like. If we refrain from expressing our negative opinions about things unless they’re directly asked for, we can train ourselves to respond rather than react the second we see or hear something and then feel we must verbalize our views about it.
Remember, even if we don’t agree with someone or something, we can still speak about the subject at hand in a positive light to encourage growth rather than guilty motivation. I like to say I express more “inspirations” than “opinions” with each passing day.
”
”
Alaric Hutchinson (Living Peace: Essential Teachings For Enriching Life)
“
Mama, I said, and then the crying came. I had not cried since I was sentenced and I had humiliated myself before a judge who didn't care. On that horrible day, my snotty sobbing had merged with Celestial and Olive's morning accompaniment. Now I suffered a cappella; the weeping burned my throat like when you vomit strong liquor. That one word, Mama, was my only prayer as I phrased on the ground like I was feeling the Holy Ghost, only what I was going through wasn't rapture. I spasmed on that cold black earth in pain, physical pain. My joints hurt; I experienced what felt like a baton against the back of my head. It was like I relived every injury of my life.. The pain went on until it didn't. and I say up, dirty and spent.
”
”
Tayari Jones (An American Marriage)
“
Adam wet his dry lips and tried to ask and failed and tried again. "Why do they have to do it?" he said. "Why is it?"
Cyrus was deeply moved and he spoke as he had never spoken before. "I don't know," he said. "I've studied and maybe learned how things are, but I"m not even close to why they are. And you must not expect to find that people understand what they do. So many things are done instinctively, the way a bee makes honey or a fox dips his paws into a stream to fool dogs. A fox can't say why he does it, and what bee remembers winter or expects it to come again? When I knew you had to go I thought to leave the future open so you could dig out your own findings, and then it seemed better if I could protect you with the little I know. You'll go in soon now--you've come to the age."
"I don't want to," said Adam quickly.
"You'll go in soon," his father went on, not hearing. "And I want to tell you so you won't be surprised. They'll first strip off your clothes, but they'll go deeper than that. They'll shuck off any little dignity you have--you'll lose what you think of as your decent right to live and be let alone to live. They'll make you live and eat and sleep and shit close to other men. And when they dress you up again you'll not be able to tell yourself from the others. You can't even wear a scrap or pin a note on your breast to say, 'This is me--separate from the rest.'"
"I don't want to do it," said Adam.
"After a while," said Cyrus, "you'll think no thought the others do not think. You'll know no word the others can't say. And you'll do things because the others do them. You'll feel the danger in any difference whatever-- a danger to the whole crowd of like-thinking, like-acting men."
"What if I don't?" Adam demanded.
"Yes," said Cyrus, "sometimes that happens. Once in a while there is a man who won't do what is demanded of him, and do you know what happens? The whole machine devotes itself coldly to the destruction of his difference. They'll beat your spirit and your nerves, your body and your mind, with iron rods until the dangerous difference goes out of you. And if you can't finally give in, they'll vomit you up and leave you stinking outside--neither part of themselves nor yet free. It's better to fall in with them. They only do it to protect themselves [...]
”
”
John Steinbeck (East of Eden)
“
Matt. Then Matthew who had been sick, asked her, Why for the most part Physick should be bitter to our palates? Prud. To shew how unwelcome the Word of God and the effects thereof are to a Carnal Heart. Matt. Why does Physick, if it does good, purge, and cause that we vomit? Prud. To shew that the Word, when it works effectually, cleanseth the Heart and Mind. For look, what the one doth to the Body the other doth to the Soul.
”
”
John Bunyan (Pilgrim's Progress)
“
Once we have our details—our white-hot places of experience he calls them—we have to choose one and write about it. ‘Not in sentences but in bursts of feelings—phrases, words, don’t worry how they relate just get them out. You are vomiting here.’ I circle my mother’s bathroom and start writing about it—the greasy face lotion, the dry shampoo spray, the heavy razor, the amber bottle of Chanel No. 5—and all the things that became mine the day she left.
”
”
Lily King (Writers & Lovers)
“
You want to know about Death. I left him a word. That word is NINETEEN. If you say it to him his mind will be opened. He will tell you what lies beyond. He will tell you what he saw. The word is NINETEEN. Knowing will drive you mad. But sooner or later you will ask. You won’t be able to help yourself. Have a nice day! Walter o’ Dim P.S. The word is NINETEEN. You will try to forget but sooner or later it will come out of your mouth like vomit. NINETEEN.
”
”
Stephen King (The Gunslinger (The Dark Tower, #1))
“
I’m so sorry.” We both spoke the words at exactly the same time. We tried again, and the same thing happened. Suddenly, I laughed, and he did too. Short bursts, at first, and then for longer. It was proper, genuine laughter, the kind that makes your whole body shake. My mouth was wide open, my breath slightly wheezy, my eyes shut tight. I felt vulnerable, and yet very relaxed and comfortable. I imagined that vomiting or going to the lavatory in front of him would feel the same way.
”
”
Gail Honeyman (Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine)
“
Hey, non dispera! There is a way out. Come to beautiful Oasis. No crime, no madness, no bad stuff of any kind, a brand new home, home on the range, no or antelope but hey, accentuate the positive, there never is a discouraging word, nobody rapes you or tries to reminisce about Paris in the springtime, no sense sniffing that old vomit, right? Cut the strings, blank the slate, let go of Auschwitz and the Alamo and the ... the fucking Egyptians for God’s sake, who needs it, who cares, focus on tomorrow. Onward and upward. Come to beautiful Oasis.
”
”
Michel Faber (The Book of Strange New Things)
“
Grenouille sat on the logs, his legs outstretched and his back leaned against the wall of the shed. He had closed his eyes and did not stir. He saw nothing, he heard nothing, he felt nothing. He only smelt the aroma of the wood rising up around him to be captured under the bonnet of the eaves. He drank in the aroma, he drowned in it, impregnating himself through his innermost pores, until he became wood himself; he lay on the cord of wood like a wooden puppet, like Pinocchio, as if dead, until after a long while, perhaps a half-hour or more, he gagged up the word ‘wood’. He vomited the word up, as if he were filled with wood to his ears, as if buried in wood to his neck, as if his stomach, his gorge, his nose were spilling over with wood. And that brought him to himself, rescued him only moments before the overpowering presence of the wood, its aroma, was about to suffocate him. He shook himself, slid down off the logs, and tottered away as if on wooden legs. Days later he was still completely fuddled by the intense olfactory experience, and whenever the memory of it rose up too powerfully within him he would mutter imploringly, over and over, ‘Wood, wood.
”
”
Patrick Süskind (Perfume: The Story of a Murderer)
“
MANIFESTO OF THE HUNGRY GENERATION
Poetry is no more a civilizing maneuver, a replanting of the bamboozled gardens; it is a holocaust, a violent and somnambulistic jazzing of the hymning five, a sowing of the tempestual Hunger.
Poetry is an activity of the narcissistic spirit. Naturally, we have discarded the blankety-blank school of modern poetry, the darling of the press, where poetry does not resurrect itself in an orgasmic flow, but words come out bubbling in an artificial muddle. In the prosed- rhyme of those born-old half-literates, you must fail to find that scream of desperation of a thing wanting to be man, the man wanting to be spirit.
Poetry of the younger generation too has died in the dressing room, as most of the younger prosed -rhyme writers, afraid of the Satanism, the vomitous horror, the self-elected crucifixion of the artist that makes a man a poet, fled away to hide in the hairs.
Poetry from Achintya to Ananda and from Alokeranjan to Indraneel, has been cryptic, short-hand, cautiously glamorous, flattered by own sensitivity like a public school prodigy. Saturated with self-consciousness, poems have begun to appear from the tomb of logic or the bier of unsexed rhetoric.
Published by Haradhon Dhara from 269 Netaji Subhas Road, Howrah, West Beng
”
”
Malay Roy Choudhury
“
Shrieking with rage and frustration she attempted to trace the mysterious symptoms to their source, but the students told her stubbornly they were suffering “Umbridge-itis.” After putting four successive classes in detention and failing to discover their secret she was forced to give up and allow the bleeding, swooning, sweating, and vomiting students to leave her classes in droves. But not even the users of the Snackboxes could compete with that master of chaos, Peeves, who seemed to have taken Fred’s parting words deeply to heart. Cackling madly, he soared through the school, upending tables, bursting out of blackboards, and toppling statues and vases.
”
”
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter, #5))
“
I pick up the paper and sink into a chair, gripping the photo so tight it crinkles.
Felicity Ambrose. Even her name sounds like it fits in a world of people like the Harrises. With the elegant lace on her dress, the elbow-length gloves, the sparkling pins in her hair…I scan the article for the word “engagement” or “betrothal,” but it only mentions that they attended a dinner event together yesterday evening.
I sniff hard and chuck the paper back onto the table.
So what if he ends up engaged to her? It’s not like there could have been a possibility of something happening with me. I’m a nobody from nowhere who wears the same old stained dress day after day and vomits into umbrella stands.
”
”
Jessica S. Olson (A Forgery of Roses)
“
Do you have a piece of paper I could write on?”
I jump up too fast. “Sure. Just one? Do you—of course you need something to write with. Sorry. Here.” I grab him a paper from my deskdrawer and one of my myriad pencils, and he uses the first Children of Hypnos book as a flat surface to write on. When I’m sure he’s writing something for me to read right now, I say, “I thought you only needed to do that when other people were around?”
He etches one careful line after the next. He frowns, shakes his head. “Sometimes it’s . . . tough to say things. Certain things.” His voice is hardly a whisper. I sit down beside him again, but his big hand blocks my view of the words. He stops writing, leaves the paper there, and stares.
Then he hands it to me and looks the other direction.
Can I kiss you?
“Um,” is a delightfully complex word. “Um” means “I want to say something but don’t know what it is,” and also “You have caught me off guard,” and also “Am I dreaming right now? Someone please slap me.”
I say “um,” then. Wallace’s entire head-neck region is already flushed with color, but the “um” darkens it a few shades, and goddammit, he was nervous about asking me and I made it worse. What good is “um” when I should say “YES PLEASE NOW”? Except there’s no way I’m going to say “YES PLEASE NOW” because I feel like my body is one big wired time bomb of organs and if Wallace so much as brushes my hand, I’m going to jump out of my own skin and run screaming from the house.
I’ll like it too much. Out of control. No good.
I say, “Can I borrow that pencil?”
He hands me the pencil, again without looking.
Yes, but not right now.
I know it sounds weird. Sorry. I don’t think it’ll go well if I know it’s coming. I will definitely freak out and punch you in the face or scream bloody murder or something like that.
Surprising me with it would probably work better. I am giving you permission to surprise me with a kiss. This is a formal invitation for surprise kisses.
I don’t like writing the word “kiss.” It makes my skin crawl.
Sorry. It’s weird. I’m weird. Sorry.
I hope that doesn’t make you regret asking.
I hand the paper and pencil back. He reads it over, then writes:
No regret. I can do surprises.
That’s it. That’s it?
Shit.
Now he’s going to try to surprise me with a kiss. At some point. Later today? Tomorrow? A week from now? What if he never does it and I spend the rest of the time we hang out wondering if he will? What have I done? This was a terrible idea.
I’m going to vomit.
“Be right back,” I say, and run to the bathroom to curl up on the floor. Just for like five minutes. Then I go back to my room and sit down beside Wallace. As I’m moving myself into position, his hand falls over mine, and I don’t actually jump out of my skin. My control shakes for a moment, but I turn in to it, and everything smooths out. I flip my hand over. He flexes his fingers so I can fit mine in the spaces between. And we sit there, shoulder to shoulder, with our hands resting on the bed between us.
It’s not so bad
”
”
Francesca Zappia (Eliza and Her Monsters)
“
[The presidential candidate] was vulgar, almost
illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his “ideas” almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that “of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor
the sly cynicism of a country store. Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political platforms were only wings of a windmill.
(...)
He would whirl arms, bang tables, glare from mad eyes, vomit Biblical wrath from a gaping mouth; but he would also coo like a nursing mother, beseech like an “aching lover, and in
between tricks would coldly and almost contemptuously jab his crowds with figures and facts—figures and facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely incorrect.
”
”
Sinclair Lewis (It Can't Happen Here)
“
Nope.' He grabs my hand and places it over his heart. 'I already know the truth. We’re dating.' His eyebrows waggle. 'Exclusively.'
'Gross.'
'Do you want to wear my letterman’s jacket?'
'I’m going to vomit.'
'“Should I buy you a corsage?'
'Seriously. Gagging.'
'Okay, no corsage.' He laughs. 'Just the matching tattoos, then?'
'Seriously.' I fight the urge to stomp my foot. 'Let it go, Parker. Let it go.'
'Hey, Elsa, don’t quote Frozen to me unless you’re prepared to listen to the entire soundtrack in my car on the way to Seaport.' I stare up at him. 'I’m not sure whether I should be disturbed or turned on by the fact that you know all the words to Let It Go.'
He grins. 'Definitely turned on.'
'Downloaded in your iTunes library, no doubt.' I shake my head. 'This is nearly as disturbing as the time I learned the song A Whole New World from Aladdin is a metaphor for mind-blowing sex.'
'I’m sorry, what?'
'I can open your eyes? Lead you wonder by wonder? Over, sideways, and under?' I snort. 'Come on. That’s basically soft-core porn.'
'Thank you, Zoe, for ruining a beloved Disney classic for me.'
'Anytime.'
'For the record…' He trails off.
I wince, anticipating the worst. 'What?'
'I’ll take you on my magic carpet ride any time you
want, snookums.'
'Pass.'
'So, that’s a no on rubbing my lamp then?'
'You know, I think I’ll just find my own way to Nate’s…' I turn and start walking to the elevator.
'Oh, come on.' Parker twines his fingers with mine and pushes the call button, humming under his breath. 'I’m a genie in a bottle, baby, gotta rub—' 'AH!' I stare at him in horror as the elevator arrives. 'So help me god if you start singing vintage Christina Aguilera lyrics right now, I will murder you with my bare hands.
”
”
Julie Johnson (One Good Reason (Boston Love, #3))
“
Here all great emotions decay: here only little, dry emotions may rattle!
Do you not smell already the slaughter-houses and cook-shops of the spirit? Does this city not reek of the fumes of slaughtered spirit?
Do you not see the souls hanging like dirty, limp rags? – And they also make newspapers from these rags!
Have you not heard how the spirit has here become a play with words? It vomits our repulsive verbal swill! – And they also make newspapers from this verbal swill.
They pursue one another and do not know where. They inflame one another, and do not know why. They rattle their tins, they jingle their gold.
They are cold and seek warmth in distilled waters; they are inflamed and seek coolness in frozen spirits; they are all ill and diseased with public opinion.
All lusts and vices are at home here; but there are virtuous people here, too, there are many adroit, useful virtues.
”
”
Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spoke Zarathustra)
“
Many people take this as evidence of duplicity or cynicism. But they don’t know what it’s like to be expected to make comments, almost every working day, on things of which they have little or no reliable knowledge or about which they just don’t care. They don’t appreciate the sheer number of things on which a politician is expected to have a position. Issues on which the governor had no strong opinions, events over which he had no control, situations on which it served no useful purpose for him to comment—all required some kind of remark from our office. On a typical day Aaron might be asked to comment on the indictment of a local school board chairman, the ongoing drought in the Upstate, a dispute between a power company and the state’s environmental regulatory agency, and a study concluding that some supposedly crucial state agency had been underfunded for a decade. Then there were the things the governor actually cared about: a senate committee’s passage of a bill on land use, a decision by the state supreme court on legislation applying to only one county, a public university’s decision to raise tuition by 12 percent. Commenting on that many things is unnatural, and sometimes it was impossible to sound sincere. There was no way around it, though. Journalists would ask our office about anything having remotely to do with the governor’s sphere of authority, and you could give only so many minimalist responses before you began to sound disengaged or ignorant or dishonest. And the necessity of having to manufacture so many views on so many subjects, day after day, fosters a sense that you don’t have to believe your own words. You get comfortable with insincerity. It affected all of us, not just the boss. Sometimes I felt no more attachment to the words I was writing than a dog has to its vomit.
”
”
Barton Swaim (The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics)
“
Those are very rational thoughts for a ten-year-old.” “What can I say? I was ten going on thirty.” “A grown-up mind in a child’s body?” “Exactly.” “How did the rest of your family take it?” “You see, when you say the word ‘family’ I think of my co-stars. My family is whoever I’m working with at the time. Or better said, ‘with whomever I’m working.’ We become a unit. It’s like, when you’re doing a movie nothing else matters in the world, just the movie and the team making the movie. You become immersed in your work, in the minds and hearts of the other actors around you. The cameramen, Make-up, Hair, the electricians . . . everybody. You are one pulsing heartbeat.” “I was referring to your father. Your brother.” I could feel my insides coil at the word “brother.” I felt sick, nauseous like I hadn’t eaten all day. That empty yet bilious feeling, coming up like vomit. “My brother is not ‘family.’ And my father?” I could feel my
”
”
Arianne Richmonde (Shooting Star (Beautiful Chaos, #1))
“
Your life is not an episode of Skins. Things will never look quite as good as they do in a faded, sun-drenched Polaroid; your days are not an editorial from Lula. Your life is not a Sofia Coppola movie, or a Chuck Palahniuk novel, or a Charles Bukowski poem. Grace Coddington isn’t your creative director. Bon Iver and Joy Division don’t play softly in the background at appropriate moments. Your hysterical teenage diary isn’t a work of art. Your room probably isn’t Selby material. Your life isn’t a Tumblr screencap. Every word that comes out of your mouth will not be beautiful and poignant, infinitely quotable. Your pain will not be pretty. Crying till you vomit is always shit. You cannot romanticize hurt. Or sadness. Or loneliness. You will have homework, and hangovers and bad hair days. The train being late won’t lead to any fateful encounters, it will make you late. Sometimes your work will suck. Sometimes you will suck. Far too often, everything will suck - and not in a Wes Anderson kind of way. And there is no divine consolation - only the knowledge that we will hopefully experience the full spectrum - and that sometimes, just sometimes, life will feel like a Coppola film.
”
”
Anonymous
“
They stood around a bleeding stump of a man lying on the ground. His right arm and left leg had been chopped off. It was inconceivable how, with his remaining arm and leg, he had crawled to the camp. The chopped-off arm and leg were tied in terrible bleeding chunks onto his back with a small wooden board attached to them; a long inscription on it said, with many words of abuse, that the atrocity was in reprisal for similar atrocities perpetrated by such and such a Red unit—a unit that had no connection with the Forest Brotherhood. It also said that the same treatment would be meted out to all the partisans unless, by a given date, they submitted and gave up their arms to the representatives of General Vitsyn’s army corps.
Fainting repeatedly from loss of blood, the dying man told them in a faltering voice of the tortures and atrocities perpetrated by Vitsyn’s investigating and punitive squads. His own sentence of death had been allegedly commuted; instead of hanging him, they had cut off his arm and leg in order to send him into the camp and strike terror among the partisans. They had carried him as far as the outposts of the camp, where they had put him down and ordered him to crawl, urging him on by shooting into the air.
He could barely move his lips. To make out his almost unintelligible stammering, the crowd around him bent low. He was saying: “Be on your guard, comrades. He has broken through.”
“Patrols have gone out in strength. There’s a big battle going on. We’ll hold him.”
“There’s a gap. He wants to surprise you. I know. ... I can’t go on, men. I am spitting blood. I’ll die in a moment.”
“Rest a bit. Keep quiet.—Can’t you see it’s bad for him, you heartless beasts!”
The man started again: “He went to work on me, the devil. He said: You will bathe in your own blood until you tell me who you are. And how was I to tell him, a deserter is just what I am? I was running from him to you.”
“You keep saying ‘he.’ Who was it that got to work on you?”
“Let me just get my breath. ... I’ll tell you. Hetman, Bekeshin. Colonel, Strese. Vitsyn’s men. You don’t know out here what it’s like. The whole town is groaning. They boil people alive. They cut strips out of them. They take you by the scruff of the neck and push you inside, you don’t know where you are, it’s pitch black. You grope about—you are in a cage, inside a freight car. There are more than forty people in the cage, all in their underclothes. From time to time they open the door and grab whoever comes first—out he goes. As you grab a chicken to cut its throat. I swear to God. Some they hang, some they shoot, some they question. They beat you to shreds, they put salt on the wounds, they pour boiling water on you. When you vomit or relieve yourself they make you eat it. As for children and women—O God!”
The unfortunate was at his last gasp. He cried out and died without finishing the sentence. Somehow they all knew it at once and took off their caps and crossed themselves.
That night, the news of a far more terrible incident flew around the camp.
Pamphil had been in the crowd surrounding the dying man. He had seen him, heard his words, and read the threatening inscription on the board.
His constant fear for his family in the event of his own death rose to a new climax. In his imagination he saw them handed over to slow torture, watched their faces distorted by pain, and heard their groans and cries for help. In his desperate anguish—to forestall their future sufferings and to end his own—he killed them himself, felling his wife and three children with that same, razor-sharp ax that he had used to carve toys for the two small girls and the boy, who had been his favorite.
The astonishing thing was that he did not kill himself immediately afterward.
”
”
Boris Pasternak (Doctor Zhivago)
“
Early in my career, I formed a personal motto, one by which I continue to live: If offering a criticism, accompany it with one potential solution. In the case I described, the individual didn’t want to work together to find a solution. Unfortunately, I’ve never found an effective way to deal with adults who exhibit immaturity. The Bible offers a bit of interesting insight that I consider applicable: “Do not eat the bread of a selfish man, or desire his delicacies; for as he thinks within himself, so he is. He says to you, ‘Eat and drink!’ but his heart is not with you. You will vomit up the morsel you have eaten, and waste your compliments. Do not speak in the hearing of a fool, for he will despise the wisdom of your words” (Proverbs 23:6-9). The Bible also says, “If possible, so far as it depends on you, be at peace with all men” (Romans 12:18). It saddens me to say, but in that individual’s case, peace meant limiting my interactions with him. To foster peace, I stopped saying hello in the mornings. Not out of spite, but because friendly conversation led to comfort, and comfort, I noticed, opened the door for negative comments. Rarely do I take such an extreme measure, but sometimes distance is helpful. His visits ended. My peace and fervor began to reemerge.
”
”
John Herrick (8 Reasons Your Life Matters)
“
He just wanted a walk- and a few books. It had been an age since he'd even had free time to read, let alone do so for pleasure.
But there she was.
His mate.
She was nothing like Jesminda.
Jesminda had been all laughter and mischief, too wild and free to be contained by the country life that she'd been born into. She had teased him, taunted him- seduced him so thoroughly that he hadn't wanted anything but her. She'd seen him not as a High Lord's seventh son, but as a male. Had loved him without question, without hesitation. She had chosen him.
Elain had been... thrown at him.
He glanced toward the tea service spread on a low-lying table nearby. 'I'm going to assume that one of those cups belongs to your sister.' Indeed, there was a discarded book in the viper's usual chair. Cauldron help the male who wound up shackled to her.
'Do you mind if I held myself to the other?'
He tried to sound casual- comfortable. Even as his heart raced and raced, so swift he thought he might vomit on the very expensive, very old carpet. From Sangravah, if the patterns and rich dyes were any indication.
Rhysand was many things, but he certainly had good taste.
The entire place had been decorated with thought and elegance, with a penchant for comfort over stuffiness.
He didn't want to admit he liked it. Didn't want to admit he found the city beautiful.
That the circle of people who now claimed to be Feyre's new family... It was what, long ago, he'd once thought life at Tamlin's court would be.
An ache like a blow to the chest went through him, but he crossed the rug. Forced his hands to be steady while he poured himself a cup of tea and sat in the chair opposite Nesta's vacated one.
'There's a plate of biscuits. Would you like one?'
He didn't expect her to answer, and he gave himself all of one more minute before he'd rise from this chair and leave, hopefully avoiding Nesta's return.
But sunlight on gold caught his eye- and Elain slowly turned from her vigil at the window.
He had not seen her entire face since that day in Hybern.
Then, it had been drawn and terrified, then utterly blank and numb, her hair plastered to her head, her lips blue with cold and shock.
Looking at her now...
She was pale, yes. The vacancy still glazing her features.
But he couldn't breathe as she faced him fully.
She was the most beautiful female he'd ever seen.
Betrayal, queasy and oily, slid through his veins. He'd said the same to Jesminda once.
But even as shame washed through him, the words, the sense chanted, Mine. You are mine, and I am yours. Mate.
”
”
Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Wings and Ruin (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #3))
“
When the attendant at Britz Rentals of Australia whipped around in our prepaid-in-full honeymoon car, my eyes grew wide and I knew we were in trouble. It was an SUV, yes, and a Toyota Land Cruiser at that--just as Marlboro Man had ordered. It was white and clean and very shiny. And painted in huge bright orange and royal blue lettering across the hood, the roof, all four doors, and the tailgate of the vehicle, were scrawled the enormous words: BRITZ RENTALS OF AUSTRALIA.
I could see Marlboro Man’s jaw muscles flex as he beheld his worst nightmare playing out in front of his eyes. He could hardly even bear to gaze upon such an attention-grabbing abomination, let alone conceive of driving it all over an entire continent. Unfortunately, our last-minute attempts to trade to another vehicle proved to be futile; even if Britz hadn’t been completely booked that week, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Every single car in their fleet was smeared with the exact same orange and blue promotional graffiti.
Having no other transportational alternative, we set off on our drive, a black cloud of conspicuousness and, in Marlboro Man’s case, dread following us everywhere we went. Being an attention-seeking middle child, I didn’t really mind it much. But for Marlboro Man, this was more than his makeup was programmed to handle. As far as he was concerned, we were the Griswolds, and the Land Cruiser was our Family Truckster.
It was a pox on what might have been the perfect honeymoon.
Except for my inner ear disturbance. And the vomiting. And the slightly marsupial undertone to the hamburgers.
”
”
Ree Drummond (The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels)
“
Lucy grimaces at me. “I ran into Marie and Beth while we were out.”
“Oh? And how were they?” Marie and Beth had been Lucy’s best friends for years, though it’s been a few months since I last saw them around.
“They were on some kind of outing for Marie’s birthday,” Lucy says, and her eyes glitter. She sniffs. “Apparently they don’t think I’m worth an invitation anymore.”
“What?”
She hugs her arms around her middle, squeezing her eyes shut. “When I asked why they didn’t invite me, Marie said they figured I would say no, so they didn’t bother. As if I’m choosing to be sick. As if the reason I didn’t go to Beth’s spring tea was because I couldn’t be bothered and not because I was afraid I might vomit on her mother’s sofa.” Her voice breaks.
“Oh, Luce.” I wrap my arms around her, and she buries her face against my neck.
“Is it so terrible of me to want an invitation, even if I’m unable to go?”
I shake my head, combing my fingers through her hair. “Of course not.”
“You know what else Beth said? She said, ‘You aren’t as fun anymore, and Marie wanted to have a good time.’” A sob chokes out of her lips, and her shoulders shake. “It’s like they think I’m lazy or something.”
An inferno rages in my chest. I squeeze her tighter, blinking away my own tears. “They’re wrong, Lucy. You are the most fun person I know, and you sure as hell aren’t lazy. I’d like to see Marie or Beth work half as hard as you.”
“But I don’t want to work hard just to live my life. I want to go to the tea parties and the birthday outings and have fun like them.” She mops her eyes with her sleeve.
I press a kiss to her forehead as the blood under my skin boils. The things I wish I could say to those girls. To their mothers. I grit my teeth and tighten my arms around my sister, wishing I could protect her from every hurt, every ache, every unkind word. “I know, Luce.I know.
”
”
Jessica S. Olson (A Forgery of Roses)
“
Trumpets blared.
’Denham’s Dentifrice.’
Shut up, thought Montag. Consider the lilies of the field.
’Denham’s Dentifrice.’
They toil not —
’Denham’s —’
He tore the book open and flicked the pages and felt them as if he were blind, he picked at the shape of the individual letters, not blinking.
’Denham’s. Spelled: D-E-N —’
They toil not, neither do they …
A fierce whisper of hot sand through empty sieve.
’Denham’s does it!’
Consider the lilies, the lilies, the lilies …
’Denham’s dental detergent.’
‘Shut up, shut up, shut up!’ It was a plea, a cry so terrible that Montag found himself on his feet, the shocked inhabitants of the loud car staring, moving back from this man with the insane, gorged face, the gibbering, dry mouth, the flapping book in his fist. The people who have been sitting a moment before, tapping their feet to the rhythm of Denham’s Dentifrice, Denham’s Dandy Dental Detergent, Denham’s Dentifrice Dentifrice Dentifrice, one two, one two three, one two, one two three. The people whose mouths had been faintly twitching the words Dentifrice Dentifrice Dentifrice. The train radio vomited upon Montag, in retaliation, a great ton-load of music made of tin, copper, silver, chromium, and brass. The people were pounded into submission; they did not run; there was no place to run; the great air-train fell down its shafts in the earth.
’Lilies of the field.’
’Denham’s.’
’Lilies, I said!’
The people stared.
’Call the guard.’
’The man’s off —’
’Knoll View!’
The train hissed to its stop.
’Knoll View!’ A cry.
’Denham’s.’ A whisper.
Montag’s mouth barely moved. ‘Lilies …’
The train door whistled open. Montag stood. The door gasped, started shut. Only then did he leap past the other passengers, screaming his mind, plunge through the slicing door only in time. He rain on the white tiles up through the tunnels, ignoring the escalators, because he wanted to feel his feet move, arms swing, lungs clench, unclench, feel his throat go raw with air. A voice drifted after him, ‘Denham’s Denham’s Denham’s,’ the train hissed like a snake. The train vanished in its hole.
”
”
Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)
“
It’s more an affliction than the expression of any high-minded ideals. I watch Mark Bittman enjoy a perfectly and authentically prepared Spanish paella on TV, after which he demonstrates how his viewers can do it at home—in an aluminum saucepot—and I want to shove my head through the glass of my TV screen and take a giant bite out of his skull, scoop the soft, slurry-like material inside into my paw, and then throw it right back into his smug, fireplug face. The notion that anyone would believe Catherine Zeta-Jones as an obsessively perfectionist chef (particularly given the ridiculously clumsy, 1980s-looking food) in the wretched film No Reservations made me want to vomit blood, hunt down the producers, and kick them slowly to death. (Worse was the fact that the damn thing was a remake of the unusually excellent German chef flick Mostly Martha.) On Hell’s Kitchen, when Gordon Ramsay pretends that the criminally inept, desperately unhealthy gland case in front of him could ever stand a chance in hell of surviving even three minutes as “executive chef of the new Gordon Ramsay restaurant” (the putative grand prize for the finalist), I’m inexplicably actually angry on Gordon’s behalf. And he’s the one making a quarter-million dollars an episode—very contentedly, too, from all reports. The eye-searing “Kwanzaa Cake” clip on YouTube, of Sandra Lee doing things with store-bought angel food cake, canned frosting, and corn nuts, instead of being simply the unintentionally hilarious viral video it should be, makes me mad for all humanity. I. Just. Can’t. Help it. I wish, really, that I was so far up my own ass that I could somehow believe myself to be some kind of standard-bearer for good eating—or ombudsman, or even the deliverer of thoughtful critique. But that wouldn’t be true, would it? I’m just a cranky old fuck with what, I guess, could charitably be called “issues.” And I’m still angry. But eat the fucking fish on Monday already. Okay? I wrote those immortal words about not going for the Monday fish, the ones that’ll haunt me long after I’m crumbs in a can, knowing nothing other than New York City. And times, to be fair, have changed. Okay, I still would advise against the fish special at T.G.I. McSweenigan’s, “A Place for Beer,” on a Monday. Fresh fish, I’d guess, is probably not the main thrust of their business. But things are different now for chefs and cooks. The odds are better than ever that the guy slinging fish and chips back there in the kitchen actually gives a shit about what he’s doing. And even if he doesn’t, these days he has to figure that you might actually know the difference. Back when I wrote the book that changed my life, I was angriest—like a lot of chefs and cooks of my middling abilities—at my customers. They’ve changed. I’ve changed. About them, I’m not angry anymore.
”
”
Anthony Bourdain (Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook)
“
Doremus Jessup, so inconspicuous an observer, watching Senator Windrip from so humble a Boeotia, could not explain his power of bewitching large audiences. The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his "ideas" almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a country store.
Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political platforms were only wings of a windmill. Seven years before his present credo—derived from Lee Sarason, Hitler, Gottfried Feder, Rocco, and probably the revue Of Thee I Sing—little Buzz, back home, had advocated nothing more revolutionary than better beef stew in the county poor-farms, and plenty of graft for loyal machine politicians, with jobs for their brothers-in-law, nephews, law partners, and creditors.
Doremus had never heard Windrip during one of his orgasms of oratory, but he had been told by political reporters that under the spell you thought Windrip was Plato, but that on the way home you could not remember anything he had said.
There were two things, they told Doremus, that distinguished this prairie Demosthenes. He was an actor of genius. There was no more overwhelming actor on the stage, in the motion pictures, nor even in the pulpit. He would whirl arms, bang tables, glare from mad eyes, vomit Biblical wrath from a gaping mouth; but he would also coo like a nursing mother, beseech like an aching lover, and in between tricks would coldly and almost contemptuously jab his crowds with figures and facts—figures and facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely incorrect.
But below this surface stagecraft was his uncommon natural ability to be authentically excited by and with his audience, and they by and with him. He could dramatize his assertion that he was neither a Nazi nor a Fascist but a Democrat—a homespun Jeffersonian-Lincolnian-Clevelandian-Wilsonian Democrat—and (sans scenery and costume) make you see him veritably defending the Capitol against barbarian hordes, the while he innocently presented as his own warm-hearted Democratic inventions, every anti-libertarian, anti-Semitic madness of Europe.
Aside from his dramatic glory, Buzz Windrip was a Professional Common Man.
Oh, he was common enough. He had every prejudice and aspiration of every American Common Man. He believed in the desirability and therefore the sanctity of thick buckwheat cakes with adulterated maple syrup, in rubber trays for the ice cubes in his electric refrigerator, in the especial nobility of dogs, all dogs, in the oracles of S. Parkes Cadman, in being chummy with all waitresses at all junction lunch rooms, and in Henry Ford (when he became President, he exulted, maybe he could get Mr. Ford to come to supper at the White House), and the superiority of anyone who possessed a million dollars. He regarded spats, walking sticks, caviar, titles, tea-drinking, poetry not daily syndicated in newspapers and all foreigners, possibly excepting the British, as degenerate.
But he was the Common Man twenty-times-magnified by his oratory, so that while the other Commoners could understand his every purpose, which was exactly the same as their own, they saw him towering among them, and they raised hands to him in worship.
”
”
Sinclair Lewis (It Can't Happen Here)
“
Even the Hindu neighbours had no way of figuring out what the priest recited, though it was in their mother tongue, Marathi. He didn’t give a damn about the meaning of the words, the feeling behind them, the poetry of the language or the complex manoeuvres of the plot line. He had no thought for metaphysical implications nor time to translate them in terms of everyday life. He was telescoping words, sentences, paragraphs, hurtling through chapter after chapter. He was vomiting all over the place, choking on his own breathless mess. What came forth were huge boulders and sharp and clangorous bits and parts of iron pistons and bridges and girders.
”
”
Kiran Nagarkar (Ravan & Eddie)
“
Your father's last words were touching."
Elie's breath hitched. "You're lying."
"Why would I do that?" He reached into his vest and withdrew a silver chain. Dropping the piece into Ellie's hand, she realized what is was- her mother's ring, on the chain her dad always wore around his neck.
"Hold your gusto, darlin'," he drawled, breath hot on her neck. "I didn't kill him."
Ellie shook her head, staring at the ring. "How dare you?" she whispered.
Jutting her chin out, Ellie grasped the front of Terrence's shirt. "So help me God, I'll-"
"Making threats are we, now?" His brows raised in mock fear. "You're not in a place to be doing that." Open handed, Terrence shoved straight finger's into Ellie's ribs, sending her to the ground.
Pain zig-zagged through her torso, nearly making her vomit.
Ellie glared up at North as she willed the air back into her lungs. "I will never stop fighting," she wheezed as the room drifted out of focus then back again.
Terrence crouched next to her. "Just remember lover-boy the next time you think about getting in my way.
”
”
Ashley Nikole (Present History (Hands of Time, #1))
“
Rae changed into her bathrobe too. Over the gap in her bedroom wall, she called out, “What’re you trying to butter me up for?” She was the one who should’ve been cooking an Elle-belle scramblette. “Have I been replaced as maid of honor by Comedian Courtney?” The couple of times Rae had tried to make plans with Ellen recently, Ellen had been out with a woman from work named Courtney, who was apparently “the most hilarious human in the history of humanity.” Rae had mentally tallied the ways in which she was no doubt funnier than Courtney before coming to the conclusion that, given that her core competency was her heart, not her humor, she should lean into her differentiation rather than conforming to the competition’s friendship model. Would Courtney wipe Ellen’s vomit from the toilet seat or put poems on her pillows? Rae didn’t think so. “Maid-of-honor duties are safe,” Ellen said, handing her a plate of Rae-bae scramblette. “It’s just …” “What?” Ellen said the next sentence very quickly, as if it were a single ten-syllable word. “Aaron wants us to move in together.
”
”
Lindsay MacMillan (The Heart of the Deal)
“
All who do not repent shall be consumed together by the fierce anger of Jehovah as a withered oak, a waterless garden, and as tow to which the Lord shall apply the spark. Nor have the words of this section a voice for the Jew alone. They are also written for our admonition upon whom the ends of the ages have arrived. The failure of the professing Church has been even greater than that of Jerusalem, because of the greater light against which we have sinned. Soon must the Holy and the True, disgusted with such corruption, vomit out of His mouth all that is unreal and opposed to His Word. But He stands knocking at the door, and whenever there is reality and a heart for Himself, He will come in and sup there in hallowed, blest communion, though the doom of guilty Christendom is so near. Chapter Two Zion’s Future Glory The word that Isaiah the son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem.
”
”
H.A. Ironside (Expository Notes on the Prophet Isaiah (Ironside Commentary Series Book 9))
“
15‘I know your deeds, that you are neither cold (invigorating, refreshing) nor hot (healing, therapeutic); I wish that you were cold or hot. 16‘So because you are lukewarm (spiritually useless), and neither hot nor cold, I will vomit you out of My mouth [rejecting you with disgust]. 17‘Because you say, “I am rich, and have prospered and grown wealthy, and have need of nothing,” and you do not know that you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked [without hope and in great need], [Hos 12:8]
”
”
Joyce Meyer (Battlefield of the Mind Bible: Renew Your Mind Through the Power of God's Word)
“
White Man, to you my voice is like the unheard call in the wilderness. It is there, though you do not hear it. But, this once, take the time to listen to what I have to say.
Your history is highlighted by your wars. Why is it all right for your nations to conquer each other in your attempts at domination? When you sailed to our lands, you came with your advanced weapons. You claimed you were a progressive, civilized people. And today, White Man, you have the ultimate weapons. Warfare which could destroy all men, all creation. And you allow such power to be in the hands of those few who have such little value in true wisdom.
White Man, when you first came, most of our tribes began with peace and trust in dealing with you, strange white intruders. We showed you how to survive in our homelands. We were willing to share with you our vast wealth. Instead of repaying us with gratitude, you, White Man, turned on us, your friends. You turned on us with your advanced weapons and your cunning trickery.
When we, the Indian people, realized your intentions, we rose to do battle, to defend our nations, our homes, our food, our lives. And for our efforts, we are labelled savages, and our battles are called massacres.
And when our primitive weapons could not match those which you had perfected through centuries of wars, we realized that peace could not be won, unless our mass destruction took place. And so we turned to treaties. And this time, we ran into your cunning trickery. And we lost our lands, our freedom, and were confined to reservations. And we are held in contempt.
'As long as the Sun shall rise...' For you, White Man, these are words without meaning.
White Man, there is much in the deep, simple wisdom of our forefathers. We were here for centuries. We kept the land, the waters, the air clean and pure, for our children and our children's children.
Now that you are here, White Man, the rivers bleed with contamination. The winds moan with the heavy weight of pollution in the air. The land vomits up the poisons which have been fed into it. Our Mother Earth is no longer clean and healthy. She is dying.
White Man, in your greedy rush for money and power, you are destroying. Why must you have power over everything? Why can't you live in peace and harmony? Why can't you share the beauty and the wealth which Mother Earth has given us?
You do not stop at confining us to small pieces of rock an muskeg. Where are the animals of the wilderness to go when there is no more wilderness? Why are the birds of the skies falling to their extinction? Is there joy for you when you bring down the mighty trees of our forests? No living things seems sacred to you. In the name of progress, everything is cut down. And progress means only profits.
White Man, you say that we are a people without dignity. But when we are sick, weak, hungry, poor, when there is nothing for us but death, what are we to do? We cannot accept a life which has been imposed on us.
You say that we are drunkards, that we live for drinking. But drinking is a way of dying. Dying without enjoying life. You have given us many diseases. It is true that you have found immunizations for many of these diseases. But this was done more for your own benefit. The worst disease, for which there is no immunity, is the disease of alcoholism. And you condemn us for being its easy victims. And those who do not condemn us weep for us and pity us.
So, we the Indian people, we are still dying. The land we lost is dying, too.
White Man, you have our land now.
Respect it. As we once did.
Take care of it. As we once did.
Love it. As we once did.
White Man, our wisdom is dying. As we are. But take heed, if Indian wisdom dies, you, White Man, will not be far behind.
So weep not for us.
Weep for yourselves.
And for your children.
And for their children.
Because you are taking everything today.
And tomorrow, there will be nothing left for them.
”
”
Beatrice Mosionier (In Search of April Raintree)
“
She couldn’t look, and yet the image was already seared into her mind. Mina’s face wasn’t the pleasant visage that Ten remembered. Because they’d blinded her. Those big, dark, beseeching eyes were gone, instead replaced with angry, red scars and folded flesh. It was horrific how the ruined skin was set in slightly, speaking of something missing there, and how crimson veins of angry skin spread up onto her forehead and down onto her cheeks. “Who else would have?” Mina asked softly, more resigned than anything else, but Ten couldn’t be resigned. Not even remotely. Her mind was rushing in a thousand different directions, and all of them were awful. Had they held her down while pressing a burning poker to her beautiful eyes? Stuffed a cotton cloth in her mouth as she screamed? Ten vomited again, feeling like she couldn’t breathe. “Why?” she gasped, her head spinning enough that she might fall over right then and there. “You already know why.” Mina’s hands stretched out, feeling for her. Ten practically collapsed onto the dais, letting her friend cup her face. “I don’t understand. I don’t understand. I don’t understand,” she chanted over and over again, eyes squeezed shut. But then that just reminded her that Mina would never see again, so she opened her eyes, only to find herself face to ruined face with the girl. Snot was dripping from her nose and tears were starting to fall from Ten’s eyes. She felt like she was locked in the worst nightmare she’d ever had, but she couldn’t wake up. “How could they do this to you?” “Oh, Ten, your heart is so pure.” Mina leaned in, resting her forehead against Ten’s. “You know the reason.” “No, I don’t. I really don’t.” But then Mina’s lips were near her ear, whispering words that made Ten’s entire body run cold. “No savage can ever see the Light.
”
”
Jada Fisher (Maiden of the Lux (The Dragon Guard #2))
“
never let a man ruin your lipstick, eyeliner or mascara unless he is kissing or throat-fucking you.
”
”
Dani L Smith (Word Vomit)
“
Alis coughed from the shadows of the house, and I remembered to start walking, to look toward the dais-
At Tamlin.
The breath knocked from me, and it was an effort to keep going down the stairs, to keep going my knees from buckling. He was resplendent in a tunic of green and gold, a crown of burnished laurel leaves gleaming on his head. He'd loosened the grip on his glamour, letting that immortal light and beauty shine through- for me.
My vision narrowed on him, on my High Lord, his wide eyes glistening as I stepped onto the soft grass, white rose petals scattered down it-
And Red ones.
Like drops of blood amongst the white, red petals had been sprayed across the path ahead.
I forced my gaze up, to Tamlin, his shoulders back, head high.
So unaware of the true extent of how broken and dark I was inside. How unfit I was to be clothed in white when my hands were so filthy.
Everyone else was thinking it. They had to be.
Every step was too fast, propelling me toward the dais and Tamlin. And toward Ianthe, clothed in dark blue robes tonight, beaming beneath the hood and silver crown.
As if I were good- as if I hadn't murdered two of their kind.
I was a murderer and a liar.
A cluster of red petals loomed ahead- just like the Fae youth's blood had pooled at my feet.
Ten steps from the dais, at the edge of that splatter of red, I slowed.
Then stopped.
Everyone was watching, exactly as they had when I'd nearly died, spectators to my torment.
Tamlin extended a broad hand, brows narrowing slightly. My heart beat so fast, too fast.
I was going to vomit.
Right over those rose petals, right over the grass and ribbons trailing into the ailse from the chairs flanking it.
And between my skin and bones, something thrummed and pounded, rising and pushing, lashing through my blood-
So many eyes, too many eyes, pressed on me, witness to every crime I'd committed, every humiliation-
I don't know why I'd even bothered to wear gloves, why I'd let Ianthe convince me.
The fading sun was too hot, the garden too hedged in. As inescapable as the vow I was about to make, binding me to him forever, shackling him to my broken and weary soul. The thing inside me was roiling now, my body shaking with the building force of it as it hunted for a way out-
Forever- I would never get better, never get free of myself, of the dungeon where I'd spent three months-
'Feyre,' Tamlin said, his hand steady, as he continued to reach for mine. The sun sank past the lip of the western garden wall; shadows pooled, chilling the air.
If I turned away, they'd start talking, but I couldn't make the last few steps, couldn't, couldn't, couldn't-
I was going to fall apart, right there, right then- and they'd see precisely how ruined I was.
Help me, help me, help me, I begged someone, anyone. Begged Lucien, standing in the front row, his metal eye fixed on me. Begged Ianthe, face serene and patient and lovely within that hood. Save me- please, save me. Get me out. End this.
Tamlin took a step toward me- concern shading those eyes.
I retreated a step. No.
Tamlin's mouth tightened. The crowd murmured. Silk streamers laden with globes of gold faelight twinkled into life above and around us.
Ianthe said smoothly. 'Come, Bride and be joined with your true love. Come, Bride, and let good triumph at last.'
Good. I was not good. I was nothing, and my soul, my eternal soul was damned-
I tried to get my traitorous lungs to draw air so I could voice a word. No- no.
But I didn't have to say it.
Thunder crackled behind me, as if two boulders have been hurled against each other.
People screamed, falling back, a few vanishing outright as darkness erupted.
I whirled, and through the night drifting away like smoke on a wind, I found Rhysand straightening the lapels of his black jacket.
'Hello, Feyre darkling,' he purred.
”
”
Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Mist and Fury (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #2))
“
Sophie had to force herself to breathe slower to keep her head from getting woozy. “I’m sure I speak for everyone,” Keefe grunted, “when I say: Are we there yet?” “Almost,” Tiergan promised. “Everyone dig deep—and don’t look down.” “Steaming sasquatch poop—that’s a long way to fall!” Keefe announced. Fitz moved closer to Sophie, his new cologne tickling her nose as he whispered, “I almost forgot. I brought you a present.” Her heart skipped at least five beats when he slipped an orange velvet satchel into her palm. He’d been bringing her lots of tiny gifts lately—and she’d been trying hard not to read too much into it. “Ugh, anyone else ready to vomit from the Fitzphie?” Keefe asked. “I am,” Dex said, as Linh asked, “Did Fitzphie become an actual thing?” “I don’t even know what ‘Fitzphie’ is supposed to mean,” Tiergan noted. “Want me to explain it?” Tam offered. “No,” Sophie said, opening the satchel and pulling out a fist-size crystal prism. It was heavy like a paperweight, and when she held it up to the light, rainbow sparkles flashed across her fingers, highlighting words carved across the base, along with the Foxfire seal. Alvar Soren Vacker “That’s called a Radiant,” Fitz explained. “It’s the highest honor any prodigy can receive when they complete the basic levels at Foxfire. Alvar was so disgustingly smug about earning one that he told my mom she should keep it on the mantel in our main sitting room, so it could inspire Biana and me to work harder.” “Ugh, I forgot about that,” Biana grumbled. “I can’t believe Mom did it.” “I know. So I think it’s time to destroy it. And considering where we are, maybe it’d be fun to let it take a really nasty fall.” “Gotta give you credit,” Tam told Fitz. “That’s pretty much a perfect gift.” It was. Though Sophie felt bad taking it. “Shouldn’t you or Biana do the honors?” “Nope. Alvar was there when they took your parents,” Biana argued. “And when you were kidnapped.” “Just throw it extra hard, for us,” Fitz added. Sophie glanced at Dex. “Alvar helped kidnap you, too.” “So boost your throw with the Sucker Punch I made you,” he suggested. They seemed pretty sure, so Sophie gathered whatever mental energy she could muster and channeled it into her arm muscles. A burst of force from the Sucker Punch gave her throw extra oomph as she hurled the Radiant down the center of the curving stairs, where none of the bodyguards would be standing. A satisfying
”
”
Shannon Messenger (Nightfall (Keeper of the Lost Cities, #6))
“
In a written lament then words cannot simply be dumped or gushed or mushed as in initial grief. Here one cannot simply vomit out feelings but must choose words. Not that the lament is cold, objective, and detached. Rather the intensity of one's emotions unite with the discipline of one's mind to produce structured sorrow, a sort of authorized version of distress, a kind of coherent agony. In a lament, therefore, words are carefully selected, crafted, honed, to express loss as closely yet fully as possible.
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Dale Ralph Davis (2 Samuel: Out of Every Adversity (Focus on the Bible Commentaries))
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just when i thought i was over it, all the feelings came back and hit me like a ton of bricks. i just can’t seem to quit feeling for you.
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Dani L Smith (Word Vomit)
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your scent brings comfort to my soul
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Dani L Smith (Word Vomit)
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bruise my lips with kisses.
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Dani L Smith (Word Vomit)
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i forced myself to go on a date. but once again, he wasn’t you.
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Dani L Smith (Word Vomit)
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it took me so long to realise that you are my safe place.
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Dani L Smith (Word Vomit)
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i’m tired of going on dates with people that i have zero chemistry with. meanwhile there are two men in my life one unobtainable one not interested whom i have scorching chemistry with.
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Dani L Smith (Word Vomit)