THE NIGHT CIRCUS - ERIN MORGENSTERN

The Night Circus - Pg 508

   There are so many paces to begin.
   So many elements to consider.
   He wonders if the poem of the circus could possibly be bottled.
   Widget takes a sip of his wine and puts his glass down on the table. He sits back in his chair and steadily returns the stare aimed at him. Taking his time as though he has all of it in the world, in the universe, from the days when tales meant more than they do now, but perhaps less than they will someday, he draws a breath that releases the tangled knot of words in his heart, and they fall from his lips effortlessly.
   "The circus arrives without warning."

The Night Circus - Pg 505

   "Someone needs to tell those tales. When the battles are fought and won and lost, when the pirates find their treasures and the dragons eat their foes for breakfast with a nice cup of Lapsang souchong, someone needs to tell their bits of overlapping narrative. There's magic in that. It's in the listener, and for each and every ear it will be different, and it will affect them in ways they can never predict. From the mundane to the profound. You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone's soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows what they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift. Your sister may be able to see the future, but you yourself can shape it, boy. Do not forget that." He takes another sip of his wine. "There are many kinds of magic, after all."

The Night Circus - Pg 480

   It is only then that Bailey realizes the scope of the commitment he is being asked for.
   It is not the handful of years committed to Harvard. It is, he thinks, an even greater commitment than inheriting responsibility for the family farm.
   He looks from Marco to Celia, and knows from the look in her eyes that she will let him go if he asks to leave, no matter what that might mean for them or for the circus.
   He thinks of a litany of questions but none of them truly matter.
   He knows his answer already.
   His choice was made when he was ten years old, under a different tree, bound up in acorns and dares and a single white glove.
   He will always choose the circus.

The Night Circus - Pg 468

   Celia holds her hands to her lips, not quite believing her eyes. The sight of Marco standing in the Ice Garden is one she has imagines so many times before while alone in the icy expanse of flowers, it does not seem real despite the darkness of his suit against a bower of pale roses.
   Then he turns and looks at her. As soon as she sees his eyes all her doubts vanish.
   For a moment, he looks so young that she can see the boy he was, years before she met him, when they were already connected but still so far apart.
   There are so many things she wants to say, things she feared she would never have the opportunity to tell him again. Only one seems truly important.
   "I love you," she says.
   The words echo throughout the tent, softly rustling the frozen leaves.

The Night Circus - Pg 462

   Tsukiko flicks her still-glowing cigarette toward the fire.
   It is still in the air when Marco cries out for Celia to stop.
   It has barely touched the flickering white flames of the bonfire when she leaps into his arms.
   Marco knows he does not have the time to push her away, so he pulls her close, burying his face in her hair, his bowler hat torn from his head by the wind.
   And then the pain starts. Sharp, ripping pain as though he is being pulled apart.
   "Trust me," Celia whispers in his ear, and he stops fighting it, forgetting everything but her.
   In the moment before the explosion, before the white light becomes too blinding to discern precisely what is happening, they dissolve into the air.

The Night Circus - Pg 392

   Trapped in silence, Marco traces apologies and adorations across Celia's body with his tongue. Mutely expressing all the things he cannot speak aloud.
   He finds other ways to tell her, his fingers leaving faint trails of ink in their wake. He savors every sound he elicits from her.
   The entire room trembles as they come together.
   And though there are a great many fragile objects contained within it, nothing breaks.
   Above them, the clock continues to turn its pages, pushing stories too minuscule to read ever onward.

The Night Circus - Pg 359

   And before he can tell her to tell Widget goodbye for him if need be, she leans forward and kisses him, not on the cheek, as she has a handful of times before, but on the lips, and Bailey knows in that moment that he will follow her anywhere.

The Night Circus - Pg 349

   "Call me by my name," he says. He had never heard her speak his name and holding her in his arms he suddenly craves the sound. "Please," he adds when she hesitates.
   "Marco," she says, her voice low and soft. The sound of his name on her tongue is even more intoxicating than he had imagined, and he leans in to taste it.

The Night Circus - Pg 322

   It is not always a pleasant position to be in, but it is the way of such things, and Chandresh knows this process well. One is proud, one collects one's receipts, and even if one is a bit melancholy, one moves on.
   The circus left him behind, sailing forth, and yet he cannot turn away from the shore. More than enough time to mourn the creative process and ignite it again, but there are no sparks of something new. No new endeavors, nothing bigger or better for nearly fourteen years.
   Perhaps, he thinks, he has outdone even himself. But it is not a pleasant thought, so he drowns it in brandy and attempts to ignore it.

The Night Circus - Pg 309

   He goes directly to the ballroom, making his way to the center of the dance floor. He takes Celia's arm, spinning her away from Herr Thiessen.
   Marco pulls her to him in an emerald embrace, so close that no distinction remains between where his suit ends and her gown begins.
   To Celia, there is suddenly no else in the room as he holds her in his arms.
   But before she can vocalize her surprise, his lips close over hers and she is lost in wordless bliss.
   Marco kisses her as though they are the only two people in the world.
   The air swirls in a tempest around them, blowing open the glass doors to the garden with a tangle of billowing curtains.
   Every eye in the crowded ballroom turns in their direction.
   And then he releases her and walks away.
   By the time Marco leaves the room, almost everyone has forgotten the incident entirely. It is replaced by a momentary confusion that is blamed on the heat or the excessive amounts of champagne.
   Herr Thiessen cannot recall why Celia has suddenly stopped dancing, or when her gown shifted to its current deep green.
   "Is something wrong?" he asks, when he realizes that she is trembling.

The Night Circus - Pg 297

   They stand entwined but not touching, their heads tilted toward each other. Lips frozen in the moment before (or after) the kiss.
   Though you watch them for some time they do not move. No stirring of fingertips or eyelashes. No indication that they are even breathing.
   "They cannot be real," someone nearby remarks.
   Many patrons only glance at them before moving on, but the longer you watch, the more you can detect the subtlest of motions. The change in the curve of a hand as it hovers near an arm. The shifting angle of a perfectly balanced leg. Each of them always gravitating toward the other.
   Yet still they do not touch.

The Night Circus - Pg 292

   Without the concern for the effect she might be having on the surroundings, she is able to relax into the sensation instead of resisting it. It is exquisite. It is the way she has felt in so many of his tents, the thrill of being surrounded by something wondrous and fantastical, only magnified and focused directly on her. The feel of his skin against hers reverberates across her entire body, though his fingers remain entwined in hers. She looks up at him, caught in the haunting greenish-grey of his eyes again, and she does not turn away.
   They stand gazing at each other in silence for moments that seem to stretch for hours.

The Night Circus - Pg 289

   The silence that falls between them is a comfortable one. He longs to reach over and touch her, but he resists, fearful of destroying the delicate camaraderie they are building. He steals glances instead, watching the way the light falls over her skin. Several times he catches her regarding him in a similar manner, and the moments when she holds his eyes with hers are sublime.

The Night Circus - Pg 277

   "I've seen you like this before," she says, placing his true countenance in a location in her memory. "You've watched my show like that."
   "Do you remember all of your audiences?" Marco asks.
   "Not all of them," Celia says. "But I remember the people who look at me the way you do."
   "What way might that be?"
   "As though they cannot decide if they are afraid of me or they want to kiss me."
   "I am not afraid of you."

The Night Circus - Pg 269

   By the time he reaches the farm, he is sure that the Bailey he is now is closer to the Bailey he is supposed to be than the Bailey he had been the day before. He may not be certain what any of it means, but for now he does not think that it much matters.
   In his dreams, he is a knight on horseback, carrying a silver sword, and it does not really seem that strange after all.

The Night Circus - Pg 247

   "Have you ever been in love, Kiko?" Isobel asks.
   Tsukiko's shoulders stiffen as she exhales slowly. For a moment Isobel thinks her question will go unanswered, but then she replies.
   "I have had affairs that lasted decades and others that lasted hours. I have loved princesses and peasants. And I suppose they loved me, each in their way."

The Night Circus - Pg 228

   "Widge?" Poppet asks after a long silence.
   "Yes?"
   "Is it not that bad to be trapped somewhere, then? Depending on where you're trapped?"
   "I suppose it depends on how much you like the place you're trapped in," Widget says.
   "And how much you like whoever you're stuck there with," Poppet adds, kicking his black boot with her white one.
   Her brother laughs and the sounds echoes through the tent, carried over the branches that are covered in candles. Each flame flickering and white.

The Night Circus - Pg 226

   "The wizard was old and quite clever himself, of course, and he had gone a very, very long time without telling his secrets to anyone at all. Maybe over the years he had forgotten about the importance of keeping them, or maybe he was distracted by her youth or beauty or cleverness. Maybe he was just tired, or maybe he had too much wine and didn't realize what he was doing. Whatever the circumstances, he told his deepest secrets to the girl, the hidden keys to all his magic."

The Night Circus - Pg 222

   Bailey feels oddly at ease. As though he is closer to the ground, but taller at the same time. His concerns about his future no longer weigh so heavily on him as he exits the tent, turning right down the curving path that winds between the striped tents.

The Night Circus - Pg 184

   It is these aficionados, these rêveurs, who see the details in the bigger picture of the circus. They see the nuance of the costumes, the intricacy of the signs. They buy sugar flowers and do not eat them, wrapping them in paper instead and carefully bringing them home. They are enthusiasts, devotees. Addicts. Something about the circus stirs their souls, and they ache for it when it is absent.

The Night Circus - Pg 113

   He reads histories and mythologies and fairy tales, wondering why it seems that only girls are ever swept away from their mundane lives on farms by knights or princes or wolves. It strikes him as unfair to not have the same fanciful opportunity himself. And he is not in the position to do any rescuing of his own.

The Night Circus - Pg 112

   "She would have run off with him regardless," she says. "That was what she wished. It would not have been my choice for her, but a child should not have their choices dictated for them. I have listened to you read books aloud to my cats. When you were five years old you turned a laundry tub into a pirate ship and and launched an attack against the hydrangeas in my garden. Do not try to convince me that you would choose that farm."

The Night Circus - Pg 73

   Within moments of his arrival, he finds himself with a glass of sparkling wine in hand, exchanging pleasantries with a former prima ballerina. He decides then that he rather enjoys unusual late-night social functions, and should endeavor to attend them more frequently.

The Night Circus - Pg 57

   Chandresh relishes reactions. Genuine reactions, not mere polite applause. He often values the reactions over the show itself. A show without an audience is nothing, after all. In the response of the audience, that is where the power of performance lives.

The Night Circus - Pg 24

   Celia stares back at him, unsure how to explain. She plays over in her mind the impression of the man in his grey suit with his pale eyes and harsh features, trying to figure out why the name does not fit on him properly.
   "It's not a real name," she says. "Not one that he's carried with him always. It's one he wears like his hat. So he can take it off if he wants."

The Night Circus - Pg 15

   "Have you seen the contraptions these magicians build to accomplish the most mundane feats? They are a bunch of fish covered in feathers trying to convince the public they can fly, and I am simply a bird in their midst."

TWAIN'S END - LYNN CULLEN

Twain's End - Pg 297

   A quiet descended. Isabel became aware of every little sound--a ticking somewhere in the bowels of the furnace, The King's slow breathing. As she strained to listen, she felt something else: the reaching out of another person to her, not by movement of his body but with is very will.
   Without speaking, she knew to take off her blindfold. Ralph was waiting for her, his brown eyes intense. Marry me, he mouthed.

Twain's End - Pg 223

   "So in closing, friends, remember that life is short. Break the rules. Forgive quickly, kiss SLOWLY. Love truly, laugh uncontrollably. And never, ever regret ANYTHING that makes you smile."

Twain's End - Pg 216

   "When it was over, and Mother was weeping in the house, and Father had stormed away, I crept out back to be next to Jennie. She was lying in the dust, all in a heap. I whispered that I was sorry, real sorry, but that did no good. She did not move. So I lay down next to her and, shyly, crept my hand upon her arm. And as I lay there begging God to help her get up so we could run away together, I saw that the skin of her forearm was paler than the freckles on my hand. How could Mother call Jennie black if she was whiter than me in places?"

Twain's End - Pg 188

   A flash of lightning illuminated his shock of hair. "Come over here. I want you to see this."
   At the window, he had slid his arms around her from behind. Conscious that they were in his bedroom, that his forearms were crossed over her ribs, that his sensitive hands with their tapered fingers, an ink-stained callous on the side of his index finger, were near her breasts, she lifter her gaze to the storm sweeping toward the mountains. White fissures sliced the curtains of rain slanting from the black heavens. Thunder jarred the house. At the edge of the lawn, the fir trees reached up as for mercy, their supplications lit up by the relentless lightning.
   Mr. Clemens tightened his hold until she could feel his every contour pressing into her back. She dared not move.
   By and by, the terrible ecstasy beyond their window died away, until the only sounds were the hissing of the phonograph needle at the end of the cylinder, their breathing, and the purr of the now sleeping cat.
   Mr. Clemens's mustache had brushed against her cheek when he spoke. "Is that you, Lioness, or the cat?"
   "Me," she had said.

Twain's End - Pg 187

   A lump had scalded her throat when he finished and taken off his reading glasses. "Well, what do you think?" he asked.
   "Eve tells all the reasons why she could love Adam, but those aren't really why." Fireflies signaled as she'd swallowed her tears. "She loves him because he's hers."
   Just then a rocket, a leftover from Independence Day, had soared over Mount Monadnock. It struggled toward a heaven it couldn't reach and then, in a piteous burst, fell to earth in despair. They had looked at each other with shining eyes. The very world seemed to have been created just for them.

Twain's End - Pg 184

   Isabel plucked at the coral necklace that he had given her, thinking of all the times she had been patted, kissed, or had her hand grasped by both men and women so they might touch someone close to the great man. One woman, after kissing her on the forehead, had asked how she ever managed to come to work for such a saintly man, as if Isabel somehow maneuvered her way into his confidence. Isabel had "managed" nothing. The most wonderful things in life came of their own accord; you just had to be open to them.

Twain's End - Pg 172

   "I loved her, you know. People said that I married her for her money, but that wasn't true. Oh, I loved her money, don't get me wrong, and I loved how she made me respectable, or at least tried to, but that's not why I had to have her." He took a drink, then set down his glass. "She was just a little girl, you see, frail as a child. It was as if I could hold her in one hand. I was so honored that she trusted me not to crush her. " He sighed. "But I did. I crushed her every day."

Twain's End - Pg 158

   Olivia would hold his letters to her breast, trembling. She yearned for him to take her in his arms and ravish her. Oh, and when he finally did, after a thrilling two years of courtship and breakups and tearful reunion--
   Olivia closed her eyes again, remembering the first months of her marriage. He had tried to be tender, calling her his little girl, his sweet delicate, fragile little girl, stroking her, petting her, until his kisses became so passionate she thought he would eat her. He made her scream out in ecstasy, her body tearing with pleasure.

Twain's End - Pg 154

   The gloaming. Eventide. Dusk. Twilight. For this hour to have so many names, it must have troubled the ancients. As a girl in Elmira, before her health had become delicate, she'd liked this time best, especially in summer, when there were fireflies to capture and a white moon to watch rise, after which she would drag herself indoors, sticky and tired from playing, to sit in the warm soapy water of a tin hat tub. Now the folding of day into night held none of these delights. Twilight felt purely ominous: the ending of a chance; the dwindling of time that would never repeat itself; a loss. The earth itself seemed to hold its breath during these fading minutes, as if afraid of what was to come. The lingering made the surrender so poignant, until the light finally... went.

Twain's End - Pg 125

   Grunting softly with each breath, Mrs. Clemens waited until Isabel stopped smiling. "If you care about him, let him talk about the rugs in this place, Miss Lyon. Let him talk about the wall color. Let him talk about the shutters. Just don't encourage him to tell the truth about himself." She paused, panting slightly. "No one wants to hear about the deepest part of another person's heart. It's too unbearable."

Twain's End - Pg 111

   Although Mr. Clemens walked with Jean, Isabel could feel him reaching out to her. Keenly Isabel willed her inner self to let him know that she was reaching back.

Twain's End - Pg 74

   "I'd like to be king." He tossed his graying auburn mane and held out his cigar like a scepter. "How's that?"
   She bowed to him. "Your Highness."
   "What am I king of?"
   She thought of his fondness for cards. "Hearts."
   He nodded. "Right." He put out the other hand. "You may kiss the royal mitt."
   She gazed at his wedding band shining from within its sparse thicket of hair. When she looked up, he lifted his hand.
   She returned his bold look, then leaned forward and kissed his knuckle. The salty taste of his skin stayed on her lips after she pulled back; she smelled the tarry smoke of his cigar.
   The laughter in his eyes settled into seriousness. They took a breath and, as one, turned toward the river. Below, a paddle ship, trailing smoke from its single black stack, navigated the broad and sparkling seam in the earth.

Twain's End - Pg 69

   She genuinely liked Jean, though there was something about her that made Isabel sad. Outwardly, Jean seemed to have everything--a world-famous father, money, intelligence, and, with her strong chin and Greek-goddess nose, healthy good looks. At age twenty-three, she was still a tomboy, not only in her appearance--she refused to wear a corset under her plain white shirtwaist and brown corduroy skirt, or to fashion her hair in anything but a single dark braid--but in her ungraceful movement as well. She spoke in the same way she moved: bluntly, plainly, no mincing allowed. Yet as sturdy as she looked, there was something vulnerable about her, something broken, like the stray dogs and cats she was continually nursing back to health, like the dray horses in the city for which she bought freedom whenever she could.

Twain's End - Pg 58

   Her father had made her sit next to her mother, and then he put the infant, heavy as a small sack of sand, into her arms. Baby Charlie scowled up at Isabel with his double chin and furrowed brow, a petulant worm being pulled into the light. Love surged through her bony chest. Gritting her teeth against the overwhelming pain of it, she squeezed his arm. He cried out.
   "Charles!" her mother exclaimed. "Take him away from her."
   Her heart had broken as her brother had been wrenched from her. Even now, as she looked out over the majestic river, she could taste the bitterness of being misunderstood.

Twain's End - Pg 51

   They exchanged a smile that was limited to the eyes, the art of which Isabel had not fully valued before making Mr. Clemens's acquaintance. Who knew that forcing a grin away from your mouth drove it directly to your heart?

Twain's End - Pg 43

   At fifty-three, he was handsome in an almost violent way, his gray eyes too piercing, his cheekbones too raw, his arched nose somehow sexual. Although he was only sitting there and smoking, his energy seized the little room. His avalanche of silver-shot auburn hair, even his mustache--a coarse, impenetrable, orange and black buffer between the world and the man--was aggressive.

Twain's End - Pg 34

   "I believe cats are the smartest creatures on earth. Unlike dogs, who will stay and let an idiot mistreat them, cats won't stand for it. They don't like how they're being treated, they leave."

Twain's End - Pg 21

   He once told Isabel, after giving a dinner for eighteen worthies from New York in his former Fifth Avenue home, that he felt a good host should monopolize the conversation so his guests could be free to enjoy their meal. Mark Twain should entertain so they could relax. She had wondered then how the real Sam Clemens bore up to the burden that Mr. Twain so frequently imposed upon him, and had turned to him to ask. But he had shut his eyes as if to nap, his beautiful head sinking against the back of his chair, the subject closed.

Twain's End - Pg 17

   He didn't have to marry Isabel. She'd seen too many marriages that were nothing more than legal contracts, having little to do with love and respect. She didn't need that. She just wanted his acknowledgment of their mutual devotion. She just wanted him to claim her.

Twain's End - Pg 3

   Isabel's mother watcher her tie on her hat with the look of intense pride and suppressed doubt that is particular to the mothers of grown daughters.

MESSENGER - LOIS LOWRY

Messenger - Pg 158

   After the thorny branches had shredded her dress, they had reached for her legs as night fell, and now he could see that she was terribly lacerated. The wounds were deep, and he could see exposed muscles and tendons glisten yellow and pink in a devastating kind of beauty where the ragged flesh gaped open.

Messenger - Pg 129

   He could see, too, that she was accustomed to her stick and twisted leg. A lifetime of walking in that way had made it, as she had pointed out, part of her. It was who she was. To become a fast-striding Kira with two straight legs would have been to become a different person. This was not a journey Matty could undertake with a stranger.

Messenger - Pg 117

   He watched, his eyes heavy with exhaustion, as she took his bowl to the sink, placed it there, and then, leaning on her stick, gathered some stakes from a shelf, and a ball of twine. With her garden tools she turned to go outdoors. The twisted foot dragged in its familiar way. He had known everything about Kira for so long: her smile, her voice, her merry optimism, the amazing strength and skill of her hands, and the burden of her useless leg.
   I must tell you this, Matty thought before he slept. I can fix you.

Messenger - Pg 102

   To his surprise, Jean kissed him. SO often in the past, teasing, she had said she would, one day. Now she did, and it was a quick and fragrant touch  to his lips that gave him courage and, even before he started out, made him yearn to come back home.

Messenger - Pg 71

   When would he ever learn to stop saying "Look" to a man who had no eyes?

Messenger - Pg 48

   In the past, new ones had mostly arrived alone or in pairs, but now they seemed to come in groups: whole families, often, looking tired, for they had for they had come great distances, and frightened, because they had left fearsome things behind and usually their escape had been dangerous and terrifying. But always they were hopeful, too, and clearly relieved to be greeted by the smiles. The people of Village prided themselves on the welcome, many of them leaving their regular work to go and be part of it.
   Frequently the new ones were damaged. They hobbled on canes or were ill. Sometimes they were disfigured by wounds or simply because they had been born that way. Some were orphans. All of them were welcomed.

Messenger - Pg 25

   At first, having found his way to Village, he had thought his own brutal beginnings--a fatherless hovel for a home; a grim, defeated mother who beat him and his brother bloody--were unusual. But now he knew that there were communities everywhere, sprinkled across the vast landscape of the known world, in which people suffered. Not always from beatings and hunger, the way he had. But from ignorance. From not knowing. From being kept from knowledge.

Messenger - Pg 22

   "And so we would give up--or maybe even trade away--reading, and music, in exchange for the extreme excitement of pulling a handle and watching sourballs spit forth from a mechanical device?" he asked.
   Put that way, Matty thought, the Gaming Machine didn't actually seem such a good trade. "Well," he said, "it's fun."

GATHERING BLUE - LOIS LOWRY

Gathering Blue - Pg 229

   Kira nodded, and for the first time in many months she began to cry for her own loss. She had not wept when her mother died. She had willed herself to be strong then, to decide what to do and to do it. Now hot tears stained her face and she covered it with her hands. Her shoulders shook as she sobbed. Her father opened his arms, offering her an embrace, but she turned from him.

Gathering Blue - Pg 210

   "Them be all broken, them people. But there be plenty of food. And it's quiet-like, and nice."
   "What do you mean, broken?"
   He gestured toward her twisted leg. "Like you. Some don't walk good. Some be broken in other ways. Not all. But lots. Do you think it maken them quiet and nice, to be broken?"
   Puzzled by his description, Kira didn't answer. Pain makes you strong, her mother had told her. She had not said quiet, or nice.

Gathering Blue - Pg 202

   He started in a strong, rich baritone voice. No melody, yet, really. The Song began with a chant. Gradually, melodies would enter, Kira recalled; some slow, soaring lyrical phrases, followed by other harsher phrases with a quick pulsating beat. But it emerged slowly, as the world had. The Song began with the origin of the world, so many centuries before:

                "In the beginning . . ."

Gathering Blue - Pg 127

  The scrap told her something of her father--something important, something that mattered--but the knowledge entered her sleep, trembling through like a dream, and in the morning she did not know that it was there at all.

Gathering Blue - Pg 99

   When he read the world hollyhock aloud with his finger on the word, she saw that it was long, with many lines like tall stems. She turned her eyes away quickly so that she would not learn it, would not be guilty of something clearly forbidden to her. But it made her smile, to see it, to see how the pen formed the shapes and the shapes told a story of a name.

Gathering Blue - Pg 68

  They had always eaten together at a wooden table that Kira's father had made long before her birth. She mourned the table after the burning because of the memories it held for her mother. Katrina had described his strong hands smoothing the wood and rounding its corners so that the coming baby would not be endangered by sharp edges. All of it was ashes now: the smooth wood, the soft edges the memory of his hands.

Gathering Blue - Pg 50

   While her mother slept restlessly, Kira sorted the dyed threads in her basket and began to weave them into the cloth scrap with a bone needle. It soothed her to do so, and passed the time.
   The threads began to sing to her. Not a song of words or tones, but a pulsing, a quivering in her hands as if they had life. For the first time, her fingers did not direct the threads, but followed where they led. She was able to close her eyes and simply feel the needle move through the fabric, pulled by the urgent, vibrating threads.
   When her mother murmured, Kira leaned forward with the water container and moistened the dry lips. Only then did she look down at the small strip of material in her lap. It was radiant. Despite the dim light in the cott--it was night-start by then--the golds and reds pulsated as if the morning sun itself had slid and twisted its rays into the cloth. The brilliant threads crisscrossed in an intricate pattern of loops and knots that Kira had never seen before, that she could not have created, that she had never known or heard described.
   When her mother's eyes opened for a final time, Kira had held the vibrant piece of fabric so that the dying woman could see. Words were beyond Katrina by then. But she smiled.

Gathering Blue - Pg 39

   You saw my father taken? Kira had never heard the details of the tragedy. She knew only what her mother had told her. But this man had known her father. This man had been there!
   Was he afraid? Was my father afraid? It was a strange, unbidden question, and she did not ask it aloud. But Kira was so afraid herself... She wondered what the moment had been like for her father.

Gathering Blue - Pg 26

   "Take pride in your pain," her mother had always told her. "You are stronger than those who have none.

Gathering Blue - Pg 22

 In one astounding burst of creativity, her ability had gone far beyond her mother's teaching. Now, without instruction or practice, without hesitancy, her fingers felt the way to twist and weave and stitch the special threads together to create designs rich and explosive with color. She did not understand how the knowledge had come to her. But it was there, in her fingertips, and now they trembled slightly with eagerness to start. If only she was allowed to stay.

Gathering Blue - Pg 11

   But today there was no festivity. There were only the usual sounds. Katrina's death had changed nothing in the lives of the people. She had been there. Now she was gone. Their lives continued.

Gathering Blue - Pg 1

   "Mother?"
   There was no reply. She hadn't expected one. Her mother had been dead now for four days, and Kira could tell that the last of the spirit was drifting away.
   "Mother." She said it again, quietly, to whatever was leaving. She thought that she could feel its leave-taking, the way one could feel a small whisper of breeze at night.

LEGEND OF A SUICIDE - DAVID VANN

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 176

 It seems to me that one life is actually many lives, and that they add up to something surprisingly long. But what makes me sad, I guess, and the reason I bring all of this up, is that you won't be getting any other lives.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 237

   Perhaps we never were generous enough to the father. A father, after all, is a lot for a thing to be. That sounds bitter, I suppose, but I don't mean it to be bitter; there were times when the father showed me most clearly what I would become, and that, certainly, is a kind of gift, if not always a blessing.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 234

   "What else should I know about you? I know very little, you know."
   "Well, son, let me tell you everything."
   The father never told me anything, of course, but looking back, I can see that I felt closest to the father on that very afternoon. Perhaps it was only gestures--the way the father hitched up his jeans, his sideways grin at the spiel of a salesman, the gratitude and love I thought I saw in certain small movements of the eyes--but even if these indices were only imagined, they did seem to provide what I had wanted for a very long time.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 226

 Perhaps he had been, to some degree, lonely. This was not the kind of thinking I wanted to take very far. My pity for my father up to this point had been limited to a man who had inflicted avoidable pain on everyone around him but who must have suffered some himself. I didn't care to enlarge on this.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 218

   Memories are infinitely richer than their origins, I discovered; to travel back can only estrange one even from memory itself. And because memory is often all that a life or a self is built on, returning home can take away exactly that.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 218

   Everything my father had left me vanished. I glanced at the remains and they shifted the light until opacity became translucence and I could see only a diffusion of the unparticular ground beyond, the clutter that promised but gave nothing.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 205

  He saw himself in Mexico and maybe someday in the South Pacific, down there in all the nice weather with warm, beautiful blue water and the green mountains, and he saw that he would still be alone. Roy would never catch up to him. And he wondered what Roy's grave looked like. He realized he'd never get to see it now.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 201

   The next day came slowly. A thin line of gray, or perhaps a blue less dark, and then the peaks outlined as if by their own emanation, and then a faster lightening above them until their edges curled in fire and suddenly everywhere was white and the orange sun ticked upward in thin, segmented lines between two peaks to grow heavy and yellow and merge into the world too hot to look at. All became blind. The water and mountains and air all the same brightness, glaring.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 200

 Boating in a strange place at night you could believe almost anything, he knew, any direction, any depth, so sure of innate fears you could distrust your compass and depth finder right up until you hit the rocks.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 191

   I could have stayed here, he said. If I had not cheated and broken everything up. If I had been able to stand my wife. If salmon had flown like birds through the streets.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 177

   And then Jim went through a time when he didn't seem to have any thoughts or memories at all. He stayed in bed and stared at the ceiling. When he went out, he stared at the trees or at the waves. The water was calm, no whitecaps. A surge more than waves at times, the water gray and opaque and thick-looking. He sat with Roy sometimes, but he was through talking. He was ready to get back to his life, to get back to other people.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 172

   You're still alive, he told Roy one day. I've been thinking about this. You don't get to experience anything anymore; your life stopped for you when you died. But things are going to keep happening to me because of this, and that makes you still alive, in a way.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 169

 So then he was thinking of Roy on the beach and the seagulls and in this way he tortured himself each day and night under the guise of trying to fill his time and survive.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 167

   I didn't mean to rush this, he told his son. I know this is your burial. It should be something special and your mother should be here, but I just can't do anything about all that. I just... and here he stopped and didn't know what to say. All he could think was I love you, you're my son, but this bent him so that he couldn't speak, so he wept and shoveled in the dirt and mounded it and packed it and walked back to the cabin in near darkness, not caring much anymore whether he lost his way.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 152

 And he untied Roy and carried him back to the bedroom, then felt so lost all of a sudden he lay down on the bare wooden floor in the bedroom and just moaned for the rest of the day, no idea at all in his head as to what he was doing or why. The room was cold and dim and seemed to stretch on forever, and he a tiny speck lost in the middle of it.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 147

   He saw the sleeping bag propped up there with Roy in it and realized he had forgotten about Roy for a few minutes. The thought that he could do that seemed terribly sad, but he didn't stop and indulge himself. He had work to do.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 136

   He touched Roy's jacket then, and shook Roy's shoulder gently. Then he looked at the blood on his hand and back at the stump for a head that was all Roy had now and then from inside him he begain to howl.
   And howling did nothing but fill itself and he was like an actor in his own pain, not knowing who he was or what part now to play. He shook his hands oddly in the air and slapped them against his thighs. He pushed himself back farther away from Roy but this was phony, another act, and still he didn't know what to do. No one was watching. And though it couldn't be his son there, it kept being his son there.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 129

   Listen, his father said. Man is only an appendage to woman. Woman is whole by herself and doesn't need man. But man needs her. So she gets to call the shots. That's why the rules don't make any sense, and why they keep changing. They're not being decided on by both sides.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 124

   When he turned the radio off, Roy asked, If you talked with her and she wanted you to, would you leave here right away to go be with her?
   His father shook his head. I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm just missing her.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 121

   So they set off up the ridge, exposed again to the wind. Roy fought to keep up, to not lose his father. He knew that if he lost sight of him even for a minute, his father would never hear him yell and he'd be lost and never find his way back. Watching the dark shadow moving before him, it seemed as if this were what he had felt for a long time, that his father was something insubstantial before him and that if he were to look away for an instant or forget or not follow fast enough and will him to be there, he might vanish, as if it were only Roy's will that kept him there. Roy became more and more afraid, and tired, with a sense that he could not continue on, and he began to feel sorry for himself, telling himself, It's too much for me to have to do.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 118

   Roy read from his history book then, thinking he never had weird talks like this with his mother and then missing her. She and his sister would be having dinner now, listening to the same classical music, whatever it was, that they always listened to, and his mom asking Tracy all about everything and Tracy getting to talk to her. But then his father seemed to be doing better, too, and this wasn't so bad, so he read on about the guillotine and tried to forget about home.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 117

   If you could have anything you wanted, his father said, what would it be?
   I don't know, Roy said.
   You're not giving the question any time to seep into your bones, me boy. What would it be? What's your dream?
   Roy thought and couldn't come up with anything. It seemed to him he was just trying to get through this one dream of his father's. But finally he said, A big boat, that I could sail to Hawaii on, and then maybe around the world.
   Ah, his father said. That is a good one.
   What about you?
   What about me. What about me. So many things. I think a good marriage and not to have broken up the two I had, and not to have been a dentist, and not to have the IRS after me, and after that, maybe a son like you and maybe a big boat.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 110

   They went to bed each night exhausted, and there was no time left awake to listen for his father, and so Roy managed on some nights even to forget that his father was not well. He began, even, to assume that his father was fine, in that he didn't think about his father one way or the other. He was simply living each day filled with activity and then sleeping and then rising again, and since he was working alongside his father, he assumed his father was feeling all the same things. If he had been asked how his father was feeling, he would have been annoyed at the question and considered the matter too far away to pay attention to.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 108

 His father carried the carcass back one haunch at a time while Roy guarded the rest, a shell in the chamber, looking all around him as it grew dark, watching for the red eyes of bears and whatever else his imagination could think of to fear.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 99

   Roy avoided his eyes and looked at the light beard his father had now and the hair longer on the sides and flattened against his skull from not being washed. He didn't look anything like a dentist anymore, or really even like his father. He looked like some other man who maybe didn't have much.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 98

   His father looked up at him then. Roy was thinking, you're not any better. Nothing has gotten better. You could decide just to bury yourself in there or something. but what he said was, How do we get to the food?

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 69

   He dreamed he was chopping up bits of fish and every piece had a small pair of eyes and as he chopped, there was a moaning sound that was getting louder. It wasn't coming from the pieces of fish or their eyes exactly, but they were watching him and waiting to see what he would do.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 42

   In California he had thought all the time of Ketchikan and rain forest and had formed an image in his imaginings and in his boastings to his friends of a wild and mysterious place. But put back into it, the air was colder and the plants were lush but still only plants and he wondered how they would pass the time. Everything was sharply itself and nothing else.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 36

   The world was originally a great field, and the earth flat. And every beast roamed upon the field and hand no name, and every bigger thing ate every smaller thing, and no one felt bad about it. Then man came, and he hunched up around the edges of the world hairy and stupid and weak, and he multiplied and grew so numerous and twisted and murderous with waiting that the edges of the world began to warp. The edges bent and curved down slowly, man and woman and child all scrambling over each other to stay on the world and clawing the fur off each other's backs with the climbing until finally all of man was bare and naked and cold and murderous and clinging to the edge of the world.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 29

   When my mother finally broke up with John, on that same couch as I hovered in the kitchen, peeking through the louvered doors, John said, "Okay," and kept holding her hand. Without a fight, my mother wasn't sure what to do. My father had wronged her in concrete ways that could be yelled about. With my father, there had been the possibility of righteousness. But with John, for both of us, there was only the ache of knowing how much we had wanted him to stay.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 27

   "Men," my mother said, "are full of surprised. They're never who you think they are." I began to imagine that all men were in costume, that somewhere down each of their backs was a zipper. Then it occurred to me that someday I would be a man, also, and I wondered about the zipper thing.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 22

   If I had touched her neck, what would she have done? Pushed my hand away, laughed at me, smiled? That afternoon, I knew Rhoda could do anything. She could vanish. Just walk down toward the creek in her long dress, follow it, and not return, her history known to us then only in postcards or in dreams. Nothing was holding her.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 11

   The tiger-striped archer fish, who was half jaw, half tail, who swam always at a forty-five-degree angle to the surface of the water, and who could spit sizable water pellets, was skimming his strong lower lip along the surface, waiting, and at some point--I have no idea when, since time stands still after a death, with no sensation of passing--I rose to bring him the jar of flies. I let one into the air space between hood and water, covered the hole again with tape, and sat down beside my mother to watch this ritual of the familiar, a relic from what our lives had been, but I knew that I had lost interest.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 10

 He may have paused for a moment to reflect, but I doubt it. His momentum was made up only of air, without the distraction of ground.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 9

   Each night during that vacation, as I lay in a sleeping bag on the hotel-room floor at the foot of his bed, I heard his tossings and turnings until very late and sensed, with the assurance children sometimes have, that he would not be my father for much longer.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 3

 No one had told me about lizards--I honestly never had dreamed of reptiles--but on first sight I knew they were a step in the wrong direction.

Legend of a Suicide - Pg 3

   My job was to keep them from flopping out of the boat. They had terrific strength in those wide, flat bodies, and with a good splat of their tails they could send themselves two or three feet into the air, their white undersides flashing. Between us a kind of understanding developed: if they didn't flop, I didn't smash their heads with the hammer. But sometimes, when the ride was especially wild and we were all thrown again and again into the air and their blood and slime were all over me, I gave out a few extra whacks, an inclination of which I am ashamed. And the other halibut, with their round brown eyes and long, judicious mouths, did see.

1984 - GEORGE ORWELL

1984 - Pg 241

   Something changed in the music that trickled from the telescreen. A cracked and jeering note, a yellow note, came into it. And then--perhaps it was not happening, perhaps it was only a memory taking on the semblance of sound--a voice was singing:
           "Under the spreading chestnut tree
            I sold you and you sold me--"
   The tears welled up in his eyes. A passing waiter noticed that his glass was empty and came back with the gin bottle.
   He took up his glass and sniffed at it. The stuff grew not less but more horrible with every mouthful he drank. But it had become the element he swam in. It was his life, his death, and his resurrection.

1984 - Pg 211

   "Do not imagine that you will save yourself, Winston, however completely you surrender to us. No one who has once gone astray is ever spared. And even if we chose to let you live out the natural term of your life, still you would never escape from us. What happens to you here is forever. Understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you could net recover, if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves."

1984 - Pg 205

   "Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes."

1984 - Pg 204

   "But it did exist! It does exist! It exists in memory. I remember it. You remember it."
   "I do not remember it," said O'Brien.
   Winston's heart sank. That was doublethink. He had a feeling of deadly helplessness. If he could have been certain that O'Brien was lying, it would not have seemed to matter. But it was perfectly possible that O'Brien had really forgotten the photograph. And if so, then already he would have forgotten his denial of remembering it, and forgotten the act of forgetting. How could one be sure that it was simply trickery? Perhaps that lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen: the was the thought that defeated him.

1984 - Pg 196

   More dimly he thought of Julia. Somewhere or other she was suffering, perhaps far worse than he. She might be screaming with pain at this moment. He though: "If I could save Julia by doubling my own pain, would I do it? Yes, I would." But that was merely an intellectual decision, taken because he knew that he ought to take it. He did not feel it. In this place you could not feel anything, except pain and the foreknowledge of pain. Besides, was it possible, when you were actually suffering it, to wish for any reason whatever that your own pain should increase? But that question was not answerable yet.

1984 - Pg 191

   The expression on his face changed. The annoyance passed out of it and for a moment he looked almost pleased. A sort of intellectual warmth, the joy of the pedant who has found out some useless fact, shone through the dirt and scrubby hair.
   "Has it ever occurred to you," he said, "that the whole history of English poetry has been determined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?

1984 - Pg 180

   As he fastened the belt of his overalls he strolled across to the window. The sun must have gone down behind the houses; it was not shining into the yard any longer. The flagstones were wet as though they had just been washed, and he had the feeling that the sky had been washed too, so fresh and pale was the blue between the chimney pots.

1984 - Pg 179

   He knew better than before that he was not mad. Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad. A yellow beam from the sinking sun slanted in through the window and fell across the pillow. He shut his eyes. The sun on his face and the girl's smooth body touching his own gave him a strong, sleepy, confident feeling. He was safe, everything was all right. He fell asleep murmuring "Sanity is not statistical," with the feeling that this remark contained in it a profound wisdom.

1984 - Pg 145

   "We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing. It might be a thousand years. At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation."

1984 - Pg 105

   That was above all what he wanted to hear. Not merely the love of one person, but the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire: that was the force that would tear the Party to pieces. He pressed her down upon the grass, among the fallen bluebells. This time there was no difficulty. Presently the rising and falling of their breasts slowed to normal speed, and in a sort of pleasant helplessness they fell apart.

1984 - Pg 103

   It spread its wings, fitter them carefully into place again, ducked its hear for a moment, as though making a sort of obeisance to the sun, and then began to pour forth a torrent of song. In the afternoon hush the volume of sound was startling. Winston and Julia clung together, fascinated... Winston watched it with a sort of vague reverence. For whom, for what, was that bird singing? No mate, no rival was watching it. What made it sit at the edge of the lonely wood and pour its music into nothingness? He wondered whether after all there was a microphone hidden somewhere near... But by degrees the flood of music drove all speculations out of his mind. It was as though it were a kind of liquid stuff that poured all over him and got mixed up with the sunlight that filtered through the leaves. He stopped thinking and merely felt. The girl's waist in the bend of his arm was soft and warm. He pulled her round so that they were breast to breast; her body seemed to melt into his. Wherever his hands moved it was all as yielding as water. Their mouths clung together; it was quite different from the hard kisses they had exchanged earlier. When they moved their faces apart again both of them sighed deeply. The bird took fright and fled with a clatter of wings.
   Winston put his lips against her ear. "Now," he whispered.

1984 - Pg 97

   It was almost time for Winston and the girl to part. But at the last minute, while the crowd still hemmed them in, her hand felt for his and give it a fleeting squeeze.
   It could not have been ten seconds, and yet it seemed a long time that their hands were clasped together. He had time to learn every detail of her hand. He explored the long fingers, the shapely nails, the work-hardened palm with its row of calluses, the smooth flesh under the wrist. Merely from feeling it he would have known it by sight. In the same instant it occurred to him that he did not know what color the girl's eyes were. They were probably brown, but people with dark hair sometimes had blue eyes. To turn his head and look at her would have been inconceivable folly. With hands locked together, invisible among the press of bodies, they stared steadily in front of them, and instead of the eyes of the girl, the eyes of the aged prisoner gazed mournfully at Winston out of nests of hair.

1984 - Pg 86

 It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy but always against one's own body. Even now, in spite of the gin, the dull ache in his belly made consecutive thought impossible. And it is the same, he perceived, in all seemingly heroic or tragic situations. On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralyzed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth.

1984 - Pg 68

   He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes round the sun; today, to believe that the past is unalterable. He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong.

1984 - Pg 66

 And then, for perhaps half a minute in all, something happened to the telescreens. The tune that they were playing changed, and the tone of the music changed too. There came into it--but it was something hard to describe. It was a peculiar, cracked, braying, jeering nore; in his mind Winston called it a yellow note. And then a voice from the telescreen was singing:
           "Under the spreading chestnut tree
            I sold you and you sold me:
            There lie they, and here lie we
            Under the spreading chestnut tree."
   The three men never stirred. But when Winston glanced again at Rutherford's ruinous face, he saw that his eyes were full of tears. And for the first time he noticed, with a kind of inward shudder, and yet not knowing at what he shuddered, that both Aaronson and Rutherford had broken noses.

1984 - Pg 66

 He was a monstrous man, with a mane of greasy gray hair, his face pouched and seamed, with protuberant lips. At one time he must have been immensely strong; now his great body was sagging, sloping, bulging, falling away in every direction. He seemed to be breaking up before one's eyes, like a mountain crumbling.

1984 - Pg 64

 It was like a single equation with two unknowns. It might very well be that literally every word in the history books, even the things that one accepted without question, was pure fantasy.

1984 - Pg 63

 It might be true that the average human being was better off now than he had been before the Revolution. The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different. It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness.

1984 - Pg 52

 And though, of course, it grew worse as one's body aged, was it not a sign that this was not the natural order of things, if one's heart sickened at the discomfort and dirt and scarcity, the interminable winters, the stickiness of one's socks, the lifts that never worked, the cold water, the gritty soap, the cigarettes that came to pieces, the food with its strange evil tastes? Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?

1984 - Pg 52

   He meditated resentfully on the physical texture of life. Had it always been like this? Had food always tasted like this? He looked around the canteen. A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close together that you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays, coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy, grime in every crack; and a sourish, composite smell of bad gin and bad coffee and metallic stew and dirty clothes. Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to.

1984 - Pg 26

 He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.

1984 - Pg 10

   How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present in which case it would not listen to him, or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.

1984 - Preface by Walter Cronkite

   It has been said that 1984 fails as a prophecy because it succeeded as a warning--Orwell's terrible vision has been averted. Well, that kind of self-congratulation is, to say the least, premature. 1984 by not arrive on time,  but there's always 1985.

1984 - Preface by Walter Cronkite

   George Orwell was no prophet, and those who busy themselves keeping score on his predictions and grading his use of the crystal ball miss the point.

THE BROKEN EYE - BRENT WEEKS

The Broken Eye - Pg 728

   Teia looked at Kip, and he looked at her. She was glowing with joy and morning light, her skin radiant, her eyes holding a million colors Kip had never seen. And they were flying, and they were holding each other, and they were safe, and they were alive, and they were breathing pure glory, and Orholam's Eye gazed on them with the approval that only young lovers know, and in that moment Kip knew the difference between love and infatuation, and love and hunger, and love and the longing not to go unloved. And he wanted to know nothing more than this, and he wanted this moment to freeze forever and thought to cease.
   He kissed her. And she kissed him. And it was infatuation, and it was hunger, and it was longing to be loved, and it was an all-consuming fire so hot it devoured worry and loneliness and fear and time and being and thought itself. They kissed, embracing, flying, and for a hundred heartbeats, there was no war, no death, no pain, nothing hard, nothing terrible, nothing but warmth and acceptance.
   And as they slowed, nearing the end of their flight, when Kip pulled away from her at last, and gazed again into her eyes, he knew he was lost in her. And he knew at last the difference between love and necessity.

The Broken Eye - Pg 713

   This is what it is to grow up. It is to live beyond the blind rush of passion, or hate, or green luxin, or battle juice, or battle juice. It is to see what must be done, and to do it, without feeling a great desire or a great hatred or a great love. It is to confront fear, naked. No armor of bombast or machismo. Just duty, and love for one's fellows. Not love felt, not the love that compelled action without thought, but love chosen deliberately. I am the best person to do this thing, it said, though I may die doing it.
   I will go, it said, with clear eyes and no passion, but it was love, love, love all the same.

The Broken Eye - Pg 560

   Karris couldn't move. She held herself rigid. I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten. That promise held everything she'd ever hoped to hear, and from Orholam. It felt like someone had picked her soul up out of her body and shaken it gently, and all the dirt and grime and hatred and rage had simply sloughed off and fallen, and he dropped her back into her own shoes. Everything was the same, but her eyes were different, healing. She didn't trust herself to speak.

The Broken Eye - Pg 529

   "Know this, O Kip. Your being here involves a compromise. Your mind is not structured to understand timelessness. So instead of being outside of time, you are instead carrying around with you a bubble of casuality."
   "Hammerfist centaur granite," Kip said gravely.
   Ancient eyes wrinkled, irritated. "What?"
   "I was, uh, trying to demonstrate how I could understand each of the three words in a three-word phrase and still have no clue what they mean together." Kip grinned weakly.

The Broken Eye - Pg 482

   "We are the priests of light and darkness, the arbiters of dusk. Neither day nor night is our master. And do you know what happens when a woman walks without fear?"
   Teia shook her head, but there was a sudden longing deep in her that swelled so strong it paralyzed her tongue. Tell me. Tell me.
   "She becomes."
   Becomes what? Teia didn't say the words aloud, but he knew what she was thinking, for he answered:
   "She becomes whatever she wills. Minus only one thing." In the dark, he held up a finger, almost like he was scolding her.
   Teia was silent now. The question was obvious, and now she didn't want to ask it.
   Sharp said, "She has one thing she can never be, never again. You know what it is, don't you?"
   The words came unbidden to her lips, from a place so dark no light had ever touched it: "A slave."

The Broken Eye - Pg 458

   "Sorry, 'mother'," Kip said. He was trying to make a joke of it, but the word was so sharp-edged that Karris couldn't even hear the joke. None of Kip's tone could make it past the roaring of the blood in her ears. Just that one, lancet word piercing a boil.

   "You are not my son!" Karris spat. Her heart was bile and she was vomiting it out on him, foul and acid, and it tore her throat and ate everything it touched. 

   Kip had the same look on his face as she'd seen on men mortally wounded, staring at their own guts in ropes in their hands, shocked they weren't already dead, but dying nonetheless. 

The Broken Eye - Pg 335

   When the crier finished, there was only silence and sobs, the broken being led away by stunned friends. 

   Kip wanted to shout at them. You thought this was a game?! When Tyreans were dying it was exciting, but now, now it's serious?! He hated them for a moment, but the moment passed, and he saw their sorrow and was moved.

   That they have learned to weep at war is no victory. That they know loss is no gain.

The Broken Eye - Pg 335

   The squads stood at attention for fifteen minutes as the names were read. Name after name after name. As each lord's dead was read, some would sob or shriek or collapse, while others tried not to let too much relief show. But as the list continued relentlessly, the balance shifted. The mood darkened. The brightly shining sun glistened in mockery, as if Orholam didn't see.

The Broken Eye - Pg 333

   All the world turned around the Jaspers, but the Jaspers were not the world... He realized there was now no sign at all of the sea demon attack that had nearly demolished this bridge. The sea demon itself hadn't been seen since the Feast of Light and Darkness, nor the black whale. The mess had been cleared, the dead taken away--and none of them were people Kip had known, or known by people Kip knew. It was like it hadn't happened. 

   This is what it is to live in the cosmos that is the Jaspers. The world changes here, but there is not one world, there are many, and we only see the others when they tread upon our toes.  

The Broken Eye - Pg 329

   "And this?" Teia asked, showing her still-bloodied hands and the bloody rag that wouldn't get the stains out completely. "This is the best thing?"

   Kip stared her hard in the eye. He took the towel in his own clean hands and smeared blood first on one palm and then on the other. "Not the best thing, Teia. The best thing possible? A thousand times yes."

   And staring into his eyes, she believed him. It was a damned thing, war, but she wasn't damned for fighting it.

The Broken Eye - Pg 282

   "Orholam is a caring lord," Kip said. Not so much because he believed it, but to see what Andross would say.

   "Caring enough to give us rational and consistent laws, which is great care indeed. Laws that apply to the faithful, to apostates, to pagans, and to those in vast reaches beyond unknown oceans who have never even heard the word 'Orholam'. I find that infinitely more caring than some bearded giant who embraces some and smites others without reason."

The Broken Eye - Pg 192

   "You can tell I love you and want the best for you."

   "Love me?" Kip scoffed. "You barely know me."

   "When you have lived either a very short time or a very long time--if you've lived well--you will be able to love easily, too. Broken hearts have fresh places to bond with new faces."

The Broken Eye - Pg 167

   "Greetings, daughter. May the light always shine upon you. Dulcina, if you would like to--"

   "Shh," she said, touching her lips with a finger. "I've already confessed."

   "Then would you like me to lead us in some prayers or songs?"

   She shook her head. "My High Lord Prism, you've been doing Orholam's work all day, and will do so all night and through the morrow. Let me give you a gift. The only gift I have. The gift of my five minutes. You may speak or we can be silent. You can Free me first if you prefer solitude, or at the end if you prefer company. As you will."

   He didn't understand. There had to be some angle, some advantage. It was all she had. It was her last five minutes, whereas to him it would just be another grain in a full hourglass.

   There was no angle. There was no deceit in her open eyes. He started at her for ten seconds, thirty. And then he was furious for no reason he could understand. 

   And then he broke.

   And he wept.

   And she held him. And they wept together.

   And after five minutes, the accursed bell jingled. And he stood. And he begged her forgiveness. And he kissed her lips.

   And he slew her.

   And with her died his faith in Orholam. It had survived war and abandonment and massacres and deceit, but it could not survive the holiest night of the year.

The Broken Eye - Pg 137

   Time was measured out with such perfect regularity that time lost meaning. Gavin's every day had a similar rhythm. Pull. Twist. Push. Twist. Pull. Up, down, life circumscribed in ovals of work and rest and transition from one to the other. Scrape off the inefficient edges of every moment. Breathe in, breathe out, try to make the motion of the one to the other as painless as possible. Wake, sleep, and spend no time in between.

The Broken Eye - Pg 85

 She had some of a warrior's sense of humor: black and light, irreverent to death as death was irreverent to all else.

The Broken Eye - Pg 85

   She took care of me, knowing my mother wasn't doing so, and she did it in a way that never made me ashamed. She made it a game, for me. Kip had seen the fun in it before, but he'd never seen the kindness of it until now. 

The Broken Eye - Pg 83

 She saw him from afar, smiled, and beckoned him to come with one hand as she continued singing. The sound was like the rivers and the winds and the deeps of the sea, and the warmth and light of a fire against a child's fear of the darkness. It held the promise of the morning and the comfort of a mother's heartbeat.

The Broken Eye - Pg 81

   The hunger had lost its urgency. Kip felt an odd purity, the serenity of saints and ascetics and the batshit insane. The clarity of a soul detaching itself from its flesh home, perhaps.

The Broken Eye - Pg 75

   I howl, waking the whole goddam camp, and my Aeshma comes back over me, putrid and beautiful, a diseased whore. She is as ugly as I plan to do, and my soul is a small price to pay for vengeance. It makes me monstrous. I am become a beast. I am become a god. Vengeance is mine.

The Broken Eye - Pg 23

   Because he'd turned, Gavin couldn't see how Gunner responded, if he was furious or amused. Gavin couldn't see any of the other sailors' reactions. He only saw gray sea and gray sky. The only light granted to him was ugliness.

THE BLINDING KNIFE - BRENT WEEKS

The Blinding Knife - Pg 518

   The screams of the furious and the shouts of anger and the moans of the injured and the cries of urgent orders and the crackling of fireballs and the snapping of distant muskets and booms of cannons and the whistle of the big mortars and the snap of the sails and the wash of the waves and the hissing of the wind and the moans of the dying and the shrieks of the wights faded, grew distant, hushed. Kip could hear only the deep, slow whoosh of his own heartbeat, ludicrously slow, and around and beneath that a sighing, like the beach when the tide goes out. For a moment, he had a wild notion that he was hearing the sunlight hit the waves. 

The Blinding Knife - Pg 431

   Oh, Orholam have mercy. Gavin had murdered that stupid girls cause she'd insulted Karris? Karris felt like weeping, for Ana, for herself, for Gavin, for the whole stupid world and shipwrecked love.  

The Blinding Knife - Pg 338

   "You make it sound so simple, and empty."

   "Evil is simple and empty. Evil has no mysterious depths. We stare into a dark hole and fill it with our fears, but it is only a hole."

The Blinding Knife - Pg 333

   "Freedom isn't the highest good. Power is. For without power, your freedom can be taken." He smiled again. It was a hard smile, but this was a hard world.

The Blinding Knife - Pg 332

   "Might doesn't make right. Might makes reality." He stared at the corregidor for long enough to drop the weight of certainty on the boy, then turned and looked at the women and children. His gaze was sad but resolute. He would march these people to their deaths to shield his own people's lives, and he would blame the corregidor for it. 

   If it was a bluff, it was as brassy a bluff as Liv had ever seen. But she didn't think it was a bluff. Neither, she could tell, did the corregidor. His face slowly worked through horror, revulsion, astonishment, and finally resignation. He wasn't facing a man, he was facing a force of nature. There was no reasoning with a cyclone, no pleading with a hurricano. You batten down the hatches and ride it out, praying you survive.

The Blinding Knife - Pg 328

   Zymun's flirtation was the flirtation of possibility. She had only to say the word, just once, one night when he came by her tent and asked politely if he could come in. That she could say yes, that none would stop her, that none would even question her was more of an erotic charge than that she could say yes to Zymun in particular, dashing as he was. 

The Blinding Knife - Pg 321

   "The pagans believed in separate gods, as you know. Either real, living entities that required their sacrifices and could be wooed by human gifts or, as other pagans believed, simply as facets of humanity itself--as greed is part of each of us, or ambition, or passion--they believed the gods should be acknowledged only for how they revealed truths about our own souls.

The Blinding Knife - Pg 320

   "You haven't known me for three months, and you've just handed four great treasures into my hands. I could take them from you now and have you thrown out. I could buy myself a satrap's seat with what you've got. You think I'm immune? You think I'm too good a man to do that?" 

   "Yes, sir," Kip said.

   "But you don't know."

   "A man's got to act without knowing everything, or he'll never do anything,"

   Commander Ironfist's lip twitched. "So you're a man now?"

   "I've taken lives, and I've taken my own life in my hands and trusted a friend with it. Yes, sir, I'd say that makes me a man." 

   "Neither makes me a man. The first makes you a killer. The second makes you a fool. Either may get you killed."

The Blinding Knife - Pg 291

   Usef and I had fought on opposite sides of the Prisms' War, the False Prisms' War, the War of the Guiles. One of my best friends from the Chromeria killed Usef's first wife. And Usef had killed her in turn. Usef and I had ample reason to hate each other. Instead, we'd fallen in love. Two broken warriors tired of war.

The Blinding Knife - Pg 257

   The Prism was a peerless warrior, and slaughter, too, is the necessary work of war. He was a tireless worker, circling, circling, like a buzzard. He circled until there was no more shrieking, until there was no more hatred, until crimson blood no longer sluiced from the pure yellow decks of his a skimmer, until the full harvest of death was brought to hell's gates.