He Quotes (page 337)
The wild splash of red that was her hair tumbled over the vivid green of the bedspread. Shadows from the candle shifted over her face, reminding him of the impression he'd first had of her-the Gypsy-open fires, weeping violins. Her eyes were dark, pure gray, and waiting."We MacGregors," he murmured, "have ways of... dealing with Campbells."His mouth lowered but paused a whisper from hers. He saw that her lids had fluttered down yet hadn't closed. She watched him through her lashes while her...
Nora Roberts
I'm named Bella," the girl told Gendry. "For the battle. I bet I could ring your bell, too. You want to?"No," he said gruffly."I bet you do." She ran a hand along his arm. "I don't cost nothing to friends of Thoros and the lighting lord."No, I said." Gendry rose abruptly and stalked away from the table out into the night. Bella turn to Arya. "Don't he like girls?"Arya shrugged. "He's just stupid. He likes to polish helmets and beat on swords with hammers.
George R. R. Martin
Yet no one seemed to have thought through the implications of a world in which everyone cheated. The other morning Keith had bought five hundred vanity sachets of Outrage, his staple perfume. At lunchtime he discovered that they all contained water, a substance not much less expensive than Outrage, but harder to sell. Keith was relieved that he had already unloaded half the consignment on Damian Noble in the Portobello Road. Then he held Damian's tenners up to the light: they were crude...
Martin Amis
There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.A man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down.Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himeself from a thing still too close to him in time.The degree of slowness is directly proportional...
Milan Kundera
After some years of muddled thinking on the subject, he suddenly saw quite clearly what it was he had been running away from; why he had refused Sandy's first invitation, and what the trouble had been with Charles. It was also the trouble, he perceived, with nine-tenths or the people here tonight. They were specialists. They had not merely accepted their limitations, as Laurie was ready to accept his, loyal to his humanity if not to his sex, and bringing an extra humility to the hard study of...
Mary Renault
Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.'That's some catch, that Catch-22,' he observed.'It's the best there is,' Doc Daneeka agreed. Yossarian saw it clearly in all its spinning reasonableness. There was an elliptical precision about its perfect pairs of parts that was graceful and shocking, like good modern art, and at times Yossarian wasn't quite sure he saw it at all, just the way he was never quite sure about...
Joseph Heller
In exchange for his first taste of powdered milk, Pascal showed me a tree we could climb to find a bird's nest. After we handled and examined the pink-skinned baby birds, he popped one of them into his mouth like a jujube. It seemed to please him a lot. He offered a baby bird to me, pantomiming that I should eat it. I understood perfectly well what he meant, but I refused. He did not seem disappointed to have to eat the whole brood himself.
Barbara Kingsolver
I must say, though, that a man who has staked his whole life on the card of a woman's love and who, when that card is trumped, falls to pieces and lets himself go to the dogs -- a fellow like that is not a man, not a male. You say he's unhappy -- you know best. But all the nonsense hasn't been taken out of him yet. I'm sure he really believes he's a smart fellow just because he reads that rag Galignani and saves a muzhik from a flogging once a month.
Ivan Turgenev
...If he failed the first time he took his driver's licence test, it was mainly because he started an argument with the examiner in an ill-timed effort to prove that nothing could be more humiliating to a rational creature than being required to encourage the development of a base conditional reflex by stopping at a red light when there was not an earthly soul around, heeled or wheeled. He was more circumspect the next time, and passed...
Vladimir Nabokov
Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away. That is, one can even say that the more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Peeta's awake already, sitting on the side of the bed, looking bewildered as the trio of doctors reassure him, flash lights in his eyes, checks his pules. I'm disappointed that mine was not the first face he saw when he woke up, but he sees it now. His features registrer disbelief and something more intense that I can't quite place. Desire? Desperation? Surely both, for he sweeps the doctors aside, leaps to his feets and moves towards me. I run to meet him, my arms extended to embrace him....
Suzanne Collins