Overly Quotes (page 169)
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But what was there to say?
Only that there were tears. Only that Quietness and Emptiness fitted together like stacked spoons. Only that there was a snuffling in the hollows at the base of a lovely throat. Only that a hard honey-colored shoulder had a semicircle of teethmarks on it. Only that they held each other close, long after it was over. Only that what they shared that night was not happiness, but hideous grief.
Only that once again they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be...
Arundhati Roy
When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in the warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as twenty thousand feet below the seafloor, the skeletal remains had turned into rock. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth. If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The...
John McPhee
No: that fear had been inside him for manyyears, it had lived with him, it had been another shadow cast over hisown shadow ever since the night he awoke, shaken by a bad dream, and realized that death was not only a permanent probability, as hehad always believed, but an immediate reality.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
He walked among the bookstore shelves, hearing Muzak in the air. There were rows of handsome covers, prosperous and assured. He felt a fine excitement, hefting a new book, fitting hand over sleek spine, seeing lines of type jitter past his thumb as he let the pages fall. He was a young man, shrewd in his fervors, who knew there were books he wanted to read and others he absolutely had to own, the ones that gesture in special ways, that have a rareness or daring, a charge of heat that stains...
Don DeLillo
I didn’t lack thoughts nor words nor the power of expression— I lacked something much more important: the lever which would shut off the juice. The bloody machine wouldn’t stop, that was the difficulty. I was not only in the middle of the current but the current was running through me and I had no control over it whatever.
Henry Miller
forests of monsterous overnourished oaks with serpent roots twisting and sucking unnamable juices from an earth verminous with millions of cannible devils; mound like tentacles groping from underground nuclei of polypous perversion...insane lightning over malignant ivied walls and daemon arcades choked with fungous vegetation...Heaven be thanked for the instinct which led me unconscious to places where men dwell; to the peaceful village that slept under the calm stars of clearing skies.
H. P. Lovecraft
He went to bed early, but could not fall asleep. He was haunted by sad and gloomy reflections about the inevitable en? death. These thoughts were familiar to him, many times had he turned them over this way and that, first shuddering at the probability of annihilation, then welcoming it, almost rejoicing in it. Suddenly a peculiarly familiar agitation took possession of hi? He mused awhile, sat down at the table, and wrote down the following lines in his sacred copy-book, without a single...
Ivan Turgenev
All right, beautiful. You've got me tied down to this stone table, and there's a knife in your hand that says you get to rule Narnia for another hundred years. So maybe I die, and winter goes on. Maybe the hunger and the darkness and the fear never end. But as long as the children believe in me, I know that Aslan will live again. I, the Great Lion, Son of The Emperor Over The Sea, will live again and -- aaaaauugh!!
C. S. Lewis