Librarians. He’d never met one with a bad memory. He had a theory that words stuck to their minds like flies to flypaper.
Her beauty took one’s breath away, like a sudden pain.
Molotov explained how that book, should one be foolish enough to open it, gave the power to read things and creatures out of any book in the world.
Only in books could you find pity, comfort, happiness – and love. Books loved anyone who opened them, they gave you security and friendship and didn’t ask anything in return, they never went away, never, not even when you treated them badly. Love, truth, beauty, wisdom and consolation against death.
It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.” Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland.
The rain pummeled the old Dragon bones as though to provide the rhythm to the song of their mortality, but death was not what they had on their minds – or wasn’t love sometimes called the small death?
I think we should sometimes read stories where everything’s different from our world, don’t you agree? There’s nothing’s like it for teaching us to wonder why trees are green and not red, and why we have five fingers rather than six.” Of.
The Bluebeard’s terrible parting gift had been to make desire rhyme with death and fear.
No. Nothing could make it easier. You lost what you loved. That was death, here as well as there.
He still looked so sad. Not a sign of the laughter that once used to be as much a part of his face as his black eyes. The smile he gave her now was only a sad shadow of it.
Fear was not red, fear is pale as a dead man’s face.
It seems only yesterday I used to believe There was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I would shine. But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life, I skin my knees. I bleed. Billy Collins, “On Turning Ten” A.
Guilt is a strong motivator, sometimes even stronger than love.
Maybe people don’t see the cruelty in your world right away, it’s better hidden, but it’s there all the same.
Only to be expected!′ Elinor’s voice almost cracked. Belligerent as a Bull Terrier, she marched up to him.
You make peace with one sister only to declare war on the other. It’s always like that with peace, isn’t it? Always to someone’s detriment, already sowing the seed for the next war.
Whenever he felt the sharp pangs of homesickness he had come back here to his old enemies, where he didn’t feel quite so out of place.
Courage was not given; it was acquired, earned. You had to take the difficult paths.
But fear was an emotion Jacob almost enjoyed. It lured him to dark places, through forbidden doors and far away from himself. Even the yearning for his father could be drowned in it.
They were her home when she was somewhere strange. They were familiar voices, friends that never quarreled with her, clever, powerful friends – daring and knowledgable, tried and tested adventurers who had traveled far and wide. Her books cheered her up when she was sad and kept her from being bored while Mo cut leather and fabric to the right size and re-stitched old pages that over countless years had grown fragile from the many fingers leafing through them.