When Phoebe glanced back at the marquess he swiftly lifted that rogue lock of hair, pointed at his forehead and mouthed: Good aim. She clapped a hand over her mouth. Dear God, he was sporting a bruise! So that’s where she’d clocked him with his hat! And this explained the forelock.
We think we’re so clever. And yet we’re always surprised to find ourselves entrapped or made fools of.
Gentleness was sometimes perilously close to pity.
Plain girls who were also clever were a ha’pence a dozen.
There are those who think beauty is a thing of surface, and forget that it’s really of the soul. But good is something you are, not something you do. – Vicar Adam Sylvaine.
She felt the pain of his loss inside her like a savage hook. She wanted to reach into him and take it out, as though it were shrapnel. But the pain was old to him, and somehow it had become a part of him. He could bear it and speak of it. It had shaped him; he had accommodated it. He had loved and he had lost and it had made him who he was.
I have learned that everyone else in the world is boring except you.
Before him and since he’d gone away, she’d either contracted or ever-so-subtly contorted her very being to accommodate nearly everybody else. She was only ever wholly herself with him.
He regarded her thoughtfully, and something about that look traveled up her spine like a trailed finger.
And as she looked back at him, she felt the serrated edges of her heart in her chest. But also a sort of dizzying vastness: she could face anything now.
The stars are particularly spectacular tonight, don’t you think? Dazzling. As if they’ve all had a good rinsing from the storm.
A girl could forget her precise location in the universe when a man looked at her with eyes like those.
Oh, I’m bowed, but unbroken.
Her laugh was wonderful. It was mischief made musical.
Not every man will make you want to do anything he wishes because the moment he touches you your body is his to command. Not every man is capable of making you scream with bliss in every imaginable position, or knows where to touch you or listens to your breath and your sighs to know precisely how to touch you, so that the pleasure you experience is the most intense. Not every man will make you see stars every... single... time.
Let’s refer to it as Saturday, rather than the day of my hanging, shall we?
Good God. She was Wellington with eyelashes.
But now he understood why someone would write things like ‘she walked in beauty like the night’ and so forth. Because poetry was a barrier against raw emotions. It distilled them into bearable music, allowed one to accommodate them a little at a time.
Maybe we’re born with a full set of qualities, some fine, some not so fine, and none of us knows what will bring out everything that lives within us. And sometimes it’s the fine qualities that cause us trouble, and the not so fine that save us.
He was close enough now to see that her profile was designed to do dramatic things to hearts: stop them, steal them, break them.