I am selfish, private and easily bored. Will this be a problem?
Have you ever spent days and days and days making up flavors of ice cream that no one’s ever eaten before? Like chicken and telepone ice cream? Green mouse ice cream was the worst. I didn’t like that at all.
Never a possession, always the possessor, with skin as pale as smoke, and eyes tawny and sharp as yellow wine: Desire is everything you’ve ever wanted. Whoever you are. Whatever you are. Everything.
You’re always you, and that don’t change, and you’re always changing, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
And then he’d tried to become an official Atheist and hadn’t got the rock-hard self-satisfied strength of belief even for that.
Pain shared, my brother, is pain not doubled but halved. No man is an island.
It’s not sipping wine. It’s a mourning wine. You drain it. Like this.
Names come and names go.
You don’t have to test everything to destruction just to see if you made it right.
All around me darkness gathers, Fading is the sun that shone, We must speak of other matters, You can be me when I’m gone Flowers gathered in the morning, Afternoon they blossom on, Still are withered in the evening, You can be me when I’m gone.
They were having an argument as old and comfortable as an armchair, the kind of argument that no one ever really wins or loses but which can go on forever, if both parties are willing.
Any view of things that is not strange, is false.
The converse held reassuringly true: daylight was safe. Daylight was always safe.
Writing imaginative tales for the young is like sending coals to Newcastle. For coals.
The tongue is the most remarkable. For we use it both to taste out sweet wine and bitter poison, thus also do we utter words both sweet and sout with the same tongue.
He wondered how it could have taken him so long to realize he cared for her, and he told her so, and she called him an idiot, and he declared that it was the finest thing that ever a man had been called.
He was painfully shy, which, as is often the manner of the painfully shy, he overcompensated for by being too loud at the wrong times.
He shivered. His coat was thin, and it was obvious he would not get his kiss, which he found puzzling. The manly heroes of the penny dreadfuls and shilling novels never had these problems getting kissed.
It is not that I was credulous, simply that I belived in all things dark and dangerous. It was part of my young creed that the night was full of ghosts and witches, hungry and flapping and dressed completely in black.
One thing I’ve learned: you can know anything, it’s all there, you just have to find it.