An author can be seen as three things: a storyteller, a teacher or a magician – but the magician, the enchanter is in the ascendant.
Their dust was in high demand, as it gave sweet dreams, but Tabetha couldn’t afford to get lost in them. Those dreams were only lies anyway, and waking up from them only made facing reality harder.
Resa longed for the kitchen, always full of the humming of the oversize fridge, for mo’s workshop in the garden, and the armchair in the library where you could sit and visit strange worlds without getting lost in them.
He sought her lips as if he needed to breathe through her, as if only she could keep him from choking on his rage.
The road went ever more steeply downhill. Overhead, the branches of the trees intertwined. It was a still, windless morning, cloudy and damp.
Although it’s not just plants and animals that die out, so do books. Quite often, I’m sorry to say. I’m sure you could fill a hundred houses like this one to the roof with all the books that have disappeared forever.
Life seemed so much stronger than death, death so much stronger than life. Like the ebb and flow of the tide.
If ye see the laird, tell him what ye hear; tell him this makes the twelve hunner and nineteen time that Jennet Clouston has called down the curse on him and his house, byre and stable, man, guest and master, wife, miss, or bairn – black, black be their fall.” Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped.
The best lies stay close to the truth.
The unicorns lifted their heads. Of course they weren’t white. Why were things in this world always white-washed? Their hides were brown and grey, mottled black, and pale yellow like the autumn sun drifting through the damp fog above.
He closed the window, and the scents of the past again flooded the room, like a bunch of wilted flowers.
Home! That was what they meant, those caressing appeals, those soft touches wafted through the air, those invisible little hands pulling and tugging, all one way. Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows.
The wheels of the pocket watch began to move in their perfect rhythm, confirming once again that there was no end to well-kept order. Immortality was clean and precise. For sure it didn’t need a heart. A heartbeat became irregular so easily and at the end it stopped, however carefully one treated it.
The Dark Fairy touched her chest. No heart, like her sisters. So where did the love come from?
What terrible human presumption it is to catch other living creatures and hold them captive!
It must be a dangerous world.” Meggie was trying to imagine it all: the giants, the trolls, and the fairies. Mo had once given her a book about fairies. Dustfinger shrugged. “Yes, it’s dangerous, so what? This world’s dangerous, too, isn’t it?
A wedding, a daughter in payment, and a white dress to hide all the bloody battlefields.
Well, one thing’s for sure, they’re very strange names, and that’s putting it mildly.
It sounded as if his mother were breaking into small pieces, such tiny pieces that no one would ever be able to put her together again. But he wanted to keep her!
The Hartliebs had no time for the snow. Outside their window, San Giorgio Maggiore seemed to be floating on the lagoon as if it had just surfaced there. The view was so beautiful that Victor felt his heart ache. Esther and her husband, however, stood side by side with their backs to the window.