We think we’re so clever. And yet we’re always surprised to find ourselves entrapped or made fools of.
For if light had a sound, it was that laugh.
He was all too aware of the failings of his species and he knew how to use them to his advantage. A fascinating skill. A useful one. But hardly a loving one.
Such a fragile way to sustain a whole life: on a web one weaves for oneself.
He wished for access to all the world’s languages at once, for then he would have a better word for how he felt and what she was.
All his reckless, whimsical, sensual testing of the world throughout the years had been a search for what he knew with her. Passion and peace. Laughter and combat and friendship. God, but he loved her. It was an immensely humbling, enormous, radiant thing.
We did everything we could to save him, to defend him and still we knew he was going to die. One never feels more like speck upon the breast of the universe in those moments.
Their faces were inches apart now, and he traced her lips with one finger, lightly, lightly, then placed his lips there as if he’d drawn them into being.
She charmed and sparkled and said witty things, but she knew very well she was being charming and sparkling and witty while she was doing it, which somehow felt wrong.
The one thing she’d been able to count on her entire life was her cleverness. She was so often right. It was humbling and disorienting to realize that she in truth knew nothing at all. One only ever saw a fraction of someone, whatever it was they chose to show you, and extrapolated a whole person from that. And saw them through a prism of one’s own prejudices.
She mulled how very Jonathan of him to effortlessly find his way to her when she needed him, labyrinth or no. Just as he’d effortlessly uncovered her secrets. But that was simply because he’d been born knowing the secret to her. He was hers and she was his. Just as there was one key for every lock.
And home, Elise, is anywhere love is. Any you are my love.
You ought to choose fewer words that contain S for the time being. You are spitting all over me.
Rebecca stared back at him, still dazed. She’d forgotten how to speak; it seemed an unimportant skill, anyhow, when such kisses were to be had, when a whole world could be made from a kiss.
How had it never occurred to him the peril in which women walked every day, even the most pampered of them? How valiant the simple act of being a woman was in so many ways.
Good evening, Miss Eversea. You’ve stars in your hair.
One only ever saw a fraction of someone, whatever it was they chose to show you, and extrapolated a whole person from that. And saw them through a prism of one’s own prejudices.
He felt feral, standing naked – clearly the word of the day – and perspiring at an open window, irritable and restless, acutely aware of every inch of his skin, or, more accurately, the full contours of his being. As though it had been coiled into a cramped place and newly freed, and now was needling him as the blood flowed again. Skin was useful for more than being the thing between his viscera and bullets, for instance. It was capable of knowing glories.
I thought love was meant to be an easy, peaceful thing, Lillias. But it’s like life itself. It’s maddening. And beautiful. And changeable and funny and passionate. It’s... like a Hudson River Valley sunset. Underneath all that fire and glory the sky is ever constant. It’s like you. For me, it is you.
His voice surprised her: a baritone with the depth of a bell and deliciously frayed at the edges, it was like stumbling into a patch of sunlight on a relentlessly gray day.
She most definitely had an instinct for passion, an instinct that matched his own, that had nearly caused him to lose his head. Well, now he knew her skin was petal smooth; he knew the rich wine of her mouth; he knew the feel of that delicate, puckered nipple rubbed against his cheek –.