Charlotte Cross > Quotes

“In this part of the world most people go to sleep not very long after the sunset. Peasants are always afraid of the dark.’ He smiled, revealing sharp white teeth.”
― Charlotte Cross, The Brides

“An old Szgany woman with a face like a wrinkled apple offered to tell my fortune but I pushed Giselle forwards instead. The woman squinted at Giselle’s palm for some while before telling her that she is to meet a charming stranger who will change her life, and very soon too. At”
― Charlotte Cross, The Brides

“The vampyr, he cannot enter unless he is invited. Still, I recommend that the windows in this room be barred, and we will wreath it all about with garlic flowers. She must not be left alone. Hang that rosary from the head of her bed too.”
― Charlotte Cross, The Brides

“I am Count Dracula.”
― Charlotte Cross, The Brides

“We were saluted over the low wall that separates the herb garden from the street by a tall man dressed entirely in black, clean-shaven but for a long grey moustache, and with a courtly air about him.”
― Charlotte Cross, The Brides

“What is your name, miss?’ ‘Alice, sir. Alice Smith.’ ‘Miss Smith, you know of the vampyr.”
― Charlotte Cross, The Brides

“This is the truth of the matter, the stark unyielding truth as revealed by photography and confirmed by the letter from the Buda-Pesth hospital. Lady Lowell’s throat once featured those same wounds as marred the throat of dear Mina Harker, and of her closest friend and my first love, poor Lucy Westenra. In the early photographs of Lady Lowell, these wounds, these bite marks, had scarred, suggesting what? Why, that her ladyship had escaped him, that monster that we put into the ground! She had been bitten, survived, and bitten no more! And where were the scars now? Healed, after the fiend’s final death, just as Mina’s were! Lady Lowell’s trauma and madness can only have come from her suffering at the hands of . . . even after so long I shudder to write the name . . . none other than Count Dracula.”
― Charlotte Cross, The Brides

“Letter: Piroska Tolvay to Gabor Jacobinus Wednesday, 29th April 1874 Őriszentanna, Transylvania, Austro-Hungarian Empire”
― Charlotte Cross, The Brides

“Frankenstein”
― Charlotte Cross, The Brides

“Will she . . . will she become—’ ‘Like him? No. He has drunk from her, but she would need to drink from him in turn. We would know if that had happened as she would not have been able to bear Our Lord.’ Dr Arminius nodded to the rosary. ‘She would then have to die a human death, and rise again to take in human blood. Then, and only then, would she become a true and lasting vampyr in her turn.”
― Charlotte Cross, The Brides

“Reaching out, he took her hand and kissed it. Mrs Cartwright, moving like a sleepwalker, didn’t or couldn’t resist. Inside her mind, I howled with revulsion at his touch. I felt his wrongness, his twisted nature. He smiled, a smile that spread slowly across his pale face and split his red lips wide, showing his pointed eye-teeth. Then, faster than a mortal man could move, he sprang across to take my mistress in his arms, and drive those sharp white teeth into her throat.”
― Charlotte Cross, The Brides

“Come here, my love, come to me and kiss me, and we will be together for ever.’ Blood began to run from the patient’s nose but she continued speaking even as it dripped down over her lips. ‘Is that not what you have always wanted? Is that not what you have always yearned for? Come to me, and be mine for eternity.”
― Charlotte Cross, The Brides

“It is my beloved and yet not. It is some creature, wrong, twisted inside, made vile in a manner for which I do not have words. Her smile is not of warmth but of some species of malice, of cruelty, of hunger. The green dress she wears, made for a woman long dead in an era long past, fits her like snakeskin. ‘Come here, my love,’ she whispers in her siren’s voice. ‘Come to me and kiss me, and we will be together for ever.’ She moves closer, holding out her cold white hand. ‘Is this not what you have always wanted? Come to me, and be mine for eternity.”
― Charlotte Cross, The Brides

“Then, from the corner of my eye, I saw an older man dressed all in black. He was standing completely still in the middle of the moving crowd. His face was very white, at odds with his deep red lips and dark iron-grey hair. His gaze was fixed on my group of ladies, in total concentration. Maybe I mean ‘fascination’? It was a look of such intensity as it moved from one to the next it was almost a glare. I realized I’d come to a complete stop as I stared, watching him.”
― Charlotte Cross, The Brides

“Mrs Cartwright’s skin was deathly grey and she was only just conscious. As the men laid her on the bed I saw a red smudge on her cheek and two red wounds on her throat, which had bled freely into the collar of her dress.”
― Charlotte Cross, The Brides

“When he’d quenched his thirst he still held her tight, brushing her lovely golden hair back from her face with a ghastly tenderness. ‘Delightful. Quite delightful.’ He kissed her cheek, and the stickiness of her own blood marked my mistress’s face. Tenderly, so tenderly, he whispered into her ear. ‘Do not be downhearted. I will make you mother of multitudes.”
― Charlotte Cross, The Brides

“We feel we are at fault, and if only we had done or not done this or that, then all would have been well.”
― Charlotte Cross, The Brides