Soot Quotes

“Quietly Sophronia added, "And the soot on my dress, sir?"
"I didn't see anything." Professor Braithwope smiled down at her, showing a small hint of fang.
Sophronia grinned back. "I'm glad we understand each other, sir."
The vampire looked out into the night. "This is the right finishing school for you, isn't it, whot?"
"Yes sir, I think it might very well be."
"A piece of advice, Miss Temminnick?"
"Sir?"
"It is a great skill to have friends in low places. They, too, have things to teach you."
"Now, sir, I thought you didn't see any soot.”
― Gail Carriger, Etiquette & Espionage

“His room was a sickly dual-tone of crimson and charcoal, like an Untitled Rothko, the colours bleeding into each other horribly and then rather serenely. The overall effect was overwhelmingly unapologetic but it grew on you like a wart on your nose you didn't realise it was a part of your identity until one day it simply was. His room was his identity. Fiercely bold, avant-garde but never monotonous. He was red, he was black, he was bored, and he was fire. At least to me he seemed like fire. A tornado of fire that burned all in its wake leaving only the wretched brightness of annihilation. His room was where he charmed and disarmed us. We were his playthings. Nobody plays with fire and leaves unscarred. The fire soon seeps into chard and soot. The colours of his soul, his aura, and probably his heart if he didn't stop smoking.”
― Moonshine Noire

“...how can I describe Endrick Street to anyone who has never been in it? 'Ugly' is not the word that describes it. it is just one of those desperate streets which we have here and there in Glasgow and, so far as I have seen, you have not at all in London. It is long and black and melancholy as a stone chasm. All hope abandons you as you enter it. From morning till night there is the sound of worn carpets being beaten, and of stone steps being scrubbed by landladies in Hinde's curlers. The great windows are always left dirty, the broken black railings are never repaired, and there is a smell of soot as if a chimney had just been on fire. Nothing seems to thrive in the back greens but soot and cats. I have never once walked down it but there has been a half empty coal-cart on the roadway with a man standing up in it his hand to his mouth, wailing the words 'Coal briquettes!”
― Catherine Carswell, The Camomile