rhaeys

“As he now leaned back in his chair, and bent his deep-set eyes upon her in his turn, perhaps he might have seen one wavering moment in her, when she was impelled to throw herself upon his breast, and give him the pent-up confidences of her heart. But, to see it, he must have overleaped at a bound the artificial barriers he had for many years been erecting between himself and all those subtle essences of humanity which will elude the utmost cunning of algebra until the last trumpet ever to be sounded shall blow even algebra to wreck. The barriers were too many and too high for such a leap. With his unbending, utilitarian, matter-of-fact face, he hardened her again, and the moment shot away into the plumbless depths of the past, to mingle with all the lost opportunities that are drowned there.”
― Charles Dickens, Hard Times

“Why, Father,” she pursued, “what a strange question to ask me! The baby-preference that even I have heard of as common among children, has never had its innocent resting-place in my breast. You have been so careful of me that I never had a child’s heart. You have trained me so well that I never dreamed a child’s dream. You have dealt so wisely with me, Father, from my cradle to this hour, that I never had a child’s belief or a child’s fear.”
Mr. Gradgrind was quite moved by his success, and by this testimony to it. “My dear Louisa,” said he, “you abundantly repay my care. Kiss me, my dear girl.”
― Charles Dickens, Hard Times

“It was 1977, Sid Vicious was still alive, and no one had a horror of bodily fluids. Vomit was one of the less precious bodily fluids, but after watching our wretched heroes slash their veins, blow mucus out of their nostrils, and void the contents of their stomachs onstage, we could scarcely upset ourselves over a harmless string of bile oozing from a lover's mouth. After all, the musicians vomited onstage to show their contempt for us, their audience. And contempt was surely an expression of love.”
― Poppy Z. Brite, Exquisite Corpse

“I passed the day in a ditch, and the night in a pigsty. That’s the way I spent my tenth birthday. Not that a ditch was new to me, for I was born in a ditch.”
― Charles Dickens, Hard Times