“Where I grew up, women’s liberation was when you let a chick out of her cage so she could stretch her legs for 15 minutes.”
―
―
“This is a smashing place, isn't it? But I must say it scares me a bit. Do you suppose one dares to ask for tea?'
'I expect so, though heaven knows how. Perhaps you blow a peal on a slughorn, or beat on your shield with your sword -- or, I'll tell you what, if you look around you'll find a long embroidered tassel, and if you pull it you'll hear a bell clanging hollowly in some dark corridor a million miles away, and then some bent old servitor will come shuffling in--'
'There's a telephone by the bed,' said Timothy.
'Good heavens, so there is. How disappointing.”
― Airs Above the Ground
'I expect so, though heaven knows how. Perhaps you blow a peal on a slughorn, or beat on your shield with your sword -- or, I'll tell you what, if you look around you'll find a long embroidered tassel, and if you pull it you'll hear a bell clanging hollowly in some dark corridor a million miles away, and then some bent old servitor will come shuffling in--'
'There's a telephone by the bed,' said Timothy.
'Good heavens, so there is. How disappointing.”
― Airs Above the Ground
“During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was--but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasureable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me--upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain--upon the bleak walls--upon the vacant eye-like windows--upon a few rank sedges--and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees--with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium--the bitter lapse into everyday life--the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart--an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime.”
― The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales
― The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales
“Nothing is easier to write than scenery; nothing more difficult and unnecessary to read.”
― Three Men on the Bummel
― Three Men on the Bummel
“A celestial wizard doesn’t destroy celestial bodies. She bends them.”
― Borealis: A Worldmaker of Yand Novel
― Borealis: A Worldmaker of Yand Novel
Delena’s 2025 Year in Books
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