Chandra Dragulin

“The caretaker was certainly very ancient, a tight and desiccated thing from which all softness and moisture had long since been extracted.”
― Jonathan Stroud, The Screaming Staircase

“Follow your dreams, Bailey,” she says. “Be they Harvard or something else entirely. No matter what that father of yours says, or how loudly he might say it. He forgets that he was someone’s dream once, himself.” Bailey”
― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

“If I make the lashes dark, And the eyes more bright And the lips more scarlet, Or ask if all be right From mirror after mirror, No vanity’s displayed; I’m looking for the face I had Before the world was made. —W. B. Yeats”
― Amy Harmon, What the Wind Knows

“Spiritually, too, he passed for a typical Dorimarite; though, indeed, it is never safe to classify the souls of one’s neighbors; one is apt, in the long run, to be proved a fool. You should regard each meeting with a friend as a sitting he is unwittingly giving you for a portrait — a portrait that, probably, when you or he die, will still be unfinished. And, though this is an absorbing pursuit, nevertheless, the painters are apt to end pessimists. For however handsome and merry may be the face, however rich may be the background, in the first rough sketch of each portrait, yet with every added stroke of the brush, with every tiny readjustment of the “values,” with every modification of the chiaroscuro, the eyes looking out at you grow more disquieting. And, finally, it is your own face that you are staring at in terror, as in a mirror by candlelight, when all the house is still.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist