Luce

“No man deserves a woman like that. He mortgages his very soul to win her and spends his life paying off the debt.”
― Tessa Dare, Romancing the Duke

“This wasn't her first kiss. He could tell that much, though he doubted any of the young men who'd kissed her had known what the hell they were doing. He felt a vague, stupid sort of rage toward them. It made him all the more resolved to make this kiss sublime. Sufficiently long and slow and sweet and deep to obliterate those embraces from her memory.
From this day forward-when she thought of kisses, she would think only of him.”
― Tessa Dare, Do You Want to Start a Scandal

“It feels like someone is gripping my heart and twisting it. It feels like I can't breathe. I shut my eyes tightly against the memory that is threatening to surface. I can't breathe.
Can't breathe. Can't breathe!”
― Ashley Earley, Alone in Paris

“We have a bad habit of seeing books as sort of cheaply made movies where the words do nothing but create visual narratives in our heads.

So too often what passes for literary criticism is "I couldn't picture that guy", or "I liked that part", or "this part shouldn't have happened." That is, we've left language so far behind that sometimes we judge quality solely based on a story's actions.

So we can appreciate a novel that constructs its conflicts primarily through plot - the layered ambiguity of a fatal car accident caused by a vehicle owned by Gatsby but driven by someone else, for instance. But in this image-drenched world, sometimes we struggle to appreciate and celebrate books where the quality arises not exclusively from plot but also from the language itself.”
― John Green