DiAnn

“He hated it as if he were about to love it—unforgivingly, irrationally, sadly.”
― Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale

“Though the house itself was a fortress, still, Isaac Penn had thought to make sure that anyone who did manage to break in would be kept busy. Thus the vault was not a vault but rather a solid plug of molybdenum steel which extended into the wall for five feet.”
― Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale

“They would go about town sighing and talking to themselves. "I love you," they would say to the imagined beloved, though it might have appeared to someone else that they were speaking to a snow shovel or an egg crate.”
― Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale

“It soon got so cold that the men rushed to close the doors. When they had shut them and the room was again silent, they saw that several women had begun to cry. The women said it was because of the numbing air that had washed over their bare shoulders, but even strangers embraced sadly as they coasted into the new year and felt its strength commencing. They cried because of the magic and the contradictions; because time had passed and time was left; because they saw themselves as if they were in a photograph that had winked fast enough to contradict their mortality; because the city around them had conspired to break a hundred thousand hearts; and because they and everyone else had to float upon this sea of troubles, watertight. Sometimes there were islands, and when they found them they held fast, but never could they hold fast enough not to be moved and once again overwhelmed.”
― Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale