Madeleine

“I was too scared to kill you. I had a gun. I bought it just to shoot you. But the closest I ever came to killing anyone with it was myself. I put it in my mouth one night to see how it tasted.…I was scared to do that, too. Not because I'm afraid I'll go to hell for committing suicide. It's because I'm afraid I won't go to hell…that there isn't a hell to go to. No heaven either. Just nothing. Mostly I think there emus be nothing after we die. Sometimes that seems like it would be a relief. Other times it's the most awful thing I can imagine.”
― Joe Hill, Horns

“She looked at Rose sitting between Jasper and Prue. How odd that one's child should do that! How odd to see them sitting there, in a row, her children, Jasper, Rose, Prue, Andrew, almost silent, but with some joke of their own going on, she guessed, from the twitching at their lips. It was something quite apart from everything else, something they were hoarding up to laugh over in their own room...There was all that hoarded behind those rather set, still, mask like faces, for they did not join in easily; they were like watchers, surveyors, a little raised or set apart from the grown-up people.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“On fine nights when the cold and the drumtaps, and the hooting of the owls, and the moonlight, have got into their wild, woodland blood and made it even wilder, they will dance till daybreak.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair

“Ig had always liked to listen to his father, to watch him while he played. It was almost wrong to say his father played. It often seemed the other way around: that the horn was playing him. The way his cheeks swole out, then caved in as if he were being inhaled into it, the way the golden keys seemed to grab his fingers like little magnets snatching at iron filings, causing them to leap and dance in unexpected, startling fits. The way he shut his eyes and bent his head and twisted back and forth at the hips, as if his torso were in auger, screwing its way deeper and deeper into the centre of his being, pulling the music up from somewhere in the pit of his belly.”
― Joe Hill, Horns