“Charlie stood at the open door of the Elevator and stared into the swirling vapors. This, he thought, is what hell must be like. Hell without heat. There was something unholy about it all, something unbelievably diabolical. It was all so deathly quiet, so desolate and empty.”
― Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator
― Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator
“At first it was not quite dark. I could see little trees growing out of the face of the cliff, and I grabbed at them with my hands as I went down. Several times I managed to catch hold of a branch, but it always broke off at once because I was so heavy and because I was falling so fast, and once I caught a thick branch with both hands and the tree leaned forward and I heard the snapping of the roots one by one until it came away from the cliff and I went on falling. Then it became darker because the sun and the day were in the fields far away at the top of the cliff, and as I fell I kept my eyes open and watched the darkness turn from grey-black to black, from black to jet black and from jet black to pure liquid blackness which I could touch with my hands but which I could not see. But I went on falling, and it was so black that there was nothing anywhere and it was not any use doing anything or caring or thinking because of the blackness and because of the falling.”
― The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
― The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
“Fate goes ever as fate must.”
― Beowulf
― Beowulf
“gorped”
― Polo
― Polo
“...[It comes] from so deep inside you, you cannot locate the source of the pain … The muscles of your jawbone go berserk, so that you bite the inside of your mouth and your jaw locks and the pain throbs. … Your spinal column stiffens so that you can hardly move your head or your neck and sometimes your back bends like a bow and you cannot stand up. … You ache with restlessness, so you feel you have to walk, to pace. And then as soon as you start pacing, the opposite occurs to you; you must sit and rest. Back and forth, up and down you go … you cannot get relief …”
― In the Belly of the Beast: Letters From Prison
― In the Belly of the Beast: Letters From Prison
Mary’s 2025 Year in Books
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