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'Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky, and whirling there it became a space ship thrusting its way into the cosmos to fertilise it and produce at the end of the movie a lovely fetus, a boy of course...'

“Many things make Victor uncomfortable,” Nurse Ratched said. “It is
fascinating. There is no one like him in all the world.”
“No,” Dad said quietly. “I don’t believe there is.”

"If war could change the nature of men, it would surely change the nature of words, I thought. But so much of the English language had been set in type and printed. We were nearing the end.

"It will find its way into the final volumes, I expect," said Mr. Sweatman when we discussed it. "The poets will see to that. They have a way of adding nuance to the meaning of things."

"Sam is holding one of your hands, and Sadie is holding the other. And your parents are there, but they are standing behind your friends. And this makes sense, because Sadie and Sam have been your family, as much as your family has been your family. Behind them, a thousand paper cranes festoon the room.

"It's okay, Marx," Sadie says. "You can let go."

"The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time."

"It isn't a sadness, but a joy, that we don't do the same things for the length of our lives."

"We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. There was the life that you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn't chosen. And sometimes, this other life felt as palpable as the one you were living."

Hugo shrugged. "She earned it. She's not like anyone else. She knows the importance of what we do, and she doesn't take it for granted. But above all else, she's kind. I don't know if I can adequately explain how significant that is."

All night the flares go up; the Dragon sings
And beats upon the dark with furious wings;
And, stung to rage by his own darting fires,
Reaches with grappling coils from town to town;
He lusts to break the loveliness of spires,
And hurl their martyred music toppling down.

"Every morning the maple leaves.
Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts
from one foot to the other. Every morning the same big
and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out
You will be alone always and then you will die."

'Arthur arched an eyebrow. "It's not about need, Linus. That's not what gift giving is for. It's about the joy that someone is thinking of you."

Linus felt his skin warm. "You were... thinking about me?"

"Constantly."

'He was pleasantly surprised to find Mr. Parnassus standing on the porch of the guest house, looking windswept and warm in the afternoon sunlight, something that Linus was finding himself not only getting used to seeing, but rather looking forward to.'

🖤

'He took a breath. "I want you ro stay. I want you to... I want you."

"You want me." She turned the words over. Gently, she squeezed his hand. "And how will you have me, Kaz?"

"How will you have me?" she repeated. "Fully clothed, gloves on, your head turned away so our lips can never touch?"

"I will have you without armor, Kaz Brekker. Or I will not have you at all."

"Don't start doing that."

"What?"

"Agreeing with me," said Jesper. "Sure path to destruction."

"I don't like the idea of killing people, either. I don't even like chemistry."

"What do you like?"

"Music. Numbers. Equations. They're not like words. They... they don't get mixed up."

"If only you could talk to girls in equations."

There was a long silence, and then... Wylan said, "Just girls?"

"Many boys will bring you flowers. But someday you'll meet a boy who will learn your favorite flower, your favorite song, your favorite sweet. And even if he is too poor to give you any of them, it won't matter because he will have taken the time to know you as no one else does. Only that boy earns your heart."

- notes from a lonely Boxing Day

She was unmistakably their sister, without any of Julia's or Sebastian's grace, without Brideshead's gravity. She seemed brisk and matter-of-fact, steeped in the atmosphere of camp and dressing-station, so accustomed to gross suffering as to lose the finer shades of pleasure.

"I have the fancy for rather spicy things, you know, not for the shade of the cedar tree, the cucumber sandwich, the silver cream-jug, the English girl dressed in whatever English girls do wear for tennis - not that, not Jane Austen, not M-m-miss M-m-mitford."

'Why did you marry her?'
'Physical attraction. Ambition. Everyone agrees she's the ideal wife for a painter. Loneliness, missing Sebastian.'
'You loved him, didn't you?'
'Oh yes. He was the forerunner.'

More even than the works of the great architects, I loved buildings that grew silently with the centuries, catching and keeping the best of each generation, while time curbed the artists's pride and the Philistine's vulgarity, and repaired the clumsiness of the dull workman. In such buildings England abounded...

But as I drove away and turned back in the car to take what promised to be my last view of the house, I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that whenever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world.

'But my dear Sebastian, you can't seriously believe it all.'
'Can't I?'
'I mean about Christmas and the star and the three kings and the ox and the ass.'
'Oh yes, I believe that. It's a lovely idea.'
'But you can't believe things because they're a lovely idea.'
'But I do. That's how I believe.'

These things are a part of life itself; but languor - the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding - that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it.

There is no candour in a story of early manhood which leaves out of account the home-sickness for nursery morality, the regrets and resolutions of amendment, the black hours which, like zero on the roulette table, turn up with roughly calculable regularity.

"So you see we mustn't blame Sebastian if at times he seems a little insipid - but then you don't blame him, do you, Charles? With that very murky background, what could he do except set up as being simple and charming, particularly as he isn't very well endowed in the Top Storey. We couldn't claim that for him, could we, much as we love him?"

You don't have to worry, she would say, and then go on bleeding, and the obviousness of the problem combined with the refusal of help left me at first frustrated and subsequently rather resentful.