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The beauty of the prelude had made him ache for the life he wished he was living. He didn't know what that life was, but this was not it, and this was his only life. There would be no second chances. He would die without being happy, without having known true love.

Edward is So Dramatic ashsbjssnsn

“Which one of us is more the beast?" Elias demanded.
He needed to know.
Willem opened his eyes and they glittered in the dark.
"Neither. All of us are monsters, to someone," he said.

Victor recognized the manic shine of Alain's eyes, the flat empty space beyond them. His own eyes looked the same. Victor wondered if all of theirs did, alchemists. He hadn't had the time to check at the party, and Mr. Sauer was simply an Archivist. He had the gaze of a professor or librarian. Elias, on the other hand, had the gaze of prey. Open and hungry and curious...cautious—but not enough to avoid
being eaten.

A thought or invention, once conceptualized never dies. It just appears again and again in time and place until it lives a proper lifetime and either evolves or falls from fashion.

"Progress cannot be stalled by something as immaterial as the probability of wickedness!" Victor spluttered. "Should we turn from the wickedness of the past that provided us with lifesaving treatment in the present?"

The luxury of time was a gift wasted by the young. Enough people in his father's office used their last breaths to share that wisdom, and Victor was not about to waste it.

It was almost as if he wanted to be found out, to shed the old secrets so that he would have room for new ones. He knew that his childhood misfortune hadn't been his fault. It was his father's doing…But the past clung to him, just as the mildew and smoke and misery-stench of the Marshalsea rose from his jacket as he'd sat in the blacking-shop window…He would never escape the prison.

On the night Dickens first met Andersen, he had drunk a few drops over his usual habit…It was an argument for moderation. Or it would have been if those invitations hadn't burbled up from such a deep well of feeling. By the end of those dinners, he loved his new friends. He wanted them to meet his family and see his home.

"Our tale begins on a Thursday afternoon, the most ordinary of ordinary afternoons, a few days shy of the most unordinary day of the entire year." Unfortunately, I am charmed by the Snicket-esque prose...

Family life so often seemed like a play that Father was directing.

It doesn't matter how little space one takes up, because it's always too much, and so you give more and more ground till you've barely enough left to stand on.

Titus Pilcrow was a quiet, serious sort of man, a little shy, a little awkward, the sort who thought too much about things that ought not bother him…Nico groped for a word, and settled on "self-contained." A man who lived in himself, not always hungry, or demanding, or grabbing at others for more. Nico, who was frequently the object of people's hunger and grabbing, found that remarkably peaceful.

"Pleased to hear it. Wouldn't want to call a chap a chap when a chap was actually a chapess. Fearfully bad form to go around mis-chapping chaps, isn't it?"

He couldn't imagine Kabel having to fight their very nature, as he did. Couldn't picture them balling their hands into fists while their whole body tingled and itched with the want-no, the need-to be anything, anyone else. No. They seemed so confident, so serene, so sure of themselves…It made Cricket happy, to know that people like Kabel existed. It made his world feel a little wider. But it also made him ache.

"It's our flame," said a third voice, higher than the other Jacks. A Jack with flowing, shadowy hair stepped into view and gestured to the large, merry fire behind Cricket. "It's attracted to Interesting Things and Beings of Character," they explained, as if this were totally normal, and in fact, all ships were actually giant pumpkins with mysterious wills of their own.

I stayed in the mouth of the dragon for a long time. It was comforting in a strange way to be in hell, to be at the very bottom and know that there was nothing farther below me.

Who needs the oath-like balance of exertion and reward when all you need is a charger, free Wi-Fi, free re-fills, annual leave. What chance does the miracle of a hedgerow have against the splendor of an EasyJet flight to Spain, an arrow shooting across the sky chock-full of manchildren plugged in and streaming—airplane not just an airplane but a flying phone charger.

…the world out there and the placement of ourselves within it…was all that mattered, and that if sodomy was a sin then it was a sin like all the others in the sense that sin was a sign of caution, a warning that served as a guardrail between our world and whatever greater thing lay beyond it, both in unknowable great joy and unattainable great peril, and the timeless, crushing responsibility of devotional love…

The air was sweet with sound, manure, herbs, rot, fruity fragrance, animal hair. There was no car exhaust, no petrol fumes, no plastic waste lining the river. Yes, there were decapitated, mutilated human heads on spikes hung across the entrance to the City - that was a shocking thing to see…but people passing the display all shared the same wincing, perplexed reaction as me. It was all still a shared humanity.

And what we are seeing now are the memories you never lived but which are inside you, facts pressed deep into you from before you even heard them…He had imagined the event a thousand times over, had spent countless hours as a child staring up to the clouds and thinking about it, wondering what his father had thought in his final moments. It was a strange thing, to grieve someone he had never known.

And it was really nothing at the time, this contentment. It Aowed through their open fingers like a stream, and they imagined it would always be like this, and that the stream would never dry up. It would just flow and flow and they would never have to think about where it came from. And never make the effort to scoop it up and drink it in, as if life could stay a honeymoon forever.

Without the truth, there can be no fiction.
Nonsense needs reason. To push against. I didn't howl at the moon, I yelled at a lamp. Subject verb. Someone wept. Some things are more important than poetry.

When you build on a graveyard everything is a graveyard, and everything is a graveyard because nothing is free from history. It foods the landscape, it burns the cities to the ground. Tell someone to get over it and you've made yourself an enemy, but you have to get over it. There is no room, there is no new room. The fire is not moving away. The smoke billows.

Galileo got a telescope. He used it to move the sun to the center of the universe. We arrested him and banned his books. Socrates had a question. Well, several questions. We gave him poison. Van Gogh had a paintbrush. He struggled with yellow. He was 700 things on a small shelf, touching. When he died he was survived by everything that was left.

When they wake, it's dark. They cry, the moon rises, the pebbles shine—my father does not like this part-and by dawn, they're back. This is the part that I don't like: They went back. When someone is trying to kill you, you shouldn't go back. Second night, same plot: Ditch the kids.
They are the parents. They don't need to be inventive. The door is locked. No pebbles.

Surely it was a misunderstanding, a simple sloppiness. It wasn't. It was a staircase down and darker.

No one believes that I know what I know because sometimes I miss a part or tell it sideways. Some people get stuck on the first thing you say and they don't let you finish your syllogism. They asked the wrong questions. I gave the wrong answers.

"You're like a rose in a graveyard," he said, and his lips twisted into a bitter smile. "I wonder what you could have turned into without the war."

I didn't know what would happen when we first met. I didn't know that it'd be a lifetime. I hoped it would, I think. At least part of me did. I couldn't even tell you why. But there was something about you, something I wanted…There's no fate, no destiny. Sometimes it is horrible, devastating. But sometimes, it could lead to a life we couldn't have predicted. A good life, even if it hurts.