credit: www.blacktieguide.com
"And how to describe a London party? Candles in lustres of cut-glass are placed everywhere about the house in dazzling profusion; elegant mirrors triple and quadruple the light until night outshines day; many-coloured hot-house fruits are piled up in stately pyramids upon white-clothed tables; divine creatures, resplendent with jewels, go about the room in pairs, arm in arm, admired by all who see them. Yet the heat is over-powering, the pressure and noise almost as bad; there is nowhere to sit and scarce anywhere to stand. You may see your dearest friend in another part of the room; you may have a world of things to tell him - but how in the world will you ever reach him? If you are fortunate then perhaps you will discover him later in the crush and shake his hand as you are both hurried past each other. Surrounded by cross, hot strangers, your chance of rational conversation is equal to what it would be in an African desert. Your only wish is to preserve your favourite gown from the worst ravages of the crowd. Every body complains of the heat and the suffocation. Every body declares it to be entirely insufferable. But if it is all misery for the guests, then what of the wretchedness of those who have not been invited? Our sufferings are nothing to theirs! And we may tell each other tomorrow that it was a delightful party."
~Susanna Clarke from J
onathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
"As to basic structure, a revolution starts as a conspiracy; therefore structure is small, secret, and organized as to minimize damage by betrayal - since there are always betrayals."
~Robert A. Heinlein from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
credit to: www.wallsave.com
"Wars make history seem deceptively simple. They provide clear turning points, easy distinctions: before and after, winner and loser, right and wrong. True history, the past, is not like that. It isn't flat or linear. It has no outline. It is slippery, like liquid; infinite and unknowable, like space. And it is changeable: just when you think you see a pattern, perspective shifts, an alternative version is proffered, a long-forgotten memory resurfaces."
~Kate Morton from
The House at Riverton
"I see that it is a photograph, a host of black and white figures with serious faces. Even from a distance the image is familiar to me. I remember it instantly, in the same way a film seen long ago, a dream, a painting, can be recalled through its merest shape."
~Kate Morton from
The House at Riverton
"The room was large, rectangular and gloomy, and wore the pallor of decorous neglect. It gave the impression of desertion, of a spell in an ancient tale. It slept the sleep of a hundred-year curse."
~Kate Morton from
The House at Riverton
"It is an uncanny feeling, that rare occasion when one catches a glimpse of oneself in repose. An unguarded moment, stripped of artifice, when one forgets to fool even oneself."
~Kate Morton from
The House at Riverton
"'Men and women who can't get over the past,' Aunt Evie said. 'That's what ghosts are. Not them.' She flapped her arm toward the coffin which stood on its bands beside the coincidentally fresh grave. 'The dead are dead. We bury them, and buried they stay.'"
~Stephen King from
Needful Things
"the heart...that secret repository where needs and fears elbowed each other continuously like uncomfortable passengers in a crowded subway car"
~Stephen King from
Needful Things
"a table-radio from the fifties which was that disgusting shade of pale pink which the people of that time had seemed to approve of when it came to appliances, if not to politics."
~Stephen King from
Needful Things
"It was deja vu, she supposed, that sense of false recollection which strikes almost everyone from time to time, a feeling which is disorienting because it is at once so dreamy and so prosaic."
~ Stephen King from
Needful Things
"When a new shop opens in a small New England town, there is rarely a crowd before the doors open, and never a line... Certain things are simply Not Done, particularly not in the tight Yankee enclaves north of Boston. These are societies which exist for nine months of every year mostly sufficient unto themselves, and it is considered bad form to show too much interest too soon, or in any way to indicate that one has felt more than a passing interest, so to speak."
~Stephen King from
Needful Things
"So Brian carefully re-folded his daydream along its creases, as a man will carefully fold a well-read and much-valued document, and tucked it on the shelf at the back of his mind where it belonged."
~ Stephen King from
Needful Things
"The day is refracted, and the next and the one after that, all of them broken up into a hundred juggled segments, each brilliant and self-contained so that the hours are no longer linear but assorted like bright sweets in a jar."
~Penelope Lively from
Moon Tiger
"At night she looks at the sizzling stars, which cannot be the same stars that glimmer in English skies, and she feels eternal, which, far from being tranquil, is like some hideous fever - a psychological version of the malaria, typhoid, dysentery and jaundice that smite each and all at some point in this continent."
~Penelope Lively from
Moon Tiger
"looking at the river, the white swooping sails of feluccas, the sunset sky in which presently glittered the brilliant enhanced stars of the desert. I know how I felt - richer, happier, more alive than ever before or ever since. It is feeling that survives; feeling and the place. There is no sequence now for those days, no chronology - I couldn't say at which point we went to Karnak, to the Colossus, to the tombs - they are simultaneous. It is a time that is both instant and frozen, like a village scene in a Breughel painting, like the walls of the tombs on which fly, swim and walk the same geese, ducks, fish, cattle that live in, on and beside the Nile today."
~Penelope Lively from
Moon Tiger
