#hit

I turned my ear toward the door because I heard him breathing. When you’re alone and afraid, the simple sound of the steady in and out of air being drawn by another person is good medicine. ↗

— Laura Anderson Kurk

#dating #fear #henry-whitmire #love #meg-kavanagh

Hearing my brother’s words coming out of Henry, this stranger in a strange town, made me feel wild with all the loss—wild and wired with no place to put those feelings. ↗

— Laura Anderson Kurk

#glass-girl #grief #henry-whitmire #laura-anderson-kurk #meg-kavanagh

It felt as though the whole globe was dressed in snow. Like it has pulled it on, the way you pull on a sweater. Next to the train line, footprints were sunken to their shins. Trees wore blankets of ice. As you may expect, someone has died. ↗

— Markus Zusak

#death #white #world #death

The Chinese used gunpowder to make fireworks for celebrations, and the white man came along and said, Holy shit, we can use this to kill people. What better way to celebrate than that?
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#celebration #chaos #chinese #death #destroy

The enormous lake stretched flat and smooth and white all the way to the edge of the gray sky. Wagon tracks went away across it, so far that you could not see where they went; they ended in nothing at all. ↗

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

#away #could #edge #ended #enormous

But he’s there! Potter’s there! Someone grab him! ↗

— J.K. Rowling

#death

Sam counts the money carefully. I watch him in the mirror. “You know what I wish?” he asks when he’s done. “What?” “That someone would convert my bed into a robot that would fight other bed robots to the death for me.” That startles a laugh out of me. “That would be pretty awesome.” A slow, shy smile spreads across his mouth. “And we could take bets on them. And be filthy rich.” I lean my head against the frame of the stall, looking at the tile wall and the pattern of yellowed cracks there, and grin. “I take back anything I might have implied to the contrary. Sam, you are a genius. ↗

— Holly Black

#death

Today I seen a dove collide into the sunset, on the way to heaven and a ruined raven chewing on death, over the pavement. ↗

— Anthony Liccione

#curse #death #dove #hope #raven

Children accept the conditions they are born into, and, to a degree, I was getting used to the bombings, fires, and death around me. I remember that I thought those things were normal. It is grown-ups who worry about things, and this ... this was total panic! I could taste the fear, and I could see that my mother was frightened, which I had never seen before, and this made me even more frightened. ↗

— Alfred Nestor

#alfred-nestor #author-alfred-nestor #children-in-war #hitler #hitler-s-germany

Woolrich had a genius for creating types of story perfectly consonant with his world: the noir cop story, the clock race story, the waking nightmare, the oscillation thriller, the headlong through the night story, the annihilation story, the last hours story. These situations, and variations on them, and others like them, are paradigms of our position in the world as Woolrich sees it. His mastery of suspense, his genius (like that of his spiritual brother Alfred Hitchcock) for keeping us on the edge of our seats and gasping with fright, stems not only from the nightmarish situations he conjured up but from his prose, which is compulsively readable, cinematically vivid, high-strung almost to the point of hysteria, forcing us into the skins of the hunted and doomed where we live their agonies and die with them a thousand small deaths. ↗

— Francis M. Nevins

#cornell-woolrich #doomed #hunted #hysteria #nightmarish