#mel

You take a straight tip from the stable, Cokey, if you must hate, hate the government or the people or the sea or men, but don't hate an individual person. Who's done you a real injury. Next thing you know he'll be getting into your beer like prussic acid; and blotting out your eyes like a cataract and screaming in your ears like a brain tumour and boiling round your heart like melted lead and ramping though your guts like a cancer. And a nice fool you'd look if he knew. It would make him laugh till his teeth dropped out; from old age. ↗

— Joyce Cary

#government #gulley-jimson #hate #injury #melted-lead

To expect and dread a thing for a lifetime; does not prepare you for the thing itself. ↗

— Mary Stewart

#dark-ages #king-author #merlin #wizards #age

The study of the past helps us to appreciate that the ideas and values of our own age are just as provisional and transient as those of bygone ages. The intelligent and reflective engagement with the thought of a bygone era ultimately subverts any notion of "chronological snobbery". Reading texts from the past makes it clear that what we now term "the past" was once "the present", which proudly yet falsely regarded itself as having found the right intellectual answers and moral values that had eluded its predecessors. ↗

— Alister E. McGrath

#perspective #timelessness #age

After a steadying breath, Aislinn turned to Keenan. "I'm sure you can figure out lunch without help. So, umm, go make friends or whatever." And she walked away. He sped up to stay beside her as they entered the cafeteria. "May I join you?" "No." He stepped in front of her. "Please?" "No." She dropped her bag into a chair next to Rianne's things. Ignoring him-and the stares they were attracting-she opened her bag. He hadn't moved. With a shaky gesture, she pointed. "The line's over there." He looked at the throng slowly progressing to the vats of food. "Can I get you something?" "A little space?" A flare of anger flashed over his too-beatiful face, but he said nothing. He just walked away. ↗

— Melissa Marr

#keenan #melissa-marr #wicked-lovely #anger

Forgotten about you?" He caught her chin, forced her to make eye contact, his gaze flashing anger, then slowly going gentle. "That would never happen. Never." And Natalie got the sense that she'd hurt him. ↗

— Pamela Clare

#pamela-clare #anger

I see her body as an arousing work of architecture. A sky-scraping building that I wouldn’t mind laying over a mountain to inject my whale-sized shank through its front entrance, knocking the doorman out of the way and flooding the lobby once I am finished with her. ↗

— Carlton Mellick III

#satan-burger #architecture

It was her first book, an indigo cover with a silver moonflower, an art nouveau flower, I traced my finger along the silver line like smoke, whiplash curves. ... I touched the pages her hands touched, I pressed them to my lips, the soft thick old paper, yellow now, fragile as skin. I stuck my nose between the bindings and smelled all the readings she had given, the smell of unfiltered cigarettes and the espresso machine, beaches and incense and whispered words in the night. I could hear her voice rising from the pages. The cover curled outward like sails. ↗

— Janet Fitch

#silver #smell #wanting #art

You’re scaring the dog,” Trish pointed out. She rarely called me by name. They do that in prisoner of war camps, I’ve heard. Depersonalization. ↗

— Garth Stein

#prison #art

The Taj Mahal rises above the banks of the river like a solitary tear suspended on the cheek of time. ↗

— Rabindranath Tagore

#taj-mahal #timeless #wonder #art

I only wanted absolute quiet to think out why I had developed a sad attitude toward sadness, a melancholy attitude toward melancholy and a tragic attitude toward tragedy — why I had become identified with the objects of my horror or compassion. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#sadness #tragedy #attitude