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There were crimson roses on the bench; they looked like splashes of blood. ↗

— Dorothy L. Sayers

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I know what you want to hear, doctor, but I'm sorry, you're not going to pry some sordid confession out of me. ↗

— Bárbara Mujica

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Barrabas came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy. ↗

— Isabel Allende

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There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

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Granted: I AM an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peep-hole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me. ↗

— Günter Grass

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One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six. ↗

— Dylan Thomas

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I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well. ↗

— Orhan Pamuk

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Jose Palacios, his oldest servant, found him floating naked with his eyes open in the purifying waters of his bath and thought he had drowned. ↗

— Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

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I might be the villain of this story. ↗

— Rebecca Makkai

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Norman Bates heard the noise and a shock went through him. ↗

— Robert Bloch

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