lectures broke into one's day and were clearly a terrible waste of time, necessary no doubt if you were reading law or medicine or some other vocational subject, but in the case of English, the natural thing to do was talk a lot, listen to music, dri...
What am I?" he asked. "I am Edmund Herondale, and, my lady, I am always and forever at your service. If you will have me." He smiled, and the smile was slow and devastating. In the dark narrow street long past midnight, his eyes were high summer.
To them, as to Magnus, time was like rain, glittering as it fell, changing the world, but something that could also be taken for granted. Until you loved a mortal. Then time became gold in a miser's hands, every bright year counted out carefully, inf...
They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressure; there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great ma...
Although we are necessarily concerned, in a chronicle of events, with physical action by the light of day, history suggests that the human spirit wanders farthest in the silent hours between midnight and dawn. Those dark fruitful hours, seldom record...
It was as natural and obvious to me as breathing. So I assumed that everyone else was doing it too. When I realized that everyone else was not doing it -- that they couldn't do it even if they tried -- I told myself, 'I'm different from other people,...
Charles Foster Kane: Mr. Carter, here's a three-column headline in the Chronicle. Why hasn't the Inquirer a three-column headline? Herbert Carter: The news wasn't big enough. Charles Foster Kane: Mr. Carter, if the headline is big enough, it makes th...
Louis: Her blood coursed through my veins, sweeter than life itself. And as it did, Lestat's words made sense to me. I knew peace only when I killed and when I heard her heart in that terrible rhythm, I knew again what peace could be.
Yvette: [to Louis] Are you not hungry, sir? Lestat: Aux contraire, mon cher, he could eat the whole colony. [starts to laugh] Louis: [as Yvette starts to pick up Louis's plate, he grabs her arm and looks at the veins in her neck] I'll finish it, Yvet...
Lestat: Perfect! Just perfect! Just burn the place! Burn everything we own! Have us sleeping in the field like cattle! Louis: You thought you could have it all... Lestat: Oh, shut up, Louis! Mon Dieu! Come here.
Lestat: Have you said your good-byes to the light? [bites Louis] Lestat: I've drained you to the point of death. If I leave you here, you die. Or you can be young always, my friend, as we are now, but you must tell me: will you come or no?
Louis: Perhaps you'd like another cigarette? Daniel Molloy: Yeah, I suppose I would. It's not bothering you, is it? Louis: No. Daniel Molloy: No, I don't assume that it would be, I mean, it's not like you're gonna die from cancer or anything, is it? ...
I don't like the rain forest," Ragnor said sadly. "That's because you are not open to new experiences in the same way I am!" "No, it is because it is wetter than a boar's armpit and twice as smelly here." Magnus pushed a dripping frond out of his eye...
Take a moment and think of something small but significant that you've wanted for decades. Dream about it. Wish for it. Let the dreaming and wishing sink deeply into your being. Add some memories of disappointment just for a little flavor. At some po...
How shall I typify what happened? Passion play? Somewhat. Weird tale? Indubitably. Horror story? Pretty close. Grotesque melodrama? Certainly. Black comedy? Your point of view will determine that. Perhaps it was a combination of them all... So, to th...
How must it have felt, Pikes, the night they seized your films, like entrails yanked from the camera, out of your guts, clutching them in coils and wads to stuff them up a stove to burn away! Did it feel as bad as having some fifty thousand books ann...
...We lost our faith and went around wondering what life was for. If art was no more than a frustrated out-flinging of desire, if religion was no more than self-delusion, what good was life? Faith had always given us answers to all things. But it all...
If you wanted to kidnap someone, what would you use?" she asked Amit. They were lying in bed, with the lights off. To knock them unconscious. So that you could drag them into the back of your van." Chloroform, I guess." Really?" She brightened. It ma...
I have something to fight for and live for; that makes me a better killer. I've got what amounts to a religion now. It's learning how to breathe all over again. And how to lie in the sun getting a tan, letting the sun work into you. And how to hear m...
The rockets set the bony meadows afire, turned rock to lava, turned wood to charcoal, transmuted water to steam, made sand and silica into green glass which lay like shattered mirrors reflecting the invasion, all about. The rockets came like drums, b...
A comparably capacious embrace of beauty and pleasure - an embrace that somehow extends to death as well as life, to dissolution as well as creation - characterizes Montaigne's restless reflections on matter in motion, Cervantes's chronicle of his ma...
