Children would struggle desperately to feel love for their parents. Rather than hate a parent, in fact, they'd choose to hate themselves. Love and violence became so intertwined for them that when they grew up and got into relationships, only hysteri...
He could be boastful in a way pleasantly at odds with his native fatalism, and his youthful stubbornness had a way of ameliorating into a sort of wounded dignity, which was centered in the darting passes of his deep-set, dark eyes.
People who want to climb mountains just like taking metaphors for real. So when I say I could murder for a mangosteen, I hope you don’t think I’m going to go out and do that.
And she kissed me. It was the kind of kiss that I could never tell my friends about out loud. It was the kind of kiss that made me know that I was never so happy in my whole life.
I didn't want it to be one good memory that led to a lot of bad ones. I wanted it to stay what it was, one amazing moment, something that was strong and sweet enough to stand on its own. Something I could remember without any pain. - Kate
She wanted to stay out there, to hang on her branch in the world until the cold had burned down to her bones. She could leave her whitened bones scattered on the snow and depart like light. Whitened bones. A whited sepulcher.
What if we were to subject public servants like politicians to a battery of psychological tests like the MMPI? Maybe we could determine which of them were more likely to become corrupt and save them the trouble of lengthy, expensive campaigns where t...
A brick could be used as a time travel device. I didn’t say it would work well, and you’d say it didn’t work at all, but I’d reply that you probably weren’t using it right. A brick is so complicated that it’s incredibly simple.
A brick could be held in one hand, and a stack of dollar bills in the other, to illustrate the difference in weight between the real and the imaginary. The imaginary only weighs more when you believe in it, and then once you stop believing in it, it ...
Death was an inverse Big Bang; an impossible magic trick where everything had become nothing in the very same instant, where one state had been replaced so completely by another that no evidence of the first could be detected, and where the catalyst ...
Listening to him tell the story now, it was clear to Adam that Glendower was more than a historical figure to Gansey. He was everything Gansey wished he could be: wise and brave, sure of his path, touched by the supernatural, respected by all, surviv...
Colin decided then and there that the female mind was a strange and incomprehensible organ - one which no man should even attempt to understand. There wasn't a woman alive who could go from point A to B without stopping at C, D, X, and 12 along the w...
I wondered how many people there were in the world who suffered, and continued to suffer, because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and folly built up a great distorted wall in front of them th...
Oh, sweetheart, I am the worst male your precious gods could have chosen for you." The expression on his face turned deadly serious. He leaned his face forward and down to get eye level with her. "I will mate no one. Ever. (Darius)
It could have been different," I say, almost under my breath. If I'd kissed Indie again after she kissed me. If I hadn't known Cassia before I met Indie. "But it's not," Indie says, and she's right.
There was nothing I could say in retaliation except something that would confuse her.
We can't impose our will on a system. We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone.
From the instant of our first meeting I judged him so, though it could be said that I was prejudiced. When one is standing naked on a slave-auction block in a wind cold enough to freeze a demon's backside, one is unlikely to have a fair impression of...
His fear was whetted to such a fine edge that he could actually feel it now: a disembodied ball of baby fingers inside his stomach, tickling him from the inside. That's what mortal terror felt like, he realized. Tiny fingers tickling you from the ins...
In school, it got so that Elijah learned to talk his way out of anything, gave great long speeches so that his words snaked themselves like vines around the nuns until they could no longer move, [...].
Katie shook her head in dismay. “I thought being poor was the worst thing that could happen to a girl.” “No, Katie,” the countess said in a clear voice. “The worst thing is to be in love with one man and have to marry another.” Katie O'Re...
