Once undressed I felt less exposed. (...) Naked was my uniform. (...) There was no pressure to conform.
A teacher had once told them that men were either beasts, gentlemen, or beasts masquerading as gentlemen. Might there be a fourth category — gentlemen masquerading as beasts?
Small mistakes tend to lead to large ones. Ours is a lifetime appoinment, and all you have is your reputation. Once it's gone, it doesn't comeback.
Especially difficult when the first and best unconscious move of a dedicated liar is to persuade himself he's sincere. And once he's sincere, all deception vanishes.
After the leave-taking, there is the leaving. And once you have left, you discover the ten thousand things that you still carry - memories of touch, scent and sight.
Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit.
Just once, he looks back at Arsay, and I feel like an entire encyclopedia of information and words is exchanged between them. I wish I could speak telepathy too.
There are horrors beyond life's edge that we do not suspect, and once in a while man's evil prying calls them just within our range.
What began the change was the very writing itself. Let no one lightly set about such a work. Memory, once waked, will play the tyrant.
His was not the hatred that arises suddenly like a storm and as suddenly abates. It was, once the initial shock of anger and pain was over, a calculated thing that grew in a bloodless way.
(In my sleep I dreamed this poem) Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.
No such thing as time travel, he'd rumbled patiently, once. Only live with what you've done, and try in the future to do what you're happy to live with.
Which is more valuable into showing how I think: the order I think of things, or the order in which I arrange them once I’ve thought of them?
Once I knew the depth where no hope was, and darkness lay on the face of all things. Then love came and set my soul free.
For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.
For if there are (at a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the mind at once, how many different people are there not – Heaven help us – all having lodgment at one time or another in the human spirit?
I figured I only had about two seconds to live. It’s amazing how many thoughts you can have in two seconds.
His attentive treatment of her had nothing to do with the presumption that she was weak, and everything to do with the conviction that she was valuable.
Kethry had once described summoning as being “like balancing on a rooftree while screaming an epic poem in a foreign language at the top of your lungs.
Did we not look out together upon the dark waters of the lake And behold there the constellations Of both hemispheres at once? -Love Songs of the Cinnamon Wastes
No matter how ugly the manner in which a man dies, it’s only the presence of a suffering human soul that is horrifying, once gone, what is left is only an object.
