Peter, who broke his enemies on the rack and hanged them in Red Square, who had his son tortured to death, is Peter the Great. But Nicholas, whose hand was lighter than that of any tsar before him, is "Bloody Nicholas". In human terms, this is irony ...
Then she gave one last burst of music. The white Moon heard it, and she forgot the dawn, and lingered on in the sky. The red rose heard it, and it trembled all over with ecstasy, and opened its petals to the cold morning air. Echo bore it to her purp...
Change can be accommodated by any system depending on its rate, Crake used to say. Touch your head to a wall, nothing happens, but if the same head hits the wall at ninety miles an hour, it's red paint. We're in a speed tunnel, Jimmy. When the water'...
The door she had just stepped through shut softly. Taylor faced Veris, took a deep breath and dropped the coat at her feet. Beneath she wore black lace-topped stay-up stockings, red and black French lace thong panties and a matching shelf bra, Swarov...
I cannot sufficiently celebrate the glorious liberty that reigns in the public libraries of the twentieth century as compared with the intolerable management of those of the nineteenth century, in which the books were jealously railed away from the p...
...and on some nights in bed, in that moment before sleep erased the day, I would picture the way the sky in Lapland looked the morning I left, how the train had sped south beneath a sky that was brighter than it had been in weeks. It had pulsed with...
The lipstick is a dark, dark red. The kind Hollywood stars wear. Not a shade good girls in Davisburg wear to the movies. I try it on anyway and gaze at my reflection in the mirror. I don't look sick. I certainly don't look like that kind of girl. Wha...
Because you were wearing a badge, customers assumed you were an oracle. 'What aisle is the desiccated coconut' 'How long do you cook a butternut squash?' 'What would you have with a pan fried red mullet?' 'Where can I find the holy grail?' Enough alr...
I come to a red light, tempted to go through it, then stop once I see a billboard sign that I don’t remember seeing and I look up at it. All it says is 'Disappear Here' and even though it’s probably an ad for some resort, it still freaks me out a...
Percy stormed over to the magical cooler. No one tried to stop him. He knocked open the lid and rummaged throught the ice. There had to be one. Please. He was rewarded with s silver-and-red can of soda. He brandished it at the dolphin warriors as if ...
Consider the black widow spider. It's a timid little beastie, useful and, for my taste, the prettiest of the arachnids, with its shiny, patent-leather finish and its red hourglass trademark. But the poor thing has the fatal misfortune of possessing e...
It rains on everyone. It may be storming but there is a covering. Life may be challenging, but there is a covering. It may seem impossible, hopeless, doubtful, fear-ridden, and pain-laden, but there is a covering. There are other umbrellas, but only ...
Horace’s eyes get wide, and he glances between me and the house. “Every time I think I got a grip on this crazy shit going on in your head, I realize I don’t know the half of it, do I?” My eyes tracing the red trim of the house, I shake my he...
[Orange] is one of God's favorite colors--- He stuck it right there between red and yellow as the second color in the rainbow. He decorates entire forests with shades of orange every autumn. It shows up in sunrises at the start of the day, sunsets at...
Tuning must come first. Each recital begins with a careful tightening of the pegs on the cross-bar, twisting them in their socket of red threads as each string is plucked and tested. He uses his thumb for this, softer and subtler than the plectrum, h...
Cono knew that all three of his tormentors would know the anthem by heart from their childhood years. They had sung it daily to belong to the elite of their country, wearing around their necks the red ties of the Communist Party Youth Brigade, which ...
We live in a world packed with desensitising forces, that strip the world of magic. The world is full of negativity, but we fight back with positivity. We're inspired by oceans, forests, animals, Marx Brothers films. We can't help but project uplifti...
That's what courage is. Taking your disappointments and your failures, your guilt and your shame, all the wounds received and inflicted, and sinking them in the past. Starting again. Damning yesterday and facing tomorrow with your head held high. Tim...
Evil turned out not to be a grand thing. Not sneering Emperors with their world-conquering designs. Not cackling demons plotting in the darkness beyond the world. It was small men with their small acts and their small reasons. It was selfishness and ...
how does she know it's the right room?' wondered Descant. Oh, I don't know; mabye it's the magical red glow coming from the doorway, or perhaps it's the deafening howl of the temporal winds.' said Mervall. Descant nodded.'You could be right, brother....
I sobbed harder into Mom’s chest. I chose not to waste time explaining that it was okay—even fun—to play with Bran while we were in first and second grade. Now, the idea of hanging out with a short kid who always smelled like onions and went to...
