Soundlessly whispering into the void, my lips moving quickly, silently, without ceasing. Calling his name, calling him to me. Even though there's no use. Even though it's futile. Even though it's way past too late.
He stops in his tracks, face expressing major disappointment. "Wait - seriously? That's it? We don't get to do a stealthy tiptoe as we slip around back? No sneaking through a cracked window, or arguing over who gets to crawl through the dogie door to...
Dusk is just an illusion because the sun is either above the horizon or below it. And that means that day and night are linked in a way that few things are there cannot be one without the other yet they cannot exist at the same time. How would it fee...
It was the hour in which objects lose the consistency of shadow that accompanies them during the night and gradually reacquire colors, but seem to cross meanwhile an uncertain limbo, faintly touched, just breathed on by light; the hour in which one i...
Brambleclaw dipped his head. “The battle is won,” he growled. “The clearing is ours. Do you concede or shall we fight for it again?” Blackstar flashed a look of burning hatred over his shoulder. “Take it,” he hissed. “It was never worth...
Of course we got drunk!" Semyon said. "It's okay to get drunk, Anton. If you need to real bad. Only you have to get drunk on vodka. Cognac and wine—that's all for the heart." "So what's vodka for?" "For the soul. If it's hurting real bad
Everybody does it!" Quirke burst out. "It's !" "Everybody?" said Vimes. He looked around at the squad. "Anyone else here take bribes?" His glare ran from face to face, causing most of the squad to do an immediate impression of the Floorboard and Ceil...
Legitimate First watched them go as they walked away. Sergeant Colon felt he was being measured up. "I've always wondered about his name," said Nobby, turning and waving. "I mean...Legitimate?" "Can't blame a mother for being proud, Nobby," said Colo...
One of the hardest lessons in young Sam's life had been finding out that the people in charge weren't in charge. It had been finding out that governments were not, on the whole, staffed by people who had a grip, and that plans were what people made i...
When you don't know what you're living for, you don't care how you live from one day to the next. You're happy the day has passed and the night has come, and in your sleep you bury the tedious question of what you lived for that day and what you're g...
How quick, brutal, and fragile is life. You are born, you live a few years in wild hope, then you are dragged back into the night. You might have breathed on a little longer, had you not dared think yourself a human creature instead of an engine of m...
You never knew the last time you were seeing someone. You didn't know when the last argument happened, or the last time you had sex, or the last time you looked into their eyes and thanked God they were in your life. After they were gone? That was al...
The owner of the Agut d'Avignon had the air of a 1920s dandy who had ruined himself with one mad night of gambling at baccarat and had only been saved by this restaurant, which he seemed to cherish as if it were his wife or a good fountain pen.
The stories that unfold in the space of a writer's study, the objects chosen to watch over a desk, the books selected to sit on the shelves, all weave a web of echoes and reflections of meanings and affections, that lend a visitor the illusion that s...
When a woman once asked Joe how he could come from such a magnificent home and such a good family and still become a gangster, Joe's answer was two-pronged: (a) he wasn't a gangster, he was an outlaw; (b) he came from a magnificent house not a magnif...
Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic, which suggests that reason (if not art) rules over a c...
It occurred to him that thinking like this could explain why, even after all the jobs he'd pulled, he rarely had much money in his pockets. Sometimes it seemed like he stole money from one place just to give it away somewhere else.
It wasn't the fog I minded, Cathleen. I really love fog. [...] It hides you from the world and the world from you. You feel that everything has changed, and nothing is what it seemed to be. No one can find or touch you any more.
Once Mo had closed the gates, he returned to his little stone hut, and his half-eaten sandwich of butter and canned sardines, and his mug of thick hot chocolate, which every night he poured carefully into a thermos labeled COFFEE.
I wake up to write stuff down all night. Useful things like this: To more efficiently make love nocturnally, I must combine the best characteristics of bats, bears, and my Uncle Norman who disappeared in the mountains in ’94.
Lilith came to Longinus in the night, as she often did, and the darkness of the cave was filled with the lustful sounds of their passionate couplings. Afterwards, as he lay back with his eyes closed, she ran her cool fingers playfully across his ches...
