It is always the first and last steps that are the hardest to take. We walk away and try not to turn back, or we stand just outside the gates, terrified to find what's waiting for us now that we've returned. In between, we stumble blindly from one pl...
It was always dear to me, this solitary hill, and this hedgerow here, that closes out my view, from so much of the ultimate horizon. But sitting here, and watching here, in thought, I create interminable spaces, greater than human silences, and deepe...
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The scien...
Criswell: [First lines] Greetings, my friends! You are interested in the unknown. The mysterious. The unexplainable. That is why you are here. And now, for the first time, we are bringing you the full story of what happened. We are giving you all the...
Sister Alma: Elisabet? Can I read you something from my book? Or am I disturbing you? It says here:"All the anxiety we bear with us, all our thwarted dreams, the incomprehensible cruelty, our fear of extinction, the painful insight into our earthly c...
Charlie: He's not crazy, he's not retarded but he's here. Dr. Bruner: He's an autistic savant. People like him used to be called idiot savants. There's certain deficiencies, certain abilities that impairs him. Charlie: So he's retarded. Dr. Bruner: A...
Noriko Nakagawa: [while looking for Nanahara, she finds Mitsuko, sitting in the rain and staring catatonically at Noriko] Mitsuko. Mitsuko: [Stands up and picks up bag] What's up? Noriko Nakagawa: I'm looking for Nanahara. Mitsuko: Got separated? Sho...
Charlotte said that if I chose, I could cease to be a Gray and take the name my mother should have had before she was married. I could be a Starkweather. I could have a true Shadowhunter name." She heard Will exhale a breath. It came out a puff of wh...
Rage flared up in Tessa and she considered belting Woolsey with the poker whether he came near her or not. He had moved awfully quickly while fighting Will, though, and she didn’t fancy her chances. “You don’t know James Carstairs. Don’t spea...
We live in a global village, Neel, where billions of voices babble simultaneously, and in this village a new hierarchy is being established, a new caste-system is being created. Only this time, it is money that sets the tone. Whoever has the most mon...
He terrifies me, Aunt Peg.” I don’t have the backbone to say it to her face. “Oliver is such a self-contained person. He’s always so calm, so at ease, so refined. I’m the one who’s always losing my mind over nothing. He is unbelievably am...
...we, and I mean humans, are meaning makers. We do not discover the meanings of mysterious things, we invent them. We make meanings because meaninglessness terrifies us above all things. More than snakes, even. More than falling, or the dark. We tri...
It is a curious fact that small boys are more terrified of their babysitters than small girls are. In part, this is because small girls and babysitters, who are usually slightly larger girls, belong to the same species, and therefore understand each ...
It is illness that makes us recognize that we do not live in isolation but are chained to a being from a different realm, worlds apart from us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body. Were we to meet a brigand on the road,...
Go ahead. You're not going to walk in on anyone. I'm home alone." "The whole night?" Immediately, I realized it might not have been the smartest thing to say. "Dorothea will be coming soon." That was a lie. Dorothea was long gone. It was close to mid...
In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but ...
Writers are people who write. By and large, they are not happy people. They're not good at relationships. Often they're drunks. And writing—good writing—does not get easier and easier with practice. It gets harder and harder—so that eventually ...
Where had they learned to converse and to dance? I couldn't converse or dance. Everybody knew something I didn't know. The girls looked so good, the boys so handsome. I would be too terrified to even look at one of those girls, let alone be close to ...
A number of people who I’ve talked to about this assume that I got into a fight with the cops. (Because of, y'know, the militant politics.) I actually had an audience member come up to me once and ask me if I paid taxes. Of course I pay taxes! I pa...
Much better now. And Sunny—there's no such thing as 'too much' when it comes to us. Too much mutual interest, or awareness, or desire, or too much damn love—there's no such thing." "I love you beyond obsession," I murmur, terrified because it is ...
...nameless hideous monsters are freaking terrifying. You always fear what you don't know, what you don't understand, and the first step to having understanding of something is to know what to call it. It's a habit of mine to give names to anything I...
