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"O my father, I understand nothing but the beauty which came to me in books." Hippo's most favorite Fictions: "He took a seat opposite Catherine, who kept her gaze fixed on him as if she feared he would vanish were she to remove it. He did not raise his to her often: a quick glance now and then sufficed; but it flashed back, each time more confidently, the undisguised delight he drank from hers. They were too much absorbed in their mutual joy to suffer embarrassment." "This time, I remember I was lying in the oak closet, and I heard distinctly the gusty wind, and the driving of the snow; I heard, also, the fir bough repeat its teasing sound, and ascribed it to the right cause: but it annoyed me so much, that I resolved to silence it, if possible; and, I thought, I rose and endeavoured to unhasp the casement. The hook was soldered into the staple: a circumstance observed by me when awake, but forgotten. 'I must stop it, nevertheless!' I muttered, knocking my knuckles through the glass, and stretching an arm out to seize the importunate branch; instead of which, my fingers closed on the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand! The intense horror of nightmare came over me: I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed: 'Let me in - let me in!' 'Who are you?' I asked, struggling meanwhile to disengage myself. 'Catherine Linton,' it replied,"I'm come home". As it spoke, I discerned, obscurely, a child's face looking through the window. Terror made me cruel; 'Begone!' I shouted, "I'll never let you in, not if you beg for twenty years.". "It is twenty years." mourned the voice: "twenty years. I've been waif for twenty years!". My suggestion doesnt seem to have gone too well. I rather thought you loved me. A fine blow to my conceit. Your hair? Why on earth do you ask? Of course I like it. What's the matter with it? I wish I was a woman of about 36 dressed in black satin with a string of pearls. You would not be in this car eith me if you were and stop biting those nails, they are ugly enough already. I ask you because you are not dressed in black satin with a string of pearls nor are you 36. You're not difficult, you are easy, very easy. Much easier that I thought you would be. I used to think it would be dreadful to be married, that one's husband would drink, or use awful language, or grumble if the toast was soft at breakfast and be rather unattractive altogether, smell possibly. You dont do any of those things. Will you look into my eyes and tell me that you love me now? "I walk past Emmett, out of the summer house on the grass. The wind buffets me. Even though it's icy laden with the scent of soil and moisture, in the end of winter. I lean against the pillar, drinking it in. Out of the whirl of memories, one surfaces: a damp, blue evening last spring, when I walked back to the New House from the farm. I'd stayed to dinner, because Emmett had asked me to. When I said goodnight he'd grinned at me, that awkward quick-quenched grin that made me feel like we were the only people in the world. I walked home whistling, dancing on the path like a music-hall turn, laughing softly to myself. I was wearing Emmett's shirt. My heart was so light I could have flown. The memory of it takes my breath away. I didnt know happiness was that simple." "I was angry with myself because I had the conceit to think for one moment that you wouldnt do so." "Don't go falling down any more stairs, avoid sharp objects, and above all, above all, keep away from disreputable people, alright? Oh, and by the way, I love you." "If it's my claws that put you off ... I'm aware that I'm hardly attractive ... this leg wont stop me from ..." "One had to have a good reason for looking Thorn straight in the face. Ophelia had one. She kissed his scars, first the one cutting through his eyebrows, then the one cutting into his cheek, and finally the one cutting across his temple." "Fifty six. That's the number of my scars"."Show them to me". The world instantly ceased to be a word and became skin. Ophelia spent these last three years feeling empty. She was at last, replete." "Physical contact disgusted him. There was just one exception to this rule." "No, no one was waiting for him in the Pole anymore, and that suited him. As long as one particular person would be waiting for him elsewhere, that would suit him." Thorn's attention had become all-consumming. Usually so reluctant to eat, he suddenly seemed ravenous" "From a pocket, Thorn took out the gloves Ophelia has entrusted to him. He put them on her himself, first one hand, then the other, even buttoning them up at the wrists for her. A most intimate thing to do." "And very slowly and with infinite gentle delays and delicate diversions and variations of indirect assault Roland finally, to use an outdated phrase, entered and took possession of all her white coolness that grew warm against him, so that there seemed to be no boundaries, and he heard, towards dawn, from a long way off, her clear voice crying out, uninhibited, unashamed, in pleasure and triumph. In the morning, the whole world had a strange new smell. It was the smell of the aftermath, a green smell, a smell of shredded leaves and oozing resin, of crushed wood, and splashed sap, a tart smell, which bore some relation to the smell of bitten apples. It was the smell of death and destruction and it smelled fresh and lively and hopeful." "At midnight, when everything was silent, I said farewell, to the old tower where I had suffered - and loved - so much. I slipped into the chateau by a secret door of which I had the key. Furtively, like a criminal, I passed along the empty and resounding galleries, guiding myself as I best could in the dark. At last I reached the salon where I had first seen her. She and her mother had not long left it, and their recent presence was revealed by a sweet and pleasant perfume which transported me. I searched, and I touched the basket where a few moment before she had replaced her embroidery. Alas, my poor heart! I fell on my knees before the seat she generally occupies, my forehead against the marble. I wept. I sobbed like a child. God, how I loved her!" "When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant, who imagines or remembers a meeting when the other had passed by innocently, just as Clifton might have opened a car door for you a year earlier and ignored the fate of his life." "I am the man who fasts until I see what I want. The jackal with one eye that looks back and one that regards the path you consider taking. In his jaws are pieces of the past he delivers to you, and when all of that time is fully discovered it will prove to have been already known." " We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead." "..artists and poets who as well as having a reputation for producing great or fine art have something garishly Wrong with them as persons; a spectacular flaw in character or citizenship, a construably romantic affliction or addiction - extreme self-centeredness, marital infidelity, stone-deafness, stone-blindness, a terrible thirst, a mortally bad cough, a partiality for grand-scale adultery, a certified or uncertified weakness for opium, and so on, God have mercy on the lonely bastards. If suicide isnt at the top of the list of compelling infirmities for creative men, the suicide poet or artist, one cant help noticing, has always been given a very considerable amount of avid attention, not seldom on sentimental grounds almost exclusively,.." The Real Rule of Four -Joscelyn Godwin The Cabinet of Curiosities (Pendergast Series) - Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child "You know I'm not one for a life of mourning. I've always been bad. Probably I shall be bad again punished again. But the worse I am, the more I need God. I cant shut myself out from His mercy. That is what it would mean; starting a life with you, without Him. One can only hope to see one step ahead. But I saw today there was one thing unforgivable - ...the bad thing I was on the point of doing, that I'm not quite bad enough to do to set up a rival good to God's. Why should I be allowed to understand that, and not you? ...or it may be a private bargain between me and God, that if I give up this one thing I want so much, however bad I am, He wont quite despair of me in the end. Now we shall both be alone, and I shall have no way of making you understand. I dont want to make it easier for you. I hope your heart may break; but I do understand." "Quid Quincunce speciosius, qui, in quamcunque partem spectaveris, rectus est?" - Quintilian "And another thing. Dont ever kid yourself about loving someone. It is just that most people are not lucky enough ever to have it. You never had it before and now you have it. What you have with ..., whether it lasts just through today and a part of tomorrow, or whatever it lasts for a long time is the most important thing that can happen to a human being. There will always be people who say it does not exist because they cannot have it. But I tell you it is true and that you have it and that you are lucky even if you die tomorrow." "What can men do to make known to themselves this sense of deliverance? Everything about mankind is paradox. He who strives and conquers grows soft. The magnanimous man grow rich becomes mean. The creative artist for whom everything is made easy nods. Every doctrine swears that it can breed men, but none can tell us in advance what sort of men it will breed. Nothing in the world had forewarned us of its coming - a joy so thrilling that if it was born of misery we remembered even the misery with tenderness." "There was no recovering them now. You could grieve endlessly for the loss of time and for the damage done. For the dead and for your own lost self. All your grief hasnt changed a thing. What you have lost will not be returned to you. It will always be lost. You've left with only your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is go on or not. But if you go on, it's knowing you carry your scars with you. No matter how you might yearn for it and pray for it, you would never get it. You could be too far ruined. You could be so lost in bitterness and anger that you could not find your way back. Even my best intentions come to naught, and hope itself is but an obstacle. But there was a redemption of some kind, in such complete fulfillment of a desire so long deferred." "The aurora was the radiance of a beautiful ice maiden. She lived far in the north, and her coldness repelled all suitors. But the king of elves and flowers fell in love with her, and his desire melted her frozen heart. That is how spring came." "It screamed, not for her ... not for her at all. It screamed with anger at the horror of its birth. It screamed with an ancient pain that no one could console. It was a scream whose echo rang out in storms and deserts, in public crowded places, and in single staring faces. It was the scream of unbelonging. A scream thread, that scarred every life, in its certain preparation for death." "I dont die - I dont fall in love. And if other people die or fall in love they always do it when I'm just not there."
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That's all folks !!!