Lyndsay Faye Quotes

The spread of flash talk to the general population would prove to be a permanent shift in the English language. When you say "so long" to your "pal" in parting, you are participating in a subversive cultural phenomenon dating back to 1530 and the Derbyshire scoundrels who first developed a secret language all their own.

More accurately, on the bed and on the table lay various pieces of what had once been a body.
Holmes was leaning with his back against the wall, his countenance deathly white. "The door was open," he said incongruously. "I was passing by, and the door was open."
"Holmes," I whispered in horror.
"The door was open," he said once more, and then buried his face in his hands.

We are all of us daily decaying, after all; the speed is our only variant.

As he passed a hand over his eyes, I recalled the he could not have slept more than twenty hours in the last seven days. For the first time since I had known him, Sherlock Holmes appeared to be exhausted by work rather than inaction.
"Because if I am right," he murmured, "I haven't the first idea what to do.

Tell Mrs. Hudson there will be five for supper. If I am not back by eight, I will have no doubt been arrested. In that case, of course, there will be four.

Miss Steele can a man make a greater blunder than to ignore the intuition of a woman?

If I must go to hell to find my mother again, so be it: I will be another embodied disaster. But I will be a beautiful disaster.

I bit the inside of my lip until I could taste all I had left of my mother, which was her blood.

My friend opened a small box which Lestrade had produced. Inside lay a beautiful silver cigarette case monogrammed with Holmes's initials, underneath which ran the words, "With the Respects of Scotland Yard, November 1888."
Sherlock Holmes sat with his lips parted, but no sound emerged.
"Thank you," he managed at length.

Grace had called Ellen a dry little prune who'd be lucky to give it away for free disguised as a hat, let alone sell it or marry it off.

Time is a tyrant, words our last and only weapons.

What if," replied Inspector Fry in the same maddeningly curteous tone, "we were all to construct daisy chains and drape them so as to shield the words from public view?

You owe your attacker no debt, Miss Steele. It is, as I have proven, a logical impossibility? Promise to try?

Being brave and being alone aren't the same thing.

Nobody chased her. But that was nobody's fault, really, not in a city of this size. It was only the callousness of four hundred thousand people, blending into a single blue-black pool of unconcern. That's what we copper stars are for, I think... to be the few who stop and look.

I looked up in curiosity. Behind us stood the Brown and Eagle Wool Warehouse and Schneider's Cap Factory, both constructed with that wholehearted devotion to industry that sullied the word architecture.

I relate to this story almost as I would a friend or a lover - at times I want to breathe its entire alphabet into my lungs, and at others I should prefer to throw it across the room.

You cannot know what it means, reader, to have thought yourself despised for your unworthiness for a period of years - to have supposed your very nature poison, and your friend right to have thus abandoned you - and to learn thereafter that you were loved not too little but too well.

There is no practice more vexing than that of authors describing coach travel for the edification of people who have already travelled in coaches. As I must adhere to form, however, I will simply list a series of phrases for the unlikely reader who has never gone anywhere:

Fourth, a telegram from brother Mycroft: 'Will visit at earliest possible convenience - great uproar in Whitehall. Mend quickly; your death would be most inconvenient at this time.

But I will be a beautiful disaster.

Watson, if the newspapers could be punished for speculation, every publication in England would soon enough be bankrupted.

That accidents happen is a universal principle - and perhaps the only universal principle worth mentioning, for it governs an enormous percentage of our daily lives.

His eyes flew back at me and I could see whole civilizations, cities that he'd built and cherished and planned for, like the model of an entire world, all crumbling.

I am not callow enough to suppose that books are not powerful
on the contrary, a book is the most delicious of paradoxes, an inert collection of symbols which are capable of changing the universe when once the cover is opened.

And in a way I have always thought that words are alive a little, for they can whisper sweet nothings and roar dragon flame with equal efficiency.

I know formidable women, dozens of them, women who fight and who win... Noble women. Heroic ones.

Look at it,' he said, gesturing. 'This window looks down upon hundreds more panes of glass, and behind those panes live thousands upon thousands of lost souls. When I feel cast down and helpless, scores of other men do as well, and when I am bitterly angry at feeling cast down and helpless, countless other people languish in concert with me. When I'm happy, it's the same. It's a bit like ... I used to play chamber music. It's like a vast orchestra. And so I shan't ever be alone.

If Mercy Underhill were any more perfect, it would take a long day's work to fall in love with her. But she has exactly enough faults to make it ridiculously easy.

The door flew open, revealing a wrinkled, forward-thrusting face wreathed with a nimbus of wispy white hair, a face resembling nothing so much as a mole emerging from its burrow. Her spectacles were so dirty that I could hardly see the use of them. She peered at us as if at two scabrous street dogs and tightened her grasp on her cane.
"What do you want? I don't let rooms, and if you've business with my sons or my husband, they work for a living.

And I maintain, Detective Halse," said Inspector Fry doggedly, "that the civil unrest which allowing this message to remain in view would foment is against the principles of conscience and of British decency. Are you against the principles of British decency, Detective?

I wanted to inflict exquisite agonies upon Aunt Patience; and had I been informed that a few weeks later, I would serve her the deepest cut imaginable, I am not certain that I would not have smiled. Morbidity

Though I no longer presumed to have a conscience, I have never once lacked feelings.

An argument could be made that the ultimate desecration of the human body is to end its earthly usefulness, which would imply that all murderers share equally that specific charge.

It was a gorgeous calamity in scale, I thought. A lovely misfortune. Immediate and irreversible and very soon forgotten. We needed more troubles like that. Ones like burning supper or coming down with a head cold at an awkward time. I desperately wanted to pass through countless small, endurable problems with the girl sitting next to me. I didn't need much else.

Hope, I've discovered, is a sad nuisance. Hope is a horse with a broken leg.

And that was when I realized that she was actually a very good liar. Only good liars are surprised at being caught.

The language spoken by New Yorkers was changing almost daily. Phrases culled from British thieves' cant intermingled with German, Dutch, Yiddish, and other immigrant languages to form "flash," a

One can grow accustomed to carrying unseeable scars, as if the tattoo one wears is inked in flesh tone over flesh tone; but nevertheless one is still covered in secret, painted with secret, stained by it.

Mr. Grange is interested in grimoires and their efficacy. I

Still I caught glimpses of another creature there in the tress, one with round eyes and a predator's hungry stare; but by the time I understood that I was the prey, my fate had already been sealed.

A word of advice: Do not ever kill for love, or you will find yourself tethered, staked to the ground when your cleanest instincts require you to run for your life without a backwards glance. Killing for love is one of the most tangled acts you can commit, reader, in an already twisted world.

Some cities bustle, some meander, I have read; London blazes and it incinerates. London is the wolf's maw. From the instant I arrived there, I loved every smoldering inch of it

Penned creatures suffer, but the more so when they imagine a pen what ain't there

By day I taught Sahjara, who brought me unceasing small presents ranging from orange flower cakes to bouquets of jolly red berries; by night, I imagined my employer making the sort of inappropriate advances which would have made most governesses flee the estate forthwith, and in graphic detail, complete with bare thighs and calloused fingers and the diagonal notches which rest so sweetly above the hipbones when a gentleman is in training, as I had no doubt whatsoever Mr. Thornfield was.

And here you are, another practical sort - neither Catholic nor Protestant, nor wicked, I think. Let us pray that you are not one of a kind, as in my experience your type tend to be o' tremendous use to God.

Knowing that home was hateful to us both, I imagined that her calling me by the word meant I was expedient, or sturdy; but if I could only keep her hand in mine, I knew I would give my four limbs and my heart for the privilege, becoming instead four walls and a roof.

I believe it is the sole business of government to invent elaborate impediments to swift action,