Stephen Lloyd Jones Quotes

(He) found that articulating those feelings made him feel morose.

This vocation of yours.
She knew that a hunger dwelled in her, in that place where happier emotions should reside, a hunger she could neither sate nor deny. While her compulsion to scratch that itch never faded, she knew that she performed a service to the world in these coll west London rooms. While it was work for which she would receive not a single word of thanks, its value, Etienne believed, could not be denied.

Pointless to question the sanity of it.

There have been so many untruths, I don' blame you for being confused.

All friendships experiences challenges, periods of difficulty. But true friendships also endure. True friendships heal. ask yourself if this is a true friendship and I hope you'll agree that is what we have.

We've been to secretive, perhaps. For long periods in our shared history, that was a necessity born from conflict. But it is not, I am prepared to accept, a style of living compatible with the modern age. It is difficult to maintain trust that way. Even among friends.

He knew she had been telling the truth when she told him she seldom asked for help. It was clear in her every interaction with him - in her speech , even in the way she held herself- that she was used to standing alone.

Somehow he's looked inside me and he's seen what lurks in there: that even in my grief, all I worry about is myself.

For years she had lived in a vacuum of emotions, and now emotions boiled in her: love, fear, hope, shame, self-pity, pride; each struggled for supremacy, ruling only briefly, before surrendering to a contender that was sometimes darker and sometimes lighter, but always different.

And then a monstrous idea jumped into her head, a thought so ruthless and dark she almost fled from the contemplation of it.

Those final moments, while horrific in one sense, were intimate in another. Perhaps when you finally realized were beaten - that there really was no hope - something was triggered in the mind, allowing you to expunge, accept.

It broke over him, a frothing, churning sea a images and sound, so vivid he had to close his eyes against it and hold his breath. Faces long dead; words spoken and heard; professions of love and regret and hate; episodes of intimacy as painful to recall as those characterised by violence.

Twice damned, in truth, and yet by quirk of timing and fate accepted into that society denied to so many others.

You want to run. I understand that. I do believe you almost found the courage just then, until cowardice unmanned you.

She never liked the man. What she saw now, she liked even less.

Not ignoble. Don't torture yourself over it. I can't change the past but I can, hopefully, ease your fears from the future.

Those were the black ears; the lost years. He had allowed himself to become the victim of events, rather than their master. [Jakab]

Yet she felt no horror at what she had witnessed, no nausea. their lives - and their deaths - had not mattered.

Hunched forward, feeling his ears burning, his hands shaking. Tried to concentrate. Found his eyes flickering over sentences and phrases, retaining nothing. [Charles Meredith]

even now, the building raised a conflicting set of emotions in her: memories of pain and loss, but also of healing and discovery.

He felts as if a tumour had burst inside his skull,

Whatever had arrived to save her had not spoken, had not announced itself with anything except the silent killing it brought.

I've always said the world is filled with as much wonder as sorrow.

She stopped, and he knew she had caught herself, dismayed a what she had been about to reveal. [Nicole Dubois]

when she realised he was enjoying the cut-glass shrill of silence that followed, she felt a hatred for him so extreme that had it found physical release, he would have dropped to the floor with every bone in his body shattered.

She did not know how the figure was, but she knew it was damaged too badly to live.

She tried, and failed, to stop herself from shaking.

perhaps that's what we thought we were. Benevolent gods.
Now look at us.

An apology, even as sincere as the one she had just received, could repair not one hour of the suffering she had endured over the last one hundred years, but ... her thoughts trailed away from her and her mouth fell open.

They say there's as many as four hundred billion stars in our galaxy" he murmured. "And our galaxy's just one in perhaps five hundred billion others. That's about seventy each of you, me and every other human who walks the earth".

Do I even want this burden any more? Probably not, I'm too old, too tired. And what, after all. have I achieved in all this time?

A lot of mistakes, but all of them in the past. Some made with worthy intentions, some without. When you live a long time you get to collect a lot of mistakes.

The rush of emotion unbalanced him, his initial outrage eclipsed by an all-consuming grief.

For so many years she'd lived a life absent of emotion or companionship or love. She'd functioned as an automaton, acting out her part without feeling, lacking even the introspection to ask why she'd cast herself in this role, or where it all might end. It hadn't even been a lonely existence because she felt no loneliness; she felt nothing. Whereas now, she felt everything. Emotions festered in her; fear pecked like a carrion bird, guilt ripped and chewed. And, at her core, that crushing sense of hopelessness, threatening to consume everything that she'd started to become.

Knowledge had always been the most important weapon in all of this. [Hannah Wilde]

Ins't that the point? It's neither your right, nor your privilege, to sit in judgement of anyone. Certainly not a people about whom you know so little.

On its rocky tip, dominating the scenery for miles around, stood he Villa dell'Ossevatore. Breathtakingly beautiful, it comprised three individual buildings and a single watchtower, roofed in terracotta tile and connected by stone bridges and loggias. Its lush gardens and lawns encircled the peninsula in steadily descending terraces, and a wide stone-built staircase hugged the rock all the way down to the waterline, terminating at a landing stage edged with balustrades. Higher up the hillside she saw the pergolas straining under the branches of ancient wisteria, and huge displays of azaleas and camellias. Ivy clung to the west-facing sides of the buildings and curled among its statues.

She may be close. She may have crawled into the bushes. She may be dying there, wanting to find somewhere peaceful, somewhere away from the sharp metal and the stink of burning and the violence and the madness. Or she's died already, alone and frightened, and wondering where you were, why you broke your promise, why you allowed this to happen.

() Teeth clenched, she heard herself snarl out words in a voice feral in its savagery (...)

Five years ago I was in love with you so utterly I thought I might go mad from it.

Their touch triggered an electric spasm of agony. He felt the gushing warmth of blood on his fingers. [Charles Meredith]

It's like a pint right here, an emptiness. There's nothing I can do to fill it. If you're telling me I can't have you, if you're really telling me that, I just don't know what I'll do.

He smiled. Rather, he widened his mouth, exposing teeth.

The last begonias wilting in the chalet's hanging baskets laced the air with a lemon and cinnamon fragrance.

What year was it now? He couldn't even say. But finally, the task to which he'd dedicated himself was done.

Her expression was distant and he was ashamed to find himself hunting for sings of pain in her features, some evidence of heartache.

The pain would be awful , but at least she would be free.

But I can't clean your blood and yours, I'm afraid, is tainted. We'll educate you, feed and clothe you, send you out into the world. But I can't do anything to purify your blood.

Yes, yes. I've heard the argument. If we all lived as long as you, we'd be in crisis. Population explosion. The stability of our society would fracture. Chaos. Anarchy. And perhaps there's a shred of truth in that.

He fell to the floor a second time, accompanied by a rain of books.

(...) Stage fright, if you like. Easier to hide behind a persona than to bare one's soul. I'm really not the monster you think I am. I just wanted to talk to you unencumbered by all this complications, all this ... history. [Jakab]

As if this was normal.
As if nothing had happened during the night.

Even now, over a half-century later, the engraved words stirred emotions in him he would rather not confront.

Yet surely no afterlife could be cruel enough to accept not just her soul but all her agony.

He couldn't even remember her name any more. when, he caught himself wondering, had he started to forget?

Her words might have been meant for another, but they had the quality of sunlight nonetheless.

We're talking about an awareness; pure consciousness, if you like. If it helps, think of our interpretation of the soul. Do you believe you have a soul? Whether you do or you don't, it's a device that features regularly in mythology. the only difference, here, is that whereas we generally consider our souls tethered to a single body during our physical experience, the tolvajok have no such restrictions. They simply need a host. And when one host starts to die, they go on and take another.

Can I blame them? they're sick with fear. We've grown too entrenched here, too entwined. Too immersed in the beating heart of this city, this country, this region, We've grown heavy and fat on our our wealth, collective power. We've become addicted to our influence, our mystique. And it's all a myth. An illusion. A crystal tower, standing on sand.

When she kissed his mouth, she tasted blood and swallowed it.

I share that pain. Those events have sparked anger, resentment, further division. I empathise with your anger. I understand your resentment. More than anything, I seek to heal that division.

I'm impressed by your protectiveness over them, but I'm only asking for an introduction. Are they so fragile they need an old man as chaperon? Do they have no tongues?

(...) Try not to speak ill of people in the future. You never know when they might be listening (...)

Perhaps it was a tacit acknowledgement of her tendency to find danger, to gravitate towards self-destruction, but she'd been terrified of heights all her life.

She was an impostor here, unfit to be around these innocent lives.

Her beauty was matchless, face so elegantly crafted that she appeared ethereal; unreal. But while nature had clearly bestowed the gift of physical perfection, it had not breathed the warmth of humanity into its creation.

It's a difficult thing to offer leadership to a people who have lost control over their future. But offer it I must. And when I look around me and see the dignity displayed by our last generation, see their elegance and their grace, it fills me with pride even as it tears at my heart.

In all his years he had not seen one as ancient as this, so obviously belonging to a world far older than his own.

She noticed a bitter aroma of a extinguished cigar, the citrus scent of cologne. And underneath those, an electric odour of excitement, of barely controlled fury.

Create a mould, and pour yourself in it. See what you want to be, and be. Don't fear the pain. Pain is good. Pain is price.

He had imagined he wanted a hundred things; a thousand. But really, even though he had not spoken his answer aloud, he found he only wanted one.
- I want this to end -

She fought black tears.

I am to be judged today. But tomorrow, in the way treat an innocent, you will all be judged.

And suddenly, magically, as she started at the single enameled button, she felt as if a plug ad been pulled somewhere deep within her, and all of her emotions - her terror and her rage and her guilt and her hate - were spiraling, draining out of her like poison from an abscess. What remained was the clarity of a single thought.

She preferred fear to misplaced confidence.

She nodded, knowing that he toyed with her, lightening her anguish, but she had no power in this exchange.

Cotswold stone framed tiny sash windows gleaming with pale green paint. Wisteria vines twisted about the stone, bunches of purple flowers hanging thick and heavy with pollen. Above it all a tiled roof sagged with sage.

He grinned, the skin of his mouth streching far wider that it should have done, exposing teeth as far back as his molar.

You're starting to have doubts, aren't you? twenty years of having this tale drip-fed to you is beginning to have its effects. You've polluted your mind with it and now you can't sort myth from reality.

A few minutes later, he heard, floating down the hallway outside, the steady creak of bedsprings, a metronomic nightmare in the darkness.

There's Moses (...) Better company that some humans I've known [Sebastien]

She could not hope to overcome him, but if she could find a blade quickly enough, if she could open her wrists.

- I want to atone -
He couldn't of course. Nothing he did now could atone fully for what he had done. But he could do one thing. Just one thing.