Curtains Quotes

His terror became his companion. When it seemed to diminish, or grow easier to bear, he forced himself to remember the details of what he had said and done so that his fears returned, redoubled. His previous life, which had been without fear, he now dismissed as an illusion since he had come to believe that only in fear could the truth be found. When he woke from sleep without anxiety, he asked himself, What is wrong? What is missing? And then his door opened slowly, and a child put its head around and gazed at him: there are wheels, Ned thought, wheels within wheels. The curtains were now always closed, for the sun horrified him: he was reminded of a film he had seen some time before, and how the brightness of the noonday light had struck the water where a man, in danger of drowning, was struggling for his life. ~ Peter Ackroyd

I am the bridge between the bleeding edge and the dead center. I stand between the Wizard of Oz and the man behind the curtain.
I am the curtain. ~ Peter Watts

Twilight drops her curtain down, and pins it with a star. ~ Lucy Maud Montgomery

Many years ago, when I lived in the mini-Siberia they call East Anglia, I was awakened in the early hours by the sound of a pantechnicon being loaded. Peeping through the curtains, I observed the grocer doing a runner with all his chattels and his family. ~ Clive Sinclair

In my stand-up, I've always been loose. If there's a curtain onstage, I'll use that in my act. If there's a door, I'll use the door. I always like to use everything at my disposal, which makes each show a little different and a little more fun. ~ J. B. Smoove

Stopping just short of her mouth, he rasped, "Are you still engaged to Blakeborough?"
Her gorgeous eyes narrowed. "My engagement didn't stop you last night."
"It would now."
A coy smile broke over her lips, and she tightened her grip on his neck. "Then I suppose it's a good thing I am not."
With a growl of triumph, he kissed her once more. She was here. She was his. Nothing else mattered.
Still kissing her, he jerked both sets of curtains closed. Then he tugged her onto his lap and began to tear at the fastenings of her pelisse-dress. He wanted to touch her, taste her…be inside her. He could think of naught else.
"I take it that you mean to seduce me," she murmured between kisses.
"Yes." Seduce her and marry her. And then seduce her again, as often as he could.
"Well then, carry on."
So he did. He unfastened her clothes just enough to bare her breasts, then seized one in his mouth. God, she was perfect. His perfect jewel.
She buried her hands in his hair to pull her into him, sighing and moaning as if she would die if he didn't make love to her. Which was exactly how he felt.
Working his hand up beneath her skirts and into the slit in her drawers, he found her so wet and hot that he nearly came right there. He slipped a finger inside her silky sweetness, and she gasped, then began to tug at his trouser buttons.
"You're all I want, Jane." As he stroked her, he used his other hand to brush hers away so he could unfaste ~ Sabrina Jeffries

He wondered about the people in houses like those. They would be, for example, small clerks, shop-assistants, commercial travellers, insurance touts, tram conductors. Did they know that they were only puppets dancing when money pulled the strings? You bet they didn't. And if they did, what would they care? They were too busy being born, being married, begetting, working, dying. It mightn't be a bad thing, if you could manage it, to feel yourself one of them, one of the ruck of men. Our civilization is founded on greed and fear, but in the lives of common men the greed and fear are mysteriously transmuted into something nobler. The lower-middle-class people in there, behind their lace curtains, with their children and their scraps of furniture and their aspidistras - they lived by the money-code, sure enough, and yet they contrived to keep their decency. The money-code as they interpreted it was not merely cynical and hoggish. They had their standards, their inviolable points of honour. They 'kept themselves respectable' - kept the aspidistra flying. Besides, they were alive. They were bound up in the bundle of life. They begot children, which is what the saints and the soul-savers never by any chance do.

The aspidistra is the tree of life, he thought suddenly. ~ George Orwell

What woke him was a subconscious awareness of atmospheric change. The billowing curtains over his east windows looked like a fat ghostly intruder. ~ Carolyn Weston

He had never known such gallantry as the gallantry of Scarlett O'Hara going forth to conquer the world in her mother's velvet curtains and the tail feathers of a rooster. ~ Margaret Mitchell

Obviously some cheap motel is missing a shower curtain. ~ Bobby Heenan

Right now he needed to concentrate on keeping himself under control. Inside, his gut churned. There was a war going on. The joy of holding his son again clashed with the waves of anger that rose higher and higher with each passing moment. He thought he had known why Pete had arrived at the farm. He had pushed the fork into the soil and watched the earth turn over sure that the truth of their tragedy was about to be laid before them. He had watched the dry earth give up the rich brown soil and wanted to stay there forever in the cold garden just watching his fork move the earth. He had not wanted to hear what Pete had to say. And now this..this..What did you call this? A miracle? What else could it be? But this miracle was tainted. He was not holding the same boy he had taken to the Easter Show.
This thin child with shaved hair was not the Lockie he knew. Someone had taken that child. They had taken his child and he could feel by the weight of him they had starved him. Someone had done this to him. They had done this and god knew what else. Doug walked slowly into the house, trying to find the right way to break the news to Sarah.
She was lying down in the bedroom again. These days she spent more time there than anywhere else. Doug walked slowly through the house to the main bedroom at the back. It was the only room in the house whose curtains were permanently closed.
How damaged was his child? Would he ever be the same boy they had taken up to the Show ? Wha ~ Nicole Trope

O Time the fatal wrack of mortal things,
That draws oblivion's curtains over kings;
Their sumptuous monuments, men know them not,
Their names without a record are forgot,
Their parts, their ports, their pomps all laid in th' dust
Nor wit nor gold, nor buildings scape time's rust;
But he whose name is graved in the white stone
Shall last and shine when all of these are gone. ~ Anne Bradstreet

Thirty years later he could not come to any other conclusion: women were indisputably better than men. They were gentler, more affectionate, more loving and more compassionate, they were rarely violent, selfish, cruel or self-centred. Moreover, they were more rational, more intelligent and more hardworking.
What on earth were men for? Michael wondered as he watched sunlight play across the closed curtains. In earlier times, when bears were more common, perhaps masculinity served a particular function, but for centuries now, men served no useful purpose. For the most part, they assuaged their boredom playing squash, which was a lesser evil; but from time to time they felt the need to change history - which expressed itself in leading a revolution or starting a war somewhere. Aside from the senseless suffering they caused, revolutions and war destroyed the achievements of the past, forcing societies to build again. Without the notion of continuous progress, human evolution took random, irregular and violent turns for which men (with their predilection for risk and danger, their repulsive egotism, their volatile nature and their violent tendencies) were directly to blame. A society of women would be immeasurably superior, tracing a slow, unwavering progression, with no U-turns and no chaotic insecurity, towards a general happiness. ~ Michel Houellebecq

And this was the main precondition, that anything might be something else. Once I'd accepted that, it followed that I might be mad, or that someone might think me mad. How could I say for certain that I wasn't, if I couldn't say for certain that a curtain wasn't a mountain range? ~ Susanna Kaysen

Night-time train travel is wonderful again! No standing in the corridors for hours, no being shunted off for a troop train to pass, and above all, no black-out curtains. All the windows we passed were lighted, and I could snoop once more. I missed it so terribly during the war. I felt as if we had all turned into moles scuttling along in our separate tunnels. I don't consider myself a real peeper-they go in for bedrooms, but it's families in sitting rooms or kitchens that thrill me. I can imagine their entire lives from a glimpse of bookshelves, or desks, or lit candles, or bright sofa cushions. ~ Mary Ann Shaffer

Her room was darkened with the curtains drawn, but he could sense her inside, moving around quietly. Her heartbeat had turned languid; she must be preparing for bed. He cocked his head, listening intently. The closet door opened and shut, and there was the sound of running water. He held the goblet with such tense care his fingers began to ache.
When she had turned the faucet off, he said telepathically, "Tess, come to your window."
Startled, frozen silence. Then the languid pace of her heart exploded into a furious rhythm.
For a moment, when she didn't move, he thought she might disobey and end their tenuous relationship. Then he heard the soft rustle of cloth, and the creak of floorboards. When she appeared in the darkened window, she looked shadowy, like the half-hidden, opaque moon, her skin pale like pearls and hair lustrous with darkness.
She looked down at him but said nothing.
He held the goblet up to show it to her. "Are you sure you want to give this to me?"
Because it mattered. It mattered what she said. While the struggle made the offering sweet, it was the act of the gift itself that was the vital part of the covenant.
She didn't respond for long moments. He stood motionless as he waited, until finally she moved to put her hand to the windowpane.
"Yes."
He inclined his head to her, brought the goblet to his lips and drank.
Pure, undiluted power slid down his throat. Like the delicate skin at her wrist, it was warm ~ Thea Harrison

After lunch, he rose and gave me the tips of his fingers, saying he would like to show me over his flat; but I snatched away my hand and gave a cry. What I had touched was cold and, at the same time, bony; and I remembered that his hands smelt of death. 'Oh, forgive me!' he moaned. And he opened a door before me. 'This is my bedroom, if you care to see it. It is rather curious.' His manners, his words, his attitude gave me confidence and I went in without hesitation. I felt as if I were entering the room of a dead person. The walls were all hung with black, but, instead of the white trimmings that usually set off that funereal upholstery, there was an enormous stave of music with the notes of the DIES IRAE, many times repeated. In the middle of the room was a canopy, from which hung curtains of red brocaded stuff, and, under the canopy, an open coffin. 'That is where I sleep,' said Erik. 'One has to get used to everything in life, even to eternity.' The sight upset me so much that I turned away my head"

- Chapter 12: Apollo's Lyre ~ Gaston Leroux

Weigh down your curtains with a proper 5-inch hem. It makes them much more proportioned and professional-looking. ~ Emily Henderson

I remember asking one of the [cyber experts], I said, "Knowing what you know, and you exist behind the curtains so to speak, and you see behind the curtain, do you look at the world differently? Do you feel you have an upper hand?" He just started laughing and said, "Man, people have no idea how exposed they are, how vulnerable, and what's possible." ~ Chris Hemsworth

Don't rush to spend time by yourself. Don't hurry to alienation. It's an inevitable destination. Time will eventually shroud you like velvet curtains, blacking out everything. ~ Joshua Mohr

Eyes are windows to the soul." His voice rang with profound meaning I couldn't grasp. Deep-chested baying alerted us to the approaching pack. Sweat trickled between my shoulder blades. "Curtains are half off at JCPenney," I snapped. "What's your point? ~ Hailey Edwards

I think it's a facade - like a puppet show, you know? We can only see what's going on above the curtain. But with the halo on, it's like the curtains have been removed and there's a whole world of activity behind them. It makes me wonder if the world I thought I knew would even be possible without the Celestial ~ Shannon Dittemore

Only a fool will deny that an abundance of flowers can quicken a woman's blood, and that continuing sun can burn years off a man's back. The poverty of life here augments the power of those influences. We lose our vision, and move like wooden toys: one year we wash the curtains, the next we plant a row of cabbages behind the house; and then comes a summer like that one, with grass soft as rabbit fur, and flowers. ~ Joe Ashby Porter

Yes, there is plenty of hard work for them in addition to that which they do when they appear, smiling and happy, when the curtain goes up. Giving a performance is the least of their worries. ~ Florenz Ziegfeld

Here's what I've got, the reasons why our marriage
might work: Because you wear pink but write poems
about bullets and gravestones. Because you yell
at your keys when you lose them, and laugh,
loudly, at your own jokes. Because you can hold a pistol,
gut a pig. Because you memorize songs, even commercials
from thirty years back and sing them when vacuuming.
You have soft hands. Because when we moved, the contents
of what you packed were written inside the boxes.
Because you think swans are overrated.
Because you drove me to the train station. You drove me
to Minneapolis. You drove me to Providence.
Because you underline everything you read, and circle
the things you think are important, and put stars next
to the things you think I should think are important,
and write notes in the margins about all the people
you're mad at and my name almost never appears there.
Because you make that pork recipe you found
in the Frida Khalo Cookbook. Because when you read
that essay about Rilke, you underlined the whole thing
except the part where Rilke says love means to deny the self
and to be consumed in flames. Because when the lights
are off, the curtains drawn, and an additional sheet is nailed
over the windows, you still believe someone outside
can see you. And one day five summers ago,
when you couldn't put gas in your car, when your fridge
was so empty - n ~ Matthew Olzmann

One lesson I got from Gandhi, 'Be the change you want to see,' haunts me. I just feel like I can't keep stomping around pointing the finger at BP when I am supporting the oil industry with my very own dollars and actions by buying their products, helping to pay their mortgage - plastic is from oil ... polyester, shower curtains. ~ Kristin Bauer Van Straten

Where thinking is isolated without free exchange with other minds and can no longer expand, delusion may follow. Whenever ideas are compartmentalized, behind and between curtains, the process of continual alert confrontation of facts and reality is hampered. The system freezes, becomes rigid, and dies of delusion. ~ Joost A.M. Meerloo

The low green tent Whose curtain never outward swings. ~ John Greenleaf Whittier

When I wake, it seems a little less hot than usual, so I'm worried I have a fever until light flashes behind the curtains and the sound of a detonation rolls in with a force that makes the windows rattle. As I step outside with a plastic bag over my cast, a stiff breeze pulls my hair away from my face, and I see the pregnant clouds of the monsoon hanging low over the city.
The rains have finally decided to come.
I sit down on the lawn, resting my back against the wall of the house, and light an aitch I've waited a long time to smoke. Suddenly the air is still and the trees are silent, and I can hear laughter from my neighbor's servant quarters. A bicycle bell sounds in the street, reminding me of the green Sohrab I had as a child. Then the wind returns, bringing the smell of wet soil and a pair of orange parrots that swoop down to take shelter in the lower branches of the banyan tree, where they glow in the shadows. ~ Mohsin Hamid

At 24, my head was as shiny as a cue ball on a billiard table. I naturally thought this meant curtains. Actually, I found it helped. When I was too young to play real character parts, they mistook me for older because of the bald noggin. I got juicy roles right from the start. ~ Frank Cady

Busy old fool, unruly Sun, why dost thou thus through windows and through curtains call on us? Must to thy motions lovers seasons run? ~ John Donne

Bring down the curtain, the farce is over ~ Francois Rabelais

How many different ways there are of knowing a person - and even so there are all these different ways of knowing Christ; so that you may keep on all your lifetime, still wishing to get into another room, and another room, nearer and nearer to the great secret, still panting to "know him." Good Rutherford says, "I urge upon you a nearer communion with Christ, and a growing communion. There are curtains to be drawn by, in Christ, that we never shut, and new foldings in love with him. I despair that ever I shall shall win to the far end of that love; there are so many plies in it. Therefore, dig deep, and set by as much time in the day for him as you can, he will be won by labor. ~ Spurgeon, Charles H.

Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass. ~ John Steinbeck

The best place for this kind of training is Holland where people, convinced of their utter innocence, do not use curtains. After dusk the windows turn into little stages on which actors act out their evenings. Sequences of images bathed in yellow, warm light are the individual acts of the same production entitled 'Life'. Dutch painting. Moving lives. ~ Olga Tokarczuk

This could be the last night of our lives, certainly the last even barely ordinary one. The last night we go to sleep and get up just as we always have. And all I could think of was that I wanted to spend it with you."
Her heart skipped a beat. "Jace-"
"I don't mean it like that," he said. "I won't touch you, not if you don't want me to. I know it's wrong - God, it's all kinds of wrong - but I just want to lie down with you and wake up with you, just once, just once ever in my life." There was desperation in his voice. "It's just this one night. In the grand scheme of things, how much can this one night matter?"
... There was nothing she had ever wanted in her life more than she wanted this night with Jace.
"Close the curtains, then, before you come to bed," she said. "I can't sleep with this much light in the room. ~ Cassandra Clare

Tell about the quality of light coming in through your window. Jump in and write. Don't worry if it is night and your curtains are closed or you would rather write about the light up north - just write. Go for ten minutes, fifteen, a half hour. ~ Natalie Goldberg

Her skin glowed in dawn's soft light sneaking in through curtains, and she stretched her arms up toward the ceiling in a move that elongated everything above her waist and below his belt. ~ Avery Flynn

I was sowing wild oats and doing the kind of things that you should do when you don't have kids. Now, I'm just doing less of that, but I earned it, you know. I feel like just spending quiet evenings with my wife and son and sitting in bed in the morning and watching him marvel over the curtains opening or whatever little thing. That all feels really good. And so, I've changed because I'm impressed. ~ Chris Pratt

Outside the window, there slides past that unimaginable and deserted vastness where night is coming on, the sun declining in ghastly blood-streaked splendour like a public execution across, it would seem, half a continent, where live only bears and shooting stars and the wolves who lap congealing ice from water that holds within it the entire sky. All white with snow as if under dustsheets, as if laid away eternally as soon as brought back from the shop, never to be used or touched. Horrors! And, as on a cyclorama, this unnatural spectacle rolls past at twenty-odd miles an hour in a tidy frame of lace curtains only a little the worse for soot and drapes of a heavy velvet of dark, dusty blue. ~ Angela Carter

My decorating and renovation skills are nil - indeed, I once used a shower curtain from Pottery Barn as 'window dressing.' ~ Candace Bushnell

Wandering back into the bedroom, my gaze immediately strayed to the large bed along the wall and the lump beneath the covers. Pale light streamed through the half-open curtains, settling around the still-sleeping form of a Winter sidhe. Or a former Winter sidhe. Pausing in the doorframe, I took advantage of the serene moment just to watch him, a tiny flutter going through my stomach. Sometimes, it was still hard to believe that he was here, that this wasn't a dream or a mirage or a figment of my imagination. That he was mine forever: my husband, my knight.
My faery with a soul.

He lay on his stomach, arms beneath the pillow, breathing peacefully, his dark hair falling over his eyes. The covers had slipped off his lean, muscular shoulders, and the early morning rays caressed his pale skin. Normally, I didn't get to watch him sleep; he was usually up before me, in the courtyard sparring with Glitch or just prowling the halls of the castle. In the early days of our marriage, especially, I'd wake up in the middle of the night to find him gone, the hyper-awareness of his warrior days making it impossible for him to stay in one place, even to sleep. He'd grown up in the Unseelie Court, where you had to watch your back every second of every day, and centuries of fey survival could not be forgotten so easily. That paranoia would never really fade, but he was gradually starting to relax now, to the point where sometimes, though not often, I would wake with him still be ~ Julie Kagawa

She paused on the pavement, and remembered that Diva had not yet expressed regret about the worsted, and that she still "popped" as much as ever. Thus Diva deserved a punishment of some sort, and happily, at that very moment she thought of a subject on which she might be able to make her uncomfortable. The street was full, and it would be pretty to call up to her, instead of ringing her bell, in order to save trouble to poor overworked Janet. (Diva only kept two servants, though of course poverty was no crime.)
"Diva darling!" she cooed.
Diva's head looked out like a cuckoo in a clock preparing to chime the hour.
"Hullo!" she said. "Want me?"
"May I pop up for a moment, dear?" said Miss Mapp. "That's to say if you're not very busy."
"Pop away," said Diva. She was quite aware that Miss Mapp said "pop" in crude inverted commas, so to speak, for purposes of mockery, and so she said it herself more than ever. "I'll tell my maid to pop down and open the door."

While this was being done, Diva bundled her chintz curtains together and stored them and the roses she had cut out into her work-cupboard, for secrecy was an essential to the construction of these decorations. But in order to appear naturally employed, she pulled out the woollen scarf she was knitting for the autumn and winter, forgetting for the moment that the rose-madder stripe at the end on which she was now engaged was made of that fatal worsted which Miss Mapp considered to have been ~ E.F. Benson

In the half-light through the drawn curtains she sits on her perch, relaxed, hooded, extraordinary. Formidable talons, wicked, curved black beak, sleek, cafe-au-lait front streaked thickly with cocoa-coloured teardrops, looking for all the world like some cappuccino samurai. ~ Helen Macdonald

Duchess was barking her head off as she raced after a snarling, hissing, yowling white ball of Maleficent. Aphrodite was chasing after the dog, screaming for her to 'Come! Stay. Be good, damnit!' Damien was close behind her, flailing his arms and yelling 'Duchess! Come!' All of a sudden the Twins' cat, the huge and very stuck-up Beelzebub joined in the chase, only he was tearing around after Duchess.
'Ohmygod! Beelzebub! Honey!' Shaunee ran into my view, yelling at the top of her very healthy lungs.
'Beelzebub! Duchess! Stop!' Erin wailed, right behind her twin.
Darius suddenly burst out into the hallway, and I stepped back behind the curtains, not sure is my shrouding could be detected by him. Apparently he didn't notice me, or anything else, because he ran into the Council Room. I peeked through the drapes and could hear him telling Neferet that she was needed on the school grounds-that there was an 'altercation.' Then Neferet was hurrying out of the room and down the hall, following Darius into the dog-barking, cat-yowling, kid-screaming craziness.
I noticed that through all of it I hadn't seen hide nor hair of Jack.
Talk about an excellent diversion! ~ Kristin Cast

God is able to place stars in their sockets & suspend sky like a curtain; surely He is mighty enough to light your path. ~ Max Lucado

They leave things behind sometimes, the guests. A bottle of scent. A crumpled handkerchief. A pearl button that fell off a dress and rolled under a bed. And sometimes they leave other sorts of things. Things you can't see. A sigh trapped in a corner. Memories tangled in the curtains. A sob fluttering against the windowpane like a bird that flew in and can't get back out. I can feel these things. They dart and crouch and whisper. ~ Jennifer Donnelly

We all feel the riddle of the earth without anyone to point it out. The mystery of life is the plainest part of it. The clouds and curtains of darkness, the confounding vapors, these are the daily weather of this world. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

This is the part of anguish grey curtains blue & wallpapers yellow. This is the part where I learn to lose you & try to gain me back. This is a part where the end is my start! ~ Sijdah Hussain

Hey". Meghan's fingers on my arm nearly made me jump out of my skin. She smiled up at me, though her eyes were puzzled. "You seem awfully nervous this morning. Is something wrong?"
Now or never, Ash. I took a deep breath. "No", I replied, turning to her, "Nothing's wrong, but I did want to ask you something. Come here a moment."
Taking both her hands, I backed away to the middle of the floor, to an open space in front of the curtains. She followed, still wearing a bemused expression, and I paused a moment to gather my thoughts. "I don't...know how it's done in your world", I began, as she tilted her head at me. "I've seen it before...but, I'm not sure how to ask. It never really comes up in the Winter Court."
Meghan blinked, frowning slightly. "What do you mean?"
"I know my role here," I continued. "Whatever happens, I'm still your knight, and nothing will change that. You are queen of this realm, and I have no desire to rule. That said, fighting your enemies, standing with you no matter what comes at us. But I'm no longer satisfied with just being your knight and protector. I want something more". I stopped and took a deep breath, then slowly released her hands, stepped back and sank to one knee. "What I'm trying to ask is...Meghan Chase, will you do me the honor of marrying me? ~ Julie Kagawa

There were places you didn't want to walk, precautions you took that had to do with locks on windows and doors, drawing the curtains, leaving on lights. These things you did were like prayers; you did them and you hoped they would save you. And for the most part they did. Or something did; you could tell by the fact that you were still alive. But ~ Margaret Atwood

I was shown into a room. A red room. Red wallpaper, red curtains, red carpet. They said it was a sitting-room, but I don't know why they'd decided to confine its purpose just to sitting. Obviously, sitting was one of the things you could do in a room this size; but you could also stage operas, hold cycling races, and have an absolutely cracking game of frisbee, all at the same time, without having to move any of the furniture.
It could rain in a room this big. ~ Hugh Laurie

The curtain of the universe is moth-eaten, and through its holes we see nothing now but mask and ghost. ~ Emile M. Cioran

Everything is so chaotic. My nervous system can't handle it. I need my peace, so, every once in a while, while the kids are at school, I lie in bed, close the curtains, watch television and eat food. ~ Leslie Mann

Velvet carpet," sighed Anne luxuriously, "and silk curtains! I've dreamed of such things, Diana. But do you know I don't believe I feel very comfortable with them after all. There are so many things in this room and all so splendid that there is no scope for imagination. That is one consolation when you are poor
there are so many more things you can imagine about. ~ L.M. Montgomery

Non ... I am DANCING IN MY NUDDY-PANTS!!!'
And we both laughed like loons on loon tablets. I danced for ages round the house in my nuddy-pants. Also, I did this brilliant thing-I danced in the front window just for a second whilst Mr. Across the Road was drawing his curtains. He will never be sure if he saw a mirage or not. That is the kind of person I am. Not really the kind of person who goes and raises elks in Whakatane. ~ Louise Rennison

Big squidhead lies a-sleeping at the bottom of the sea,
And one day, when the stars are right, he'll wake up presently,
And then may wipe us all out, which sounds worrying to me,
While the Tcho-Tcho sing this song…

Aie! Ftagn! Ftagn! Cthulhu!
Cosmic horror coming to you,
The Old Ones are back now with a view to
Sucking out your brains.

Big Squidhead lies a-sleeping, although, in a way, he's dead.
There are dreams that change reality a-running round his head.
He lies in dread R'lyeh, which is on the ocean bed.
But pops up and down for fun.

And the Tcho-Tcho sing
Aie! Ftagn! Ftagn! Yog-Sothoth!
The streets will be chockablock with shoggoth,
How sweetly their cries 'Tekeli-li!' doth
Improve the slimy hour.

Big Squidhead lies a-scheming at the bottom of the sea,
He is counting out the aeons that make up eternity,
And when he's done, it's curtains for the mast majority,
While the Tcho-Tcho get on down.

Aie! Ftagn! Ftagn! Shub-Niggurath!
We're on the winning side to see the aftermath,
Put on your marching boots because we're on the path,
To the end times, here we come!
To the end times, here we come!
To the end times! Here! We! Coooooooooome! ~ Jonathan L. Howard

Whirling silence settled around Jessica. Every fiber of her body accepted the fact that something profound had happened to it. She felt that she was a conscious mote, smaller than any subatomic particle, yet capable of motion and of sensing her surroundings. Like an abrupt revelation - the curtains whipped away - she realized she had become aware of a psychokinesthetic extension of herself. She was the mote, yet not the mote. ~ Frank Herbert

I don't want to see anyone. I lie in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and nothingness washing over me like a sluggish wave. Whatever is happening to me is my own fault. I have done something wrong, something so huge I can't even see it, something that's drowning me. I am inadequate and stupid, without worth. I might as well be dead. ~ Margaret Atwood

My darling was purring in her sleep, with the archaic smile on her lips, and she had the extra glow of comfort and solace she gets after love, a calm fulfilledness.
I should have been sleepy after wandering around the night before, but I wasn't. I've noticed that I am rarely sleepy if I know I can sleep long in the morning. The red dots were swimming in my eyes, and the street light threw the shadows of naked elm branches on the ceiling, where they made slow and stately cats' cradles because the spring wind was blowing. The window was open halfway and the white curtains swelled and filled like sails on an anchored boat ...
I felt good and fulfilled, too, but whereas Mary dives for sleep, I didn't want to go to sleep. I wanted to go on fully tasting how good I felt. ~ John Steinbeck

A rap on my window. I cringed. With a smirk, Luna pushed the curtains aside. She waved and opened the window. "Hey, Tristan."
"Hey, Luna. What's up?"
"Just blackmailing my sister."
"Good for you."
"You coming in?"
"Ah, Ayden, are we?"
Ayden eased off the bed. Finally. "Nope. Gotta go." He started out the window.
"You giving us a ride?" Luna asked.
Ayden paused, straddling the sill. "You blackmailing me too?"
Luna lifted a shoulder. "Nah, just asking."
"In that case, I'll pick you up in an hour. Car preference?"
"Surprise me."
"Will do." He gave me a wink and disappeared. ~ A&E Kirk

God has sovereignly pulled back the curtain on His glory. He has disclosed Himself on the platform of both creation and redemption that we might stand awestruck in His presence, beholding the sweet symmetry of His attributes, pondering the unfathomable depths of His greatness, baffled by the wisdom of His deeds and the limitless extent of His goodness. This is His beauty. ~ Sam Storms

Aubade THE lark now leaves his wat'ry nest, And climbing shakes his dewy wings. He takes this window for the East, And to implore your light he sings- Awake, awake! the morn will never rise Till she can dress her beauty at your eyes. The merchant bows unto the seaman's star, The ploughman from the sun his season takes, But still the lover wonders what they are Who look for day before his mistress wakes. Awake, awake! break thro' your veils of lawn! Then draw your curtains, and begin the dawn! ~ William Davenant

It was not a bed with curtains, but a bed with doors like shutters. This may not seem like a nice way of having a bed, but we would all be glad of the wooden curtains about us at night if we lived in such a cottage, on the side of a hill along which the wind swept like a wild river. Through the cottage it would be streaming all night long. And a poor woman with a cough, or a man who has been out in the cold all day, is very glad of such a place to lie in, and leave the the rest of the house to the wind and the fairies. ~ George MacDonald

I grew up on a suburban street with lace curtains and dull neighbours, so I made up stories to tell my friend, in which they became serial killers and burglars. She told her mother, who then told mine. ~ Nina Bawden

There is a curtain, thin as gossamer, clear as glass, strong as iron, that hangs forever between the world of magic and the world that seems to us to be real. ~ E. Nesbit

What?" I ask, throwing my hands up, and then pointing at the woman. "Don't even look at me like that, lady. You know after having that baby, your vagina probably looks like wrinkled roast beef curtains. So don't kid yourself...because your vagina hates you." ~Vivian ~ S.L. Romines

It costs me nothing for curtains, for I have no gazers to shut out but the sun and moon, and I am willing that they should look in ... and if he [the sun] is sometimes too warm a friend, I find it still better economy to retreat behind some curtain which nature has provided. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Agnes Shay had the true spirit of a maid. Moistened with dishwater and mild eau de cologne, reared in narrow and sunless bedrooms, in back passages, back stairs, laundries, linen closets, and in those servants' halls that remind one of a prison, her soul had grown docile and bleak...Agnes loved the ceremonies of a big house. She drew the curtains in the living room at dark, lighted the candles on the table, and struck the dinner chimes like an eager altar boy. On fine evenings, when she sat on the back porch between the garbage pails and the woodbins, she liked to recall the faces of all the cooks she had known. It made her life seem rich. ~ John Cheever

Then she did see it there - just a face, peering through the curtains, hanging in midair like a mask. A head-scarf concealed the hair and the glassy eyes stared inhumanly, but it wasn't a mask, it couldn't be. The skin had been powdered dead-white and two hectic spots of rouge centered on the cheekbones. It wasn't a mask. It was the face of a crazy old woman. Mary started to scream, and then the curtains parted further and a hand appeared, holding a butcher's knife. It was the knife that, a moment later, cut off her scream.
And her head. ~ Robert Bloch

And I came to a hill that I never saw before. I was in a dismal thicket full of black twisted boughs that tore me as I went through them, and I cried out because I was smarting all over, and then I found that I was climbing, and I went up and up a long way, till at last the thicket stopped and I came out crying just under the top of a big bare place, where there were ugly grey stones lying all about on the grass, and here and there a little, twisted stunted tree came out from under a stone, like a snake. And I went up, right to the top, a long way. I never saw such big ugly stones before; they came out of the earth some of them, and some looked as if they had been rolled to where they were, and they went on and on as far as I could see, a long, long way. I looked out from them and saw the country, but it was strange. It was winter time, and there were black terrible woods hanging from the hills all round; it was like seeing a large room hung with black curtains, and the shape of the trees seemed quite different from any I had ever seen before. I was afraid. Then beyond the woods there were other hills round in a great ring, but I had never seen any of them; it all looked black, and everything had a voor over it. It was all so still and silent, and the sky was heavy and grey and sad, like a wicked voorish dome in Deep Dendo. I went on into the dreadful rocks. There were hundreds and hundreds of them. Some were like horrid-grinning men; I could see their faces as if they would ~ Arthur Machen

In our early youth we sit before the life that lies ahead of us like children sitting before the curtain in a theatre, in happy and tense anticipation of whatever is going to appear. Luckily we do not know what really will appear. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

He went into the kitchen. It was eight in the evening. He tried to shut the bright spring evening out with the curtains, but it forced its way past them in places, dust-filled sunbeams that lit up the gloom in his flat. Spring and summer were not Erlendur's seasons. Too bright. Too frivolous. He wanted heavy, dark winters. Finding nothing edible in the kitchen, he sat down at the table with his chin resting in his hand. ~ Arnaldur Indridason

Inside the (Domestic) Sphere women did things which weren't too demanding like childcare, scrubbing the floor, washing the sheets and curtains, sewing on buttons, and coalmining. ~ Jacky Fleming

When they stopped to pick up Mike, Violet started to get out so she could climb in back with Chelsea, giving Mike's longer legs the front seat, but Jay reached out and caught her wrist.
"What are you doing? I want you to sit with me." His fingers moved to lace through hers as he drew her back inside. "Mike can sit in back."
Violet felt herself blush with satisfaction.
Mike came out of his house and jumped down the porch without ever touching the steps. Behind the darkened curtains, the television flickered.
"Here he comes!" Chelsea squealed, sounding like a little girl as she bounced up and down in the backseat, shaking the entire car. She clapped her hands with excitement.
Violet pulled her seat as far forward as she could to give Mike some extra room. He'd need it if he was going to be confined back there with Chelsea.
"Heeyyy, Mike." Chelsea managed to drawl the two words into several long syllables as Mike slid into the car. The syrupiness of it sounded so foreign oozing from Chelsea's mouth.
"Hey," Mike said back to her. One word, one syllable.
"So I guess it's just the four of us tonight," she purred.
"Really? I thought we were meeting a buncha people."
"Nope. Just us. Everyone else bailed."
Violet smiled to herself as she listened to Chelsea's account, amazed that her words came out sounding so…sincere.
But Violet knew better. And she realized from the look Jay flashed her that he knew too.
Mike, on the o ~ Kimberly Derting

He did not want to die like a sick man. He did not want his sickness to be what it is so often, an attenuation, a transition to death. What he really wanted was the encounter between his life - a life filled with blood and health - and death. He stood, dragged a chair over to the window and sat down in it, huddling in his blankets. Through the thin curtains, in the places where the material did not fall in folds, he saw the stars. He breathed heavily for a long time, and gripped the arms of his chair to control his trembling hands. He would reconquer his lucidity if he could. "It could be done, " he was thinking. And he was thinking, too, that the gas was still on in the kitchen. "It could be done," he thought again. Lucidity too was a long patience. Everything could be won, earned, acquired. He struck his fist on the arm of the chair. A man is not born strong, weak, or decisive. He becomes strong, he becomes lucid. Fate is not in man but around him. Then he realized he was crying. A strange weakness, a kind of cowardice born of his sickness gave way to tears, to childishness. ~ Albert Camus

Satin occupied a couple of rooms which a chemist had furnished for her in order to rescue her from the clutches of the police; but in little over a year she had broken the furniture, knocked in the chairs and dirtied the curtains in such a frenzy of filth and disorder that the two rooms looked as if they were inhabited by a pack of mad cats. ~ Emile Zola

And when an architect has designed a house with large windows, which is a necessity today in order to pull the daylight into these very deep houses, then curtains come to play a big role in architecture. ~ Arne Jacobsen

The world of learning is so broad, and the human soul is so limited in power! ~ Maria Mitchell

I am burning. I have to live, I have to sing, I want to transform myself into a thousand different characters and carry their life with me onto the stage where it's so bright and so dark at the same time, just knowing there are three thousand people out there longing to be swept away by the passion that's about to flood out from scarlet curtains, to this I consecrate my body and my soul, I can give no more than all of myself, I feel my heart is a throbbing engine and my voice is the valve, like a wailing train, it has to sing or blow up, there's too much fuel, too much fire, and what am I to do with this voice if I can't let it out, it's not just singing. I am here as a speck, but I don't feel scared or about to be blown away, I feel like all New York is a warm embrace just waiting to enfold me. I am in love. But not with a person. I am passionately in love with my life. ~ Ann-Marie MacDonald

The patterns overhead shifted so that, had she an imagination prone to hysteria, she could easily convince herself something hid in the curtains above her head. She imagined a face in the shadows and folds of fabric, a face with sad, hollow eyes. The sliver of light shining through a crack in the window curtains disappeared. Shadows deepened and swirled and the face became even more uncannily real. ~ Carolyn Jewel

If it weren't for Phoenician blinds, it'd be curtains for all of us. ~ Tom Robbins

Yes, when I get big and have my own home, no plush chairs and lace curtains for me. And no rubber plants. I'll have a desk like this in my parlor and white walls and a clean green blotter every Sunday night and a row of shining yellow pencils always sharpened for writing and a golden-brown bowl with a flower or some leaves or berries always in it and books ... books..books. ~ Betty Smith

Faith is almost the bottom line of creativity; it requires a leap of faith any time we undertake a creative endeavor, whether this is going to the easel, or the page, or onto the stage - or for that matter, in a homelier way, picking out the right fabric for the kitchen curtains, which is also a creative act. ~ Julia Cameron

She rolls onto her back and looks up at the dark ceiling, at the tiny speck of orange light leaking through the curtains from the streetlamp outside, and she tries to decide. "Are ~ Nick Alexander

Love like this was all consuming. I found that I was jealous of the strangest things - sunlight, streets, curtains, even her clothing, anything that was close to her. ~ Alice Hoffman

An increasing cackle of complaints, orders, and jests, and what to a European would have been bad language, came from behind the curtains. Here was evidently a woman used to command. ~ Rudyard Kipling

I wanted to hurl the mirror across the room. Scream. Break everything in sight. Rip the curtains down. Smash the window. Let the animal thing out. But good girls don't do that, don't make a fuss, don't upset parents. And I was a good girl so I curled up on the floor and sobbed silently instead. ~Jenna ~ Laura Jarratt

When we went on the air, I didn't want to be interrupted for an act-one curtain. ~ Norman Lear

We are all actors, set on the stage of the world, as the curtains open we put on our best performance to this audience of life. ~ Anthony Liccione

If the Greeks had left no tragedies behind for us, the highest reach of their power would be unknown. The three poets who were able to sound the depths of human agony were able also to recognize and reveal it as tragedy. The mystery of evil, they said, curtains that of which "every man whose soul is not a clod hath visions." Pain could exalt and in tragedy for a moment men could have sight of a meaning beyond their grasp. "Yet had God not turned us in his hand and cast to earth our greatness," Euripides makes the old Trojan queen say in her extremity, "we would have passed away giving nothing to men. They would have found no theme for song in us nor made great poems from our sorrows." Why is the death of the ordinary man ~ Edith Hamilton

You could get in rehearsals, pre-production, anything that would actually contribute to the understanding of how a film gets made. I actually find those things increase people's interest in a movie and like that better than worrying about showing the tricks behind the curtain. ~ Jay Roach

Perfection is a thousand mistakes behind curtains. ~ Yarro Rai

Reading Chip's college orientation materials, Alfred had been struck by the sentence New England winters can be very cold. The curtains he'd bought at Sears were of a plasticized brown-and-pink fabric with a backing of foam rubber. They were heavy and bulky and stiff. "You'll appreciate these on a cold night," he told Chip. "You'll be surprised how much they cut down drafts." But Chip's freshman roommate was a prep-school product named Roan McCorkle who would soon be leaving thumbprints, in what appeared to be Vaseline, on the fifth-grade photo of Denise. Roan laughed at the curtains and Chip laughed, too. He put them back in the box and stowed the box in the basement of the dorm and let it gather mold there for the next four years. He had nothing against the curtains personally. They were simply curtains and they wanted no more than what any curtains wanted - to hang well, to exclude light to the best of their ability, to be neither too small nor too large for the window that it was their task in life to cover; to be pulled this way in the evening and that way in the morning; to stir in the breezes that came before rain on a summer night; to be much used and little noticed. There were numberless hospitals and retirement homes and budget motels, not just in the Midwest but in the East as well, where these particularly brown rubber-backed curtains could have had a long and useful life. It wasn't their fault that they didn't belong in a dorm room. They'd betrayed no urge to ris ~ Jonathan Franzen

I remember the only time I ever saw my mother cry. I was eating apricot pie.
I remember how much I used to stutter.
I remember the first time I saw television. Lucille Ball was taking ballet lessons.
I remember Aunt Cleora who lived in Hollywood. Every year for Christmas she sent my brother and me a joint present of one book.
I remember a very poor boy who had to wear his sister's blouse to school.
I remember shower curtains with angel fish on them.
I remember very old people when I was very young. Their houses smelled funny.
I remember daydreams of being a singer all alone on a big stage with no scenery, just one spotlight on me, singing my heart out, and moving my audience to total tears of love and affection.
I remember waking up somewhere once and there was a horse staring me in the face.
I remember saying "thank you" in reply to "thank you" and then the other person doesn't know what to say.
I remember how embarrassed I was when other children cried.
I remember one very hot summer day I put ice cubes in my aquarium and all the fish died.
I remember not understanding why people on the other side of the world didn't fall off. ~ Joe Brainard

I was going to have to use my teeth to pull the curtains aside. I was leaning over, barng my teeth, when the thick curtain was yanked aside.
"What on earth are you doing?" Peter drawled. "You look positively feral. ~ Alyxandra Harvey

The Eliots found it a queer sort of evening - a transition evening. Hitherto the Herb of Grace had been to them a summer home; they had known it only permeated with sun and light, flower-scented, windows and doors open wide. But now doors were shut, curtains drawn to hide the sad, grey dusk. Instead of the lap of the water against the river wall they heard the whisper of the flames, and instead of the flowers in the garden they smelt the roasting chestnuts, burning apple logs, the oil lamps, polish - all the home smells. This intimacy with the house was deepening; when winter came it would be deeper still. Nadine glanced over her shoulder at the firelight gleaming upon the dark wood of the panelling, at the shadows gathering in the corners, and marvelled to see how the old place seemed to have shrunk in size with the shutting out of the daylight. It seemed gathering them in, holding them close. ~ Elizabeth Goudge

Some of the critics viewed Vietnam as a morality play in which the wicked must be punished before the final curtain and where any attempt to salvage self-respect from the outcome compounded the wrong. I viewed it as a genuine tragedy. No one had a monopoly on anguish. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

His tired gaze - from passing endless bars -
has turned into a vacant stare which nothing holds.
to him there seem to be a thousand bars,
and out beyond these bars exists no world.
his supple gait, the smoothness of strong strides
that gently turn in ever smaller circles
perform a dance of strength, centered deep within
a will, stunned, but untamed, indomitable.
but sometimes the curtains of his eyelids part,
the pupils of his eyes dilate as images
of past encounters enter while through his limbs
a tension strains in silence
only to cease to be, to die within his heart.
[the panther] ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

They came to Virginia City as soon as the true value of the Comstock was perceived. They constituted, no doubt, a deplorable source of gambling, pleasure and embroilment. They were not soft-spoken women, their desire was not visibly separate from the main chance, and they would have beheld Mr. Harte's portrayal of them at Poker Flat with ribald mirth. But let them have a moment of respect. They civilized the Comstock. They drove through its streets reclining in lacquered broughams, displaying to male eyes fashions as close to Paris as any then current in New York. They were, in brick houses hung with tapestries, a glamour and a romance, after the superheated caverns of the mines. They enforced a code of behavior: one might be a hard-rock man outside their curtains but in their presence one was punctilious or one was hustled away. They brought Parisian cooking to the sagebrush of Sun Mountain and they taught the West to distinguish between tarantula juice and the bouquet of wines. An elegy for their passing. The West has neglected to mention them in bronze and its genealogies avoid comment on their marriages, conspicuous or obscure, but it owes them a here acknowledged debt for civilization. ~ Bernard DeVoto