Immortals After Dark Quotes

She murmured, "You're unfinished."
"Aye, precisely."
"I need to go."
When she moved to get up, he shoved her against his side and slapped her arse to keep her there. "You stay with me."
She snapped, "What do you want from me, Chase?"
He drew his head back in confusion. "I want everything. You're mine, Regin. ~ Kresley Cole

Please put your penises away, gentlemen. Dinner is procured. By a woman. ~ Kresley Cole

Aidan from the past: He took her hands in his bloodied, callused ones. "Accept me?" His eyes glowed, his lashes spiked from rain.
Declan in the present: He gripped her nape. "I fuckin love you, Regin!" Rain spiked his lashes as he gazed down at her, commanding her, "Love me back! ~ Kresley Cole

Declan and Regin:
"Kiss you?" As he waited for the revulsion to seize him, he found himself wondering how she would react. Would she moan into his mouth?
"It will help you remember me. Kiss me. Come on, you know you want to so bad. You want me so bad."
"Never." Bloody get off her, get away from her. But he needed to be above her like this, to master her, overpower her.
"Never? That boner of yours just called you a lair. ~ Kresley Cole

Kneeling before him, Regin murmured, "Don't let that Fegley worm get to you." Still staring ahead, the kid slowed his banging. "There's a good ... male of indeterminate species. ~ Kresley Cole

He can learn things about me through your blood. Can learn about my sister!" She briefly covered her mouth. "He can see everything we've done! I don't want that leech to know what we do in private."
Lothaire strolled up, making a scoffing sound. "As if I don't watch you two live from a distance. ~ Kresley Cole

Valkyrie, if there was ever a cradle to be robbed ... Gods, just look at him." ...
... "Face it, Nat, this is one tiger who will never be jumping through your flaming hoop
~ Kresley Cole

There's no poetry in me, Reginleit. No fine words." He stared down at her, his gaze seeming to consume her. "I come to you as a man unfinished. ~ Kresley Cole

Regin:
So everybody thinks Lothaire is hotter than the sun he will never see, but I
don't get it. ~ Kresley Cole

, It'd taken her several seconds to react to the sight of them together. She'd been almost hypnotized by the scene as Lothaire drank. Chase's masculine face had been tense, his gray eyes focused on the ground. Lothaire's face had been starkly beautiful, his pale blond hair brushing Chase's shoulder.
Light and dark. One terrible, one tragic.
And Lothaire had been ... hard. "Oh, gods!" She cried as she ran back along the trail. Hot poker for my eyes! Hot poker! ~ Kresley Cole

He clenched Nix's shoulders. 'Why did you hesitate? I saw you hesitate!' He shook her until her head lolled, while she grinned and said, 'Wheeee! ~ Kresley Cole

His tone dripping condescension, Lothaire crooned, "Ah children, it's not yet story time." He closed his eyes and turned away, saying over his shoulder, "To anyone who contemplates even nearing me while I sleep: I will garrote you with your own viscera. ~ Kresley Cole

Once I'm free, we're going to find out exactly how much pain you can endure while remaining conscious. I won't stop until you tell me where my ring is." He leaned in to say at his ear, "I'll be sure to make you feel your loss. ~ Kresley Cole

Nix:
I'm actively involved in steering the lives of thousands of beings. Which directly affects hundreds of
thousands, which indirectly affects millions, with a ripple effect reaching billions. If someone said, 'It
ain't easy being Nïxie,' I wouldn't cal him a liar. ~ Kresley Cole

When she scooped up her clothes, opened his door, then snapped her fingers for a guard down the hall, Wroth watched like a bystander.
"Pssst. Minion. I need these laundered. Very little starch. Don't just stand there gawking or you'll anger my good frenemy General Wroth. We're like this."
He couldn't see her but knew she was twining two fingers together. ~ Kresley Cole

When they passed the centaur king's cell, Volos pointed at Regin and slid his forefinger across his throat.

She replied, "Hey, didn't I see you in a donkey show down in Tijuana? No? You've got a twin then-- ~ Kresley Cole

Wouldn't be surprising. Most immortal females behave like they're in heat."
Her brows rose. "You are the one who taught me about pleasure." ... "And now in another lifetime, you ridicule me for missing it? Come on, Chase. Take me to where you live. Scared I'll find some footy pajamas? A fleshlight? I want a bath almost as much as you need to watch me take one. I get so much more talkative when I'm clean. Loreans are really fastidious, you know. ~ Kresley Cole

Valkyrie, I will get answers from you one way or another. Either through this painful exercise in futility, as you believe, or through a civilized conversation."
"You call this civilized?" She strained against her cuffs, leaning in to whisper, "Psst, Chase. The sexual tension between us is grueling. ~ Kresley Cole

You stay on me like my godsdamned shadow, vampire."
Mirceo's lips curved. "Eternally, demon. ~ Kresley Cole

Yo, Dekko, who do I gotta blow around here to get a shower? ~ Kresley Cole

I'm told the effect is cumulative
it will continue to worsen." Though outwardly calm as he explained this, his face had paled even more. "But if you tell me about the Valkyrie's weaknesses, I'll administer the antidote."
"Weaknesses? So many. Foremost, we're ... ticklish. ~ Kresley Cole

And speaking of females, if I call you by one's name while my fangs are plunged deep in your neck, just run with it. ~ Kresley Cole

And if you don't think I can hold my own against all those eighteenth-century mortals you were out tagging, then you're a fool, Casanova." ... "Oh, yes, I know all about you."
He went still. "What are you talking about?"
"I was alive back then. And all the Lore heard about the ruthless warlord brothers from Estonia. The general, the scholar, the enigma, and ... the manwhore. ~ Kresley Cole

Regin!" He leapt up from a bunk.
"Well, well, the gang's all here." Nix must've given him Regin's whereabouts. Again.
"I'm going to get you out of here," he said, his green eyes aglow.
She snorted. "Let me know how that works out for you, Job MacBangup." Seeing Brandr here just brought her situation into stark relief. "It's curious though
you don't usually show up until it's time to bury him. ~ Kresley Cole

We'll play tomorrow. Besides, isn't it time for my cup of dinner?"
"I am not your blood gofer. Suck my dick, Vampirellie-suck it."
(Ellie and Regin, Lothaire, IAD #12) ~ Kresley Cole

I know exactly what you are now. I know what you will be - Lothaire ~ Kresley Cole

Well I am young." Just as he felt a flicker of ease, she murmured in a sexy voice, "But, baby, I've been busy. ~ Kresley Cole

Warlord, you once told me I'd always know what you're thinking. What are your thoughts now?"
"Partly, I'm thinking that I might shame myself in my trews, just from the feel of you next to me. ~ Kresley Cole

You do not mind my humor?"
"Not at all. I've not laughed like this ... " His brows drew together. "I think I've never laughed like this."
"Usually I exasperate people. And I jest at inappropriate times. Such as during executions. Freya says 'tis my gift and my bane to frustrate others."
"I like your manner, Reginleit. Life is long without humor. ~ Kresley Cole

You've maddened me for you...have changed everything. So, I'm going to f*ck you long and hard, beauty, because if I'm to be enslaved by you-I want to be your master as well. ~ Kresley Cole

He's like six hundred years younger than you are. I refuse to be the moral compass of our cell! Most weekends I have an intoxispell bong attached to my mouth like a respirator. I love scatological humor, and I list 'pranks involving nuclear waste' and 'making demons eat things' as my hobbies. ~ Kresley Cole

My life was awful. When I was a kid, I was fat, pretty ugly and had awful hair. I used to get teased every fucking day, slammed up against lockers, punched in the face - you name it. Hell, I had to go to prom with one of my female friends because I couldn't even get a proper date. I can't even look back at those photos because I look so bad. I transferred schools, but the teasing just got worse. After an, let's say, 'incident' I had with the school play the bullying just got worse. But I made it through high school, only to find out that real life was pretty much the same. I just stayed in my dark room all day and didn't talk to anyone. I didn't go outside. I just stayed inside and drew. I'd draw vampires, mummies, heroes, villains. Anything to help me escape all the bad in the world. I went to art school and didn't really belong. All I could draw was comic book characters. I tried to put my only good talent to use by drawing a cartoon and pitching it - only to have it turned down. Life to me was just pointless. I started drinking, doing drugs and just generally wasting my life drawing.
Then one day, I saw bodies falling from the sky. I witnessed people dying. And that's when I decided to turn my life around. I called up anyone I knew who had an instrument and we formed a band. Being on tour for the first few years was bad. All we'd do is get drunk and do drugs, but I loved it. Because I was doing something I loved with people I loved. And a few years ago I met the most perfe ~ Gerard Way

I'm certain, but my certainty is a lie.
To be certain is to not be seeing.
The day after tomorrow doesn't exist.
This is what exists:
A blue sky that's a bit hazy and some white clouds on the
horizon,
With a dark smudge underneath, as if they might turn black.
This is what today is,
And since for the time being today is everything, this is
everything.
I might be dead - who knows? - the day after tomorrow,
In which case the storm that will strike the day after
tomorrow
Will be a different storm than it would be if I hadn't died.
I realize that the storm doesn't fall from my eyes,
But if I'm no longer in this world, the world will be
different -
There will be one person less -
And the storm, falling in a different world, won't be the
same storm.
In any case, the storm that's going to fall will be the one
falling when it falls.

10 JULY 1930 ~ Fernando Pessoa

In the Novel

He described her mouth as full of ashes.
So when he kissed her finally
he was thinking about ashes

and the blacker rim just below
the edge of the ashtray,
and the faint dark rim that outlined her lips,

and the lips themselves, at the limit
of another darkness, farther
and far more interior.

Then the way the red,
paling, just outside those lines
caught fire and the pages caught

soon after that. Slowly at first,
but then all at once
at the scalloped brown corners of each;

like the ruff of an offended and darkening bird,
extended, then folded
in on itself; multiple,

stiffening, gone. ~ Susan Stewart

When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose. ~ Cyril Connolly

As she felt his fangs against her neck, she was in another world.
There was screaming. A woman was somewhere in agony. Everything was black, and the tormented scream was overwhelming, echoing through the emptiness. After the screaming subsided, there was panting, loud and steady, and it wasn't as dark anymore. There was a room visible now, in a reddish light. A pale man with black hair hovered over a woman dressed in white. She lay on a bed, looking disheveled and sweaty. Her brown-black hair clung to her wet forehead and shoulders. She was covered in blood. The man sat next to her, and held her close to him. He stroked her hair as her chest heaved desperately.
"I love you, my dearest Katerina," he said, cradling her in his strong arms. "Soon, we'll be together forever." Everything faded to black once more, and the woman stopped breathing. All was silent and still. ~ Dawn Bonney

That was the night he got up and went to the boys' division; perhaps he was looking for his history in the big room where all the boys slept, but what he found instead was Dr. Larch kissing every boy a late good night. Homer imagined then that Dr. Larch had kissed him like that, when he'd been small; Homer could not have imagined how those kisses, even now, were still kisses meant for him. They were kisses seeking Homer Wells.
That was the same night that he saw the lynx on the barren, unplanted hillside - glazed with snow that had thawed and then refrozen into a thick crust. Homer had stepped outside for just a minute; after witnessing the kisses, he desired the bracing air. It was a Canada lynx - a dark, gunmetal gray against the lighter gray of the moonlit snow, its wildcat stench so strong Homer gagged to srnell the thing. Its wildcat sense was keen enough to keep it treading within a single leap's distance of the safety of the woods. The lynx was crossing the brow of the hill when it began to slide; its claws couldn't grip the crust of the snow, and the hill had suddenly grown steeper. The cat moved from the dull moonlight into the sharper light from Nurse Angela's office window; it could not help its sideways descent. It traveled closer to the orphanage than it would ever have chosen to come, its ferocious death smell clashing with the freezing cold. The lynx's helplessness on the ice had rendered its expression both terrified; and resigned; both madness and fatali ~ John Irving

When describing nature, a writer should seize upon small details, arranging them so that the reader will see an image in his mind after he closes his eyes. For instance: you will capture the truth of a moonlit night if you'll write that a gleam like starlight shone from the pieces of a broken bottle, and then the dark, plump shadow of a dog or wolf appeared. You will bring life to nature only if you don't shrink from similes that liken its activities to those of humankind. ~ Anton Chekhov

And something happened in Katie's heart, and she realized it wasn't just two people being joined together, not even two families. She felt as if she were joining hands with everyone who'd done this before her, just as she'd done after giving birth to Jacob, a feeling that she finally belonged, that she was part of the whole enterprise, a brick in that great arch which rose out of the dark behind you and swung over your head and curved into the future, and she was helping to keep it strong and solid, and helping to protect everyone beneath it. ~ Mark Haddon

As they neared the entrance to the hotel, Win saw a tall, dark form moving through the lobby. It was Merripen, looking moody and distracted as he walked with his gaze focused downward. She couldn't suppress the flutters of pleasure that went through her at the sight of him, the handsome, bad-tempered beast. He approached the stairs, glancing upward, and his expression changed as he saw her. There was a flash of hunger in his eyes before he managed to extinguish it. But that brief, bright flare caused Win's spirits to lift immeasurably.
After the scene that morning, and Merripen's display of jealous rage, Win had apologized to Julian. The doctor had been amused rather than disconcerted. "He is exactly as you described," Julian had said, adding ruefully, "...only more."
"More" was a fitting word to apply to Merripen, she thought. There was nothing understated about him. At the moment he looked rather like the brooding villain of a sensation novel. The kind who was always vanquished by the fair-haired hero.
The discreet glances Merripen was attracting from a group of ladies in the lobby made it evident that Win was not the only one who found him mesmerizing. ~ Lisa Kleypas

By the way'[Gabriel] said,' everyone else had better keep out of here. After you spend so much time in lockup, you get to like your space. You get kind of territorial. I wouldn't want anybody to get hurt.' ... Gabriel gave [Kaitlyn] a long, measuring look. Then he flashed a brilliant, unsettling smile. 'You can come in any time you like ~ L.J.Smith

In a hurry to escape he let himself out of the house and walked to the truck. Before he could climb inside Marilee raced down the steps.
Breathless,she came to a sudden halt in front of him.
At the dark look in his eyes she swallowed. "Please don't go,Wyatt. I've been such a fool."
"You aren't the only one." He studied her with a look that had her heart stuttering.A look so intense, she couldn't look away. "I've been neating myself up for days,because I wanted things to go my way or no way."
"There's no need.You're not the only one." Her voice was soft,throaty. "You've always respected my need to be independent.But I guess I fought the battle so long,I forgot how to stop fighting even after I'd won the war."
"You can fight me all you want. You know Superman is indestructable." Again that long,speculative look. "I know I caught you off guard with that proposal. It won't happen again. Even when I understood your fear of commitment, I had to push to have things my way.And even though I still want more, I'm willing to settle for what you're willing to give,as long as we can be together."
She gave a deep sigh. "You mean it?"
"I do."
"Oh,Wyatt.I was so afraid I'd driven you away forever."
He continued studying her. "Does this mean you're suffering another change of heart?"
"My heart doesn't need to change. In my heart,I've always known how very special you are.It's my head that can't seem to catch up." She gave a shake of her head,a ~ R.C. Ryan

How the lands and the stars and the dreams and the little gods and the animals, how all of them came into the world. They were sung. The great beasts were sung into existence, after the Singer had done with the planets and the hills and the trees and the oceans and the lesser beasts. The cliffs that bound existence were sung, and the hunting grounds, and the dark. Songs ~ Neil Gaiman

After 'The Matrix,' I cannot wear sunglasses. As soon as I put them on, people recognize me. ~ Carrie-Anne Moss

Forty years as an astronomer have not quelled my enthusiasm for lying outside after dark, staring up at the stars. It isn't only the beauty of the night sky that thrills me. It's the sense I have that some of those points of light are the home stars of beings not so different from us, daily cares and all, who look across space with wonder, just as we do. ~ Frank Drake

The creature had nut-brown skin mixed with patches of ash. It was human-sized and formed, but its skin looked like the bark of an old, old tree. About the same height as Donna, it was spindly with arms and legs that were all joints and angles. Its face was narrow and pointed, with hair on top of its head like thick moss and narrow black eyes that glinted even in the dim light of the room. The thing's body was clothed in lichen and moss, with vines twining around its sharp limbs. The creature opened its lipless mouth, a dark slash across its twisted face.

Donna's mind flashed back to the party and the shadow she'd seen sliding through the darkness outside Xan's house. She hadn't been imagining things, after all.

The wood elves had returned to the city. ~ Karen Mahoney

The cool enchantment of evening has arrived after the prostrating heat of summer's day and we lie quietly in anticipation of Your luminous appearance - Mysterious Selene, Whose Lunar Orb relieves the dark of night. ~ Lady Svetlana

The only exercise that Tess took at this time was after dark; and it was then, when out in the woods, that she seemed least solitary.She knew how to hit to a hair's-breadth that moment of evening when the light and the darkness are so evenly balanced that the constraint if day and the suspense of night neutralize each other, leaving absolute mental liberty.It is then that the plight of being alive becomes attenuated to its least possible dimensions. ~ Thomas Hardy

Crossing the Swamp"

Here is the endless
wet thick
cosmos, the center
of everything - the nugget
of dense sap, branching
vines, the dark burred
faintly belching
bogs. Here
is swamp, here
is struggle,
closure -
pathless, seamless,
peerless mud. My bones
knock together at the pale
joints, trying
for foothold, fingerhold,
mindhold over
such slick crossings, deep
hipholes, hummocks
that sink silently
into the black, slack
earthsoup. I feel
not wet so much as
painted and glittered
with the fat grassy
mires, the rich
and succulent marrows
of earth - a poor
dry stick given
one more chance by the whims
of swamp water - a bough
that still, after all these years,
could take root,
sprout, branch out, bud -
make of its life a breathing
palace of leaves. ~ Mary Oliver

I know it seems hard sometimes but remember one thing. Through every dark night, there's a bright day after that. So no matter how hard it get, stick your chest out, keep ya head up ... and handle it. ~ Tupac Shakur

Gabrielle chuckled, her dark eyes twinkling. "So he's been after you, has he? Poor Etta, pursued by a sun priest offering to pleasure - "
"Every nook and cranny," Marietta interrupted dryly and Gabrielle tipped her head back with a throaty laugh. ~ Michelle O'Leary

It was a dead swan. Its body lay contorted on the beach like an abandoned lover. I looked at the bird for a long time. There was no blood on its feathers, no sight of gunshot. Most likely, a late migrant from the north slapped silly by a ravenous Great Salt Lake. The swan may have drowned. I knelt beside the bird, took off my deerskin gloves, and began smoothing feathers. Its body was still limp - the swan had not been dead long. I lifted both wings out from under its belly and spread them on the sand. Untangling the long neck which was wrapped around itself was more difficult, but finally I was able to straighten it, resting the swan's chin flat against the shore. The small dark eyes had sunk behind the yellow lores. It was a whistling swan. I looked for two black stones, found them, and placed them over the eyes like coins. They held. And, using my own saliva as my mother and grandmother had done to wash my face, I washed the swan's black bill and feet until they shone like patent leather. I have no idea of the amount of time that passed in the preparation of the swan. What I remember most is lying next to its body and imagining the great white bird in flight. I imagined the great heart that propelled the bird forward day after day, night after night. Imagined the deep breaths taken as it lifted from the arctic tundra, the camaraderie within the flock. I imagined the stars seen and recognized on clear autumn nights as they navigated south. Imagined their silhouettes passing ~ Terry Tempest Williams

When a human doctor, after much bleeding and cupping, finds that a patient has died out of sheer desperation, he can always say, "Dear me, will of the gods, that will be thirty dollars please," and walk away a free man. This is because human beings are not, technically, worth anything. A good racehorse, on the other hand, may be worth twenty thousand dollars. A doctor who lets one hurry off too soon to that great paddock in the sky may well expect to hear, out of some dark alley, a voice saying something on the lines of "Mr. Chrysoprase is very upset," and find the brief remainder of his life full of incident. ~ Terry Pratchett

Now the valley cried with anger, "Mount your horses draw your sword." And they killed the mountain people, so they won their just reward. Now they stood beside the treasure, on the mountain dark and red. Turned the stone and looked beneath it. "Peace on earth" was all it said. Go ahead and hate your neighbor,go ahead and cheat a friend. Do it in the name of heaven, you can justify it in the end. There won't be any trumpets blowing come the judgment day. On the bloody morning after one tin soldier rides away. ~ Dennis Lambert

There is a story they tell, about a girl dared by her peers to venture to a local graveyard after dark. This was her folly: when they told her that standing on someone's grave at night would cause the inhabitant to reach up and pull her under, she scoffed. Scoffing is the first mistake a woman can make.

I will show you, she said.

Pride is the second mistake.

They gave her a knife to stick into the frosty earth, as a way of proving her presence and her theory.

She went to that graveyard. Some storytellers say that she picked the grave at random. I believe she selected a very old one, her choice tinged by self-doubt and the latent belief that if she were wrong, the intact muscle and flesh of a newly dead corpse would be more dangerous than one centuries gone.

She knelt on the grave and plunged the blade deep. As she stood to run she found she couldn't escape. Something was clutching at her clothes. She cried out and fell down.

When morning came, her friends arrived at the cemetery. They found her dead on the grave, the blade pinning the sturdy wool of her skirt to the ground. Dead of fright or exposure, would it matter when the parents arrived? She was not wrong, but it didn't matter any more. Afterwards, everyone believed that she had wished to die, even though she had died proving that she could live.

As it turns out, being right was the third, and worst, mistake. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

The Line makes itself felt,
thro' some Energy unknown, ever are we haunted by that Edge so precise, so near. In the Dark, one never knows. Of course I am seeking the Warrior Path, imagining myself as heroick Scout. We all feel it Looming, even when we're awake, out there ahead someplace, the way you come to feel a River or Creek ahead, before anything else,
sound, sky, vegetation,
may have announced it. Perhaps 'tis the very deep sub-audible Hum of its Traffic that we feel with an equally undiscover'd part of the Sensorium,
does it lie but over the next Ridge? the one after that? We have mileage Estimates from Rangers and Runners, yet for as long as its Distance from the Post Mark'd West remains unmeasur'd, nor is yet recorded as Fact, may it remain, a-shimmer, among the few final Pages of its Life as Fiction. ~ Thomas Pynchon

Chaworth," the dark-haired man beside him intervened quietly, "if I may speak."
The speaker was ruggedly attractive, with boldly hewn features and the sun-browned complexion of an avid outdoorsman. Although he was not young- his black locks were liberally shot with steel, and time had deepened the laugh-lines around his eyes and the brackets between his nose and mouth- he certainly couldn't have been called old. Not with that air of robust health, and the presence of a man with considerable authority.
"I've known the lad since the day he was born," he continued, voice deep and a bit gravelly. "As you know, his father is a close friend. I'll vouch for his character, and his word. For the girl's sake, I suggest that we hold our silence and handle the matter with discretion."
"I am also acquainted with his father," Lord Chaworth snapped, "who plucked many a fair flower in his day. Obviously the son is following in his footsteps. No, Westcliff, I will not remain silent- he must be held accountable for his actions."
Westcliff? Pandora glanced at him with alert interest. She had heard of the Earl of Westcliff, who, after the Duke of Norfolk, held the oldest and most respectable peerage title in England. His vast Hampshire estate, Stony Cross Park, was famed for its fishing, hunting, and shooting. ~ Lisa Kleypas

After spending the last hour with Cole, whose face revealed only the emotions he wanted me to see, it was strange to see undisguised pain on Sam's face. His thick dark eyebrows showed misery all by themselves. It occurred to me that he and Grace might have had a fight.
"Her parents kicked me out," Sam said, and he smiled for just a second, like people do when something's really not funny and they don't want to be telling you but they don't know what else to do. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

The slow constellations wheeled on. It would be dawn and then sun-up after a while and he would be hungry. But that would be to-morrow and now he was only cold, and walking would cure that. His breathing was easier now and he decided to get up and go on, and then he found that he had been asleep because he knew it was almost dawn, the night almost over. He could tell that from the whippoorwills. They were everywhere now among the dark trees below him, constant and inflectioned and ceaseless, so that, as the instant for giving over to the day birds drew nearer and nearer, there was no interval at all between them. He got up. He was a little stiff, but walking would cure that too as it would the cold, and soon there would be the sun. He went on down the hill, toward the dark woods within which the liquid silver voices of the birds called unceasing - the rapid and urgent beating of the urgent and quiring heart of the late spring night. He did not look back. ~ William Faulkner

Looked at sky through smoke heavy with human fat and God was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever and we are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later. Born from oblivion; bear children, hell-bound as ourselves, go into oblivion. There is nothing else. Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It's us. Only us.
-Rorschach. ~ Alan Moore

From around the corner's edge a grotesque light was trickling out, the first intimations of an ominous sunrise over a dark horizon. I dimly recognized this colored light, though not from my waking memory. It grew more intense, now pouring out in weird streams from beyond the solid margin of the building. And the more intense it grew, the more clearly I could hear the screaming voice that had called out to me in a dream. I shouted his name, but the swelling colored brightness was a field of fear which kept me from making any move toward it. It was no amalgam of colors comparable to anything in mortal experience. It was as if all natural colors had been mutated into a painfully lush iridescence by some prism fantastically corrupted in its form; it was a rainbow staining the sky after a poison deluge; it was an aurora painting the darkness with a blaze of insanity, a blaze that did not burn vigorously but shimmered with an insect-jeweled frailness. And, in actuality, it was nothing like these color-filled effusions, which are merely a feeble means of partially fixing a reality uncommunicable to those not initiated to it, a necessary resorting to the makeshift gibberish of the mystic isolated by his experience and left without a language to describe it.

("The Dreaming In Nortown") ~ Thomas Ligotti

One evening he appeared with an infant in his arms at the door of his ex-wife, Martha. Because Briony, his lovely young wife after Martha, had died. Of what? We'll get to that. I can't do this alone, Andrew said, as Martha stared at him from the open doorway. It happened to have been snowing that night, and Martha was transfixed by the soft creature-like snowflakes alighting on Andrew's NY Yankees hat brim. Martha was like that, enrapt by the peripheral things as if setting them to music. Even in ordinary times, she was slow to respond, looking at you with her large dark rolling protuberant eyes. Then the smile would come, or the nod, or the shake of the head. Meanwhile the heat from her home drifted through the open door and fogged up Andrew's eyeglasses. He stood there behind his foggy lenses like a blind man in the snowfall and was without volition when at last she reached out, gently took the swaddled infant from him, stepped back, and closed the door in his face. ~ E.L. Doctorow

After the German occupation of Holland in May 1940, the last two dark years of the war I spent hiding indoors from the Nazis, eating tulip bulbs to fill the stomach and reading Kramers' book "Quantum Theorie des Elektrons und der Strahlung" by the light of a storm lamp. ~ Nicolaas Bloembergen

And in the complicated, relished, introspective web of young lovers, or more exactly, young petters, they progress along the oldest channel in the world and the most deceptive, for they are certain it is unique to them. Even as they are calling themselves engaged, they are losing the details of their subtle involved pledging of a troth. They are moved and warmed by intimacies between them, by long husky conversations in the parlor, in inexpensive restaurants, by the murmurs, the holding of hands in the dark velvet caverns of movie houses. They forget most of the things that have advanced them into love, feel now only the effect of them. And of course their conversation alters, new themes are bruited. Shy sensitive girls may end up as poetesses or they may turn bitter and drink alone in bars, but nice shy sensitive Jewish girls usually marry and have children, gain two pounds a year, and worry more about refurbishing hats and trying a new casserole than about the meaning of life. After their engagement, Natalie talks over their prospects. ~ Norman Mailer

The door opened after a few moments. Sherlock was looking slightly upwards, expecting Amyus Crowe to be standing inside the doorway, and for a moment he was confused by the empty space. His gaze droped, and he felt his heart stutter as it came to rest on the face of a girl at the same level as his own. Her cloths were dark, and in the shadows of the hall her face seemed to be floating in mid-air. ~ Andy Lane