Kushiel S Dart Quotes

Beauty is at its most poignant when the cold hand of Death holds poised to wither it imminently. ~ Jacqueline Carey

For every victory there is a price. ~ Jacqueline Carey

When Love cast me out, it was Cruelty who took pity upon me ~ Jacqueline Carey

Truly, it is in loss that we learn a thing's true value. ~ Jacqueline Carey

Some chains are forged for us - those are the hardest to bear. ~ Jacqueline Carey

How does it feel to be the 's third choice? Humiliating? You could have thrown a dart. That's how close they were. We had so many excellent candidates. ~ Ronald Reagan

What is fear but courage's shadow? ~ Jacqueline Carey

By morning, Joscelin was resigned. "You know, betimes I think you are a little mad, Imriel no Montreve," he said to me in the courtyard outside the stable, holding the Bastard's reins.
"You never said that to Phedre," I reminded him.
"Ah, well." He grinned despite himself. "In her case, there is no question. ~ Jacqueline Carey

Every deadline was a crisis ... No doubt it has something to do with a deep-seated personality defect, or maybe a kink in whatever blood vessel leads into the pineal gland ... On the other hand, it might easily be something as simple and basically perverse as whatever instinct it is that causes a jackrabbit to wait until the last possible second to dart across the road in front of a speeding car. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

They bear down upon Westminster, the ghost-consecrated Abbey, and the history-crammed Hall, through the arches of the bridge with a rush as the tide swelters round them; the city is buried in a dusky gloom save where the lights begin to gleam and trail with lurid reflections past black velvety- looking hulls - a dusky city of golden gleams. St. Paul's looms up like an immense bowl reversed, squat, un-English, and undignified in spite of its great size; they dart within the sombre shadows of the Bridge of Sighs, and pass the Tower of London, with the rising moon making the sky behind it luminous, and the crowd of shipping in front appear like a dense forest of withered pines, and then mooring their boat at the steps beyond, with a shuddering farewell look at the eel-like shadows and the glittering lights of that writhing river, with its burthen seen and invisible, they plunge into the purlieus of Wapping.
("The Phantom Model") ~ Hume Nisbet

We love, while knowing that someday our love might be lost forever. We laugh as we stride along, even while recognising that doom lies at the end of the road. We give, while comprehending that in the end 'twill all be taken away. we are nothing less then heroes. ~ Cecilia Dart-Thornton

Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn't even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts. Her ensign dropped limp like a rag; the muzzles of the long six-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull; the greasy, slimy swell swung her up lazily and let her down, swaying her thin masts. In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech - and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight; and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly there was a camp of natives - he called them enemies! - hidden out of sight somewhere. ~ Joseph Conrad

The people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping ... something runs among them, an exchange of glances like lines that connect one figure with another and draw arrows, stars, triangles, until all combinations are used up in a moment, and other characters come on to the scene ... ~ Italo Calvino

A sudden dart when a little over a hundred feet from the end of the track, or a little over 120 feet from the point at which it rose into the air, ended the flight. ~ Orville Wright

I believe this is yours." I hand her the last dart in my hand. "And this is mine." I cup her face in my hands before she can think anything else, and I kiss her. ~ Angeline Kace

I noticed that the large windows between the paintings [in the Musee d'Art Moderne] interested me more than the art exhibited. From then on, painting as I had known it was finished for me. ~ Ellsworth Kelly

Aubade with a Broken Neck The first night you don't come home summer rains shake the clematis. I bury the dead moth I found in our bed, scratch up a rutabaga and eat it rough with dirt. The dog finds me and presents between his gentle teeth a twitching nightjar. In her panic, she sings in his mouth. He gives me her pain like a gift, and I take it. I hear the cries of her young, greedy with need, expecting her return, but I don't let her go until I get into the house. I read the auspices - the way she flutters against the wallpaper's moldy roses means all can be lost. How she skims the ceiling means a storm approaches. You should see her in the beginnings of her fear, rushing at the starless window, her body a dart, her body the arrow of longing, aimed, as all desperate things are, to crash not into the object of desire, but into the darkness behind it. ~ Traci Brimhall

His Grace woke up in the morning red-eyed as a ferret and in roughly the same temper as a rabid badger. Had I a tranquilizing dart, I would have shot him with it without an instant's hesitation. ~ Diana Gabaldon

Speechless, castaway and wry
a spellbound oddity am I
my feet are locked upon the clay
my gaze is locked upon the sky ~ Cecilia Dart-Thornton

Mad are thy subjects all, and even the wisest heart
Straight to folly will fall, at a touch of thy poisoned dart. ~ Sophocles

We heard no other sounds. We met no other people. We saw only two bright red birds leap startled from the center of the meadow and dart into the woods. ~ Haruki Murakami

The objective of false prophets and teachers of whatever stripe is ... the influence and control of the minds of men. ~ Ron Dart

You know, I still feel in my wrists certain echoes of the pram-pusher's knack, such as, for example, the glib downward pressure one applied to the handle in order to have the carriage tip up and climb the curb. First came an elaborate mouse-gray vehicle of Belgian make, with fat autoid tires and luxurious springs, so large that it could not enter our puny elevator. It rolled on sidewalks in a slow stately mystery, with the trapped baby inside lying supine, well covered with down, silk and fur; only his eyes moved, warily, and sometimes they turned upward with one swift sweep of their showy lashes to follow the receding of branch-patterned blueness that flowed away from the edge of the half-cocked hood of the carriage, and presently he would dart a suspicious glance at my face to see if the teasing trees and sky did not belong, perhaps to the same order of things as did rattles and parental humor. There followed a lighter carriage, and in this, as he spun along, he would tend to rise, straining at his straps; clutching at the edges; standing there less like the groggy passenger of a pleasure boat than like an entranced scientist in a spaceship; surveying the speckled skeins of a live, warm world; eyeing with philosophic interest the pillow he had managed to throw overboard; falling out himself when a strap burst one day. Still later he rode in one of those small contraptions called strollers; from initial springy and secure heights the child came lower and lower, until, when h ~ Vladimir Nabokov

True friendship is worth more than can be measured,
a quality forever to be treasured.
True friends will staunchly stand beside each other,
as loyally brother shieldeth brother,
remaining firm in spite of war and strife,
in poverty or sickness, throughout life.
True friendship doth endure while comrades age
from boy to youth, from warrior to sage. ~ Cecilia Dart-Thornton

There's nothing like the discovery of an unknown work by a great thinker to set the intellectual community atwitter and cause academics to dart about like those things one sees when looking at a drop of water under a microscope. ~ Woody Allen

You can get the dart player out of the pub, but you can't get the pub out of the dart player. ~ Sid Waddell

Should they be thanked or does thanks drive them away?
"You honor us," she stammered. "We request your help. ~ Cecilia Dart-Thornton

You're not doing well and finally I don't have to
pretend to be so interested in your on going tragedy,

but

I'll rob the bank that gave you the impression that
money is more fruitful than words, and
I'll cut holes in the ozone if it means you have one less day of rain.
I'll walk you to the hospital,
I'll wait in a white room that reeks of hand sanitizer and latex for the results from the MRI scan that tries to
locate the malady that keeps your mind guessing, and
I want to write you a poem every day until my hand breaks
and assure you that you'll find your place,
it's just
the world has a funny way of
hiding spots fertile enough for
bodies like yours to grow roots.

and

I miss you like a dart hits the iris of a bullseye,
or a train ticket screams 4:30 at 4:47, I
wanted to tell you that it's my birthday on Thursday
and I would have wanted you to
give me the gift of your guts on the floor, one last time,
to see if you still had it in you.

I hope our ghosts aren't eating you alive.
If I'm to speak for myself, I'll tell you that
the universe is twice as big as we think it is
and you're the only one that made that idea
less devastating. ~ Lucas Regazzi

He said, I won't have one of those things in the house. It gives a young girl a false notion of beauty, not to mention anatomy. If a real woman was built like that she'd fall on her face.

She said, If we don't let her have one like all the other girls she'll feel singled out. It'll become an issue. She'll long for one and she'll long to turn into one. Repression breeds sublimation. You know that.

He said, It's not just the pointy plastic tits, it's the wardrobes. The wardrobes and that stupid male doll, what's his name, the one with the underwear glued on.

She said, Better to get it over with when she's young. He said, All right but don't let me see it.

She came whizzing down the stairs, thrown like a dart. She was stark naked. Her hair had been chopped off, her head was turned back to front, she was missing some toes and she'd been tattooed all over her body with purple ink, in a scrollwork design. She hit the potted azalea, trembled there for a moment like a botched angel, and fell.

He said, I guess we're safe. ~ Margaret Atwood

She was only a few yards from the door. If she lunged, she could be safely inside with solid metal between her and the bear. But she had called to him, and he had come. The tranquilizer dart that she had shot on the sea ice now lay in front of her. Impossibly, inexplicably, the bear had brought it back to her. She felt light-headed, and she knew she was shaking. She raised her eyes to look at the bear.
He was a mass of shadows at the edge of the station floodlights. She could make out the shape of his muzzle and the hunch of his shoulders. "Cassandra Dasent," he said. His voice was a soft rumble.
She felt as if her heart had stopped beating. ~ Sarah Beth Durst

On one side hung a very large oil-painting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal cross-lights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose. such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint of much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and especially by throwing open the little window towards the back of the entry, you at last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however wild, might not be altogether unwarranted.

But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through. - It's the Black Sea in a midnight gale. - It's the unnatural combat of the four primal elements. - It's a blasted heath. - It's a Hyperb ~ Herman Melville

for a poem
Needs multitude, multitudes of thoughts, all fierce, all flesh-eaters, musically clamorous
Bright hawks that hover and dart headlong, and ungainly
Gray hungers fledged with desire of transgression, salt slimed beaks, from the sharp
Rock-shores of the world and the secret waters. ~ Robinson Jeffers

Henry turned as if to dart out of the room, then swung around and stared at them, a look of confusion passing over his freckled face, as if he had only now had cause to wonder why Will, Tessa, and Jem might be crouching together in a mostly disused storage room. "What are you three doing in here, anyway?"
Will tilted his head to the side and smiled at Henry. "Charades," he said. "Massive game. ~ Cassandra Clare

The air delighted her nose - fresher and crisper compared to the air in the grimy ghetto, even better than in the city. She rubbed her chest where the dart had hit. Her heart beat powerfully inside her - fueled by fear. It felt as if it would burst, and she mentally tried to slow it down. Strange, she thought, these may be some of its last beats in her chest. Was that why it beat so fiercely? ~ Cate Campbell Beatty

Where were you planning on heading next, then, if not Australia?" Fiona asked.
"Oh, I'll just toss a dart at the map like I usually do," Kerry said, as blithely as she could.
Fiona eyed her closely, as if checking her sincerity. "Well, whenever you do head back out--wherever and with whomever that might be--we'll make sure Gus hires someone to help him with the pub. So, you know, don't let that part affect your decision making or anything."
"'Wherever or with whomever'?" Kerry repeated with a roll of her eyes.
Fiona beamed sweetly again. "Just saying. ~ Donna Kauffman

There are two kinds of cities in the world: those that reassure their residents that tomorrow and the day after, and the day after that, will be much the same; and those that do the opposite, insidiously reminding their inhabitants of life's uncertainty. Istanbul is of the second kind. There is no room for introspection, no time to wait for the clocks to catch up with the pace of events. Istanbulites dart from one breaking news story to the next, moving fast, consuming faster, until something happens that demands their full attention. ~ Elif Shafak

A long, ear-tearing howl threatened to deafen him, but he was already past the wight as the lanceblade sank in and cut deep, Gallow's body airborne and spinning, his axis almost parallel to the rooftop as the Veil bunched and shivered. Landing, still spinning, the lance a propeller now, the last wight baring its yellowed fangs and hissing. Another curse, this one hurried and malformed, hurtled flapping for Gallow's eyes, but his own spat phrase of the Old Language batted it aside, a dart of moonglow shredding the black wings. Skidding, ~ Lilith Saintcrow

I am already given to the power that rules my fate. And I cling to nothing, so I will have nothing to defend. I have no thoughts, so I will see. I fear nothing, so I will remember myself. Detached and at ease, I will dart past the Eagle to be free. ~ Carlos Castaneda

There is serenity and calm under the water's surface. You move easily and glimpse a world you have never seen before. You think of running out of oxygen and the idea of sharks dart out at you. You sense that there is something treacherous hiding behind every reef; no matter how much you explore you won't ever know what it is. ~ Jerzy Kosinski

The requirements of romantic love are difficult to satisfy in the back seat of a Dodge Dart. ~ Lisa Alther

...that somewhere from amidst the welter of sound there will dart up, like a bird, a single authentic note of immortal longing. ~ J.M. Coetzee

Mont Blanc yet gleams on high: the power is there, The still and solemn power of many sights And many sounds, and much of life and death. In the long glare of day, the snows descend Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there, Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun, Or the sunbeams dart through them. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

Man loves his own ruin. The cup is so sweet that though he knows it will poison him, yet he must drink it. And the harlot is so fair, that though he understands that her ways lead down to hell, yet like a bullock he follows to the slaughter till the dart goes through his liver. Man is fascinated and bewitched by sin. ~ Charles Spurgeon

Words are capable of flying. They dart through windows, over fences, between bar stools and across courtyards. They travel rapidly from mouth to ear, from ear to mouth. And as they go, they pick up speed and weight and substance and gravity. Until they land with a scud, take seed and grow as fast as the unruliest of beanstalks. ~ Jess Kidd

Left alone, I was passive; repulsed, I withdrew; forgotten - my lips would not utter, nor my eyes dart a reminder. ~ Charlotte Bronte

The cosmic conflict between good and evil is joined; chaotic sea and demonic sea monster verses the morally outraged man, Captain Ahab. In this boat, however, there is one man who does nothing. He doesn't hold an oar; he doesn't perspire; he doesn't shout. He is languid in the crash and the cursing. This man is the harpooner, quiet and poised, waiting. And then this sentence: 'To insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooners of his world must start to their feet out of idleness, and not out of toil.' Was this the confirmation to cultivate what I had named an 'unbusy pastor'? ~ Eugene H. Peterson

So the struck eagle, stretch'd upon the plain, No more through rolling clouds to soar again, View'd his own feather on the fatal dart, And wing'd the shaft that quiver'd in his heart. ~ Lord Byron

the disguise. Back in the main hall, Mr. Dart helped Stanley climb up into the empty picture frame. Stanley was able to stay in place because Mr. Dart had cleverly put four small spikes in the wall, one for each hand and foot. The frame was a perfect fit. Against the wall, Stanley looked just like a picture. "Except for one thing," Mr. Dart said. "Shepherdesses are supposed to look happy. They smile at their sheep and at the sky. You look fierce, not happy, Stanley. ~ Jeff Brown

The terrors of truth and dart of death To faith alike are vain. ~ Herman Melville

So in the Libyan fable it is told That once an eagle, stricken with a dart, Said, when he saw the fashion of the shaft: With our own feathers, not by others' hands, Are we now smitten. ~ Aeschylus

We almost began a perfect conversation, F. said as he turned on the six o'clock news. He turned the radio
very loud and began to shout wildly against the voice of the commentator, who was reciting a list of disasters.
Sail on, sail on, O Ship of State, auto accidents, births, Berlin, cures for cancer! Listen, my friend, listen to the
present, the right now, it's all around us, painted like a target, red, white, and blue. Sail into the target like a
dart, a fluke bull's eye in a dirty pub. Empty your memory and listen to the fire around you. Don't forget your
memory, let it exist somewhere precious in all the colors that it needs but somewhere else, hoist your memory
on the Ship of State like a pirate's sail, and aim yourself at the tinkly present. Do you know how to do this?
Do you know how to see the akropolis like the Indians did who never even had one? Fuck a saint, that's how,
find a little saint and fuck her over and over in some pleasant part of heaven, get right into her plastic altar,
dwell in her silver medal, fuck her until she tinkles like a souvenir music box, until the memorial lights go on
for free, find a little saintly faker like Teresa or Catherine Tekakwitha or Lesbia, whom prick never knew but
who lay around all day in a chocolate poem, find one of these quaint impossible cunts and fuck her for your
life, coming all over the sky, fuck her on the moon with a steel hourglass up your hole, get tangled ~ Leonard Cohen

To insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooners of this world must start to their feet from out of idleness, and not from out of toil. ~ Herman Melville

Careful, even now, not to thank the wights, she added, You have all been most kind. ~ Cecilia Dart-Thornton

I felt my hand curl into a fist. Felt my elbow draw back. Felt my arm dart forward, my knuckles crack into Cole's jaw. I couldn't stop myself. His head whipped to the side, and blood leaked from a cut in his lip. Behind me, gasps of shock abounded.

"I'm recovered," I said. "Believe me now?"

Those violet eyes slitted when they found me. "Assault and battery is illegal."

"So have me arrested."

He closed what little distance there was between us. Suddenly I could feel his warmth of his breath caressing my skin. "How about I put you over my lap and spank you instead?"

"How about I knee your balls into your throat?"

"If you're going to play with that particular area, I'd rather you use your hands."

"My hands aren't going near that area ever again."

A pause. Then, "I bet I could change your mind," he whispered huskily.

"I bet I could bash yours." I drew back another fist, but he was ready and caught me midswing. His pupils dilated, a sign of arousal. Another sign: he began to pant. He was acting like I'd tried to unbuckle his jeans rather than smack fire out of him.

"Hit me again," he said, still using the same whispered tone, "and I'll take it as an invitation."

I was just as bad. I trembled with longing I couldn't control and struggled to catch my breath. "An invitation to do what?"

His grip loosened, his fingers rubbing my skin. A caress, not a warn ~ Gena Showalter