Lovely Way Back Into Memory Quotes

One of my favorite first sentences of a
book is from Rebecca, Last night I dreamt
I went to Manderley again. ~ Daphne Du Maurier

Now that we've come up with all the obvious answers to our problem, it's time to come up with some truly ridiculous ones."
"Ridiculous?" asked Brasque.
"Yes, ridiculous. Think of something impossible, improbable or downright ridiculous and go from there."
"Like we all flap our arms and fly out of here," said Katherine.
"Exactly!" said Spider.
"How about we form a long line all the way to the mountains and pass the charges along it?" said Brasque.
"Excellent," said Spider. "Keep it coming."
"What if we each carry one charge, run back, carry another, and so on?" said Tom, getting into the swing of things.
"Lovely!" laughed Spider. "Now we're cooking."
The shower of sparks shot out of the top of the Amadragon. Joe shielded his eyes with his hand.
"Yeah, and we can all climb on the Amadragon and ride out of here," he said.
"What was that, Joe?" said Spider, suddenly dropping the jokey manner. "What's the Amadragon?"
Katherine's eyes glittered. "He means that," she said, pointing at the excavator. Everyone except Spider turned and looked. "He's talking about the giant machine, the one that keeps shooting sparks in the air."
Spider cocked his ear and listened to the rumble of the Amadragon's engine. "So Orlemann built the dragon, did he?" he said. "I'd been wondering what the noise was. If they built it to the original specifications, it should get us out of here within an hour. Let's pray that will give us enough tim ~ Carol Hughes

You try to tap into a memory and you close your eyes and it comes back. So I was doing this in the painting and then that became a practice of mine. Sometimes it was a cathartic situation, a way to meditate. ~ Jose Parla

Sitting out on the canoe tonight, watching the indigo waters of the South China Sea, I noticed the waxing moon calculating that maybe by the time it is full we'll be back in the U.S. of A. I shed a few tears for Michael again. I was hoping his ghost would materialize just to let me know there actually is a spiritual realm but no such luck. It was just me, alone. It's so bizarre. He was here and now… he's gone. That's the way it is. We are… and then, we are no more. Two or three loved ones keep our memory alive… and then, they are no more. And we all fade into that massive vapor cloud of forgotten souls. Why were we even here in the first place?
I began to stand up. That's when I saw it. It entered the night sky from the west and streaked to the east, forming a brilliant but thin arc of flame. A shooting star. A meteorite. Was that my confirmation? I would like to think so. ~ Gerald Maclennon

Grief and anger shrink my world, and I resent this. They seem to paralyze my memory of happier times, of friends, places, things; options. Squeezed by the grip of intense, unsettling emotion, I grow smaller in my single-mindedness. I suppose it is partly because I have discarded a range of choices, impairing in some measure my freedom of will. I don't like this, but after a point I have small control over it. It makes me feel that I have surrendered to a kind of determinism, which irritates me even more. Then, vicious cycle, this feeds back into the emotion that drives me and intensifies it. The simple way of ending this situation is the headlong rush to remove its object. The difficult way is more philosophical, a drawing back, the reestablishment of control. As usual, the difficult way is preferable. A headlong rush may also result in a broken neck. ~ Roger Zelazny

An old girlfriend is a gun in your belly. It's no longer loaded, so when you see her, all you feel is the hollow mechanical click in your gut, and possibly the ghost of an echo, sense memory from when it used to carry live rounds. Occasionally, though, there's a bullet you missed, lying dormant in its overlooked chamber, and when that trigger gets pulled, the unexpected gunshot is deafening even as the forgotten bullet rips its way through the tissue and muscle of your midsection and out into the light of day. Seeing Carly is like that. Even though we haven't spoken in almost ten years, it's an explosion, and in that one instant every memory, every feeling, comes flooding back as fresh as if it were yesterday. ~ Jonathan Tropper

He watched the newly arrived commuters as they stepped into the carriage, pushed their way down the tube, the odours from their damp clothes mingling, giving off varying degrees of mustiness: London grime, or smoke from airless offices. A woman wearing a blue swing coat glanced along the carriage, casting around for an empty seat. Her pale skin, the searching green eyes, reminded him of Emma. Briefly, he felt his breath catch; he stood, clambered back over his neighbour and indicated for her to take his seat. And so his mind stayed with Emma when he knew he should be working out a strategy for telling Dorothy of his news. But Emma was never far away; like the glitter balls in dance halls, she would slowly rotate in his memory, different facets reappearing, as the hues changed in her auburn hair. ~ Amanda Sington-Williams

He moved on down the alley, his feet walking forward and his brain swimming backward through a sea of time. It was a dark sea, much darker than the alley. The tide was slow and there were no waves, just tiny ripples that murmured very softly. Telling him about yesterday. Telling him that yesterday could never really be discarded, it was always a part of now. There was just no way to get rid of it. No way to push it aside or throw it into an ash can, or dig a hole and bury it. For all buried memories were nothing more than slow-motion boomerangs, taking their own sweet time to come back. This one had taken seven years. ~ David Goodis

She went through her memory for the time, for the day, she and and her husband told him all about what he should and should not do. No goin out into them woods without Papa or me knowin about it. No steppin foot out this house without them free papers, not even to go to the well or the privy. Say your prayers every night...Pick the blueberries close to the ground, son. Them the sweetest, I find. If a white man say the trees can talk, can dance, you just say yes right along, that you done seen em do it plenty of times. Don't look them people in the eye. You see a white woman riding toward you, get way off the road and go stand behind a tree. The uglier the white woman, the farther you go and the broader the tree. But where, in all she taught her son, was it about thou shall own no one, havin been owned once your own self. Don't go back to Egypt after God done took you outa there. ~ Edward P. Jones

Places We Love

Places we love exist only through us,
Space destroyed is only illusion in the constancy of time,
Places we love we can never leave,
Places we love together, together, together,

And is this room really a room, or an embrace,
And what is beneath the window: a street or years?
And the window is only the imprint left by
The first rain we understood, returning endlessly,

And this wall does not define the room, but perhaps the night
Your son began to move in your sleeping blood,
A son like a butterfly of flame in your hall of mirrors,
The night you were frightened by your own light,

And this door leads into any afternoon
Which outlives it, forever peopled
With your casual movements, as you stepped,
Like fire into copper, into my only memory;

When you go, space closes over like water behind you,
Do not look back: there is nothing outside you,
Space is only time visible in a different way,
Places we love we can never leave. ~ Ivan V. Lalić

Life has a way of going in circles. Ideally, it would be a straight path forward––we'd always know where we were going, we'd always be able to move on and leave everything else behind. There would be nothing but the present and the future. Instead, we always find ourselves where we started. When we try to move ahead, we end up taking a step back. We carry everything with us, the weight exhausting us until we want to collapse and give up.
We forget things we try to remember. We remember things we'd rather forget. The most frightening thing about memory is that it leaves no choice. It has mastered an incomprehensible art of forgetting. It erases, it smudges, it fills in blank spaces with details that don't exist.
But however we remember it––or choose to remember it––the past is the foundation that holds our lives in place. Without its support, we'd have nothing for guidance. We spend so much time focused on what lies ahead, when what has fallen behind is just as important. What defines us isn't where we're going, but where we've been. Although there are places and people we will never see again, and although we move on and let them go, they remain a part of who we are.
There are things that will never change, things we will carry along with us always. But as we venture into the murky future, we must find our strength by learning to leave things behind. ~ Brigid Gorry-Hines

The days I'd passed with my mom before she died were still there, it seemed, seared into the corners of my heart.
The atmosphere of the station brought it all back. I could see myself running to the hospital, glad to be seeing my mother again. You never know you're happy until later. Because physical sensations like smells and exhaustion don't figure into our memories, I guess. Only the good bits bob up into view.
I was always startled by the snatches of memory that I saw as happy, how they came.
This time, it was the feeling I got when I stepped out onto the platform. The sense of what it had been like to be on my way to see my mom, for her still to be alive, if only for the time being, if only for that day. The happiness of that knowledge had come back to life inside me.
And the loneliness of that moment. The helplessness. ~ Banana Yoshimoto

This digital revolutionary still believes in most of the lovely deep ideals that energized our work so many years ago. At the core was a sweet faith in human nature. If we empowered individuals, we believed, more good than harm would result.
The way the internet has gone sour since then is truly perverse. The central faith of the web's early design has been superseded by a different faith in the centrality of imaginary entities epitomized by the idea that the internet as a whole is coming alive and turning into a superhuman creature.
The designs guided by this new, perverse kind of faith put people back in the shadows. The fad for anonymity has undone the great opening-of-everyone's-windows of the 1990s. While that reversal has empowered sadists to a degree, the worst effect is a degradation of ordinary people. ~ Jaron Lanier

Looking into each other's eyes and speaking together in low tones, it becomes apparent that she hopes you will walk her through her troubles and show her that male-female relations can be lovely even in loveless union. She is looking for lust fulfilled but she searches also for respect, and in this she is out of luck because you do not know her or like her very much and you do not respect yourself and so the most you can offer this girl is time out of her life and an unsatisfactory meeting of bodies and, if the fates are generous, a couple of laughs and good feelings. At any rate there will unquestionably be a divot in your hearts before dawn and Peg seems to pick up on this after thirty minutes of groping and pawing (the car interior is damp with dew) she breaks away and with great exasperation says, "What do you think you're doing?" You are smiling, because it is an utterly stupid and boring question, and you say to her, "I am sitting in an American car, trying to make out in America," a piece of poetry that arouses something in her, and you both climb into the back seat for a meeting even less satisfactory than you feared it might be. Now she is crying and you are shivering and it is time to go home and if you had a watch you would snap your wrist to look meaningfully at it but she dabs at her face and says she wants you to come upstairs and share a special-occasion bottle of very old and expensive wine and as there is no way not to do this you follow her through the dusty ~ Patrick DeWitt

When you wake up and your heart is going like the clappers or your back feels strained, or you develop some other hang-up, you should let your mind go to the pain and the pain itself will regurgitate the memory which originally caused you to suppress it in your body. In this way the pain goes to the right channel instead of being repressed again, as it is if you take a pill or a bath, saying 'Well, I'll get over it'. Most people channel their pain into God or masturbation or some dream of making it. ~ John Lennon

As we pass the mirror in the bedroom, my attention is drawn to the lovely couple in the reflection. There is a man, tall with broad shoulders. His red hair cut short. He has nothing but a towel on. In his arms is a female, slender but muscular. Her wheat colored hair is pulled back in a neat bun on top of her head. Both of their skin is smooth and flawless, a little paler than most, but still complete perfection. You can tell by the way the man holds her, he cares a lot for her. You can also tell that he is afraid of holding her too tight, not wanting to crush her smaller frame into his body. Looking at this young pair in the mirror, one can only wonder of all the possibilities. What led them to this place? What is in store for them? Will there be a happy ending? ~ Elle A. Rose

And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen. ~ Tim O'Brien

I've lived near here at several different stretches across time, but once, when I lived here a few hundred years ago, I had a camel I named Oded. He was just about the laziest creature ever to talk the Earth. He would pass out when I was in the middle of feeding him, and making it to the closest Bedouin camp for tea was a minor miracle. But when I first met you in that lifetime-"
"Oded broke into a run," Luce said without thinking. "I screamed because I thought he was going to trample me. You said you'd never seen him move like that."
"Yeah, well," Daniel said. "He liked you."
They paused and looked at each other, and Daniel started laughing when Luce's jaw dropped. "I did it!" she cried out. "It was just there, in my memory, a part of me. Like it happened yesterday. I came to me without thinking!"
It was miraculous. All those memories from all those lives that had been lost each time Lucinda died in Daniel's arms were somehow finding their way back to her, the way Luce always found her way back to Daniel.
No. She was finding her way to them.
It was like a gate had been left open after Luce's quest through the Announcers. Those memories stayed with her, from Moscow to Helston to Egypt. Now more were becoming available.
She had a sudden, keen sense of who she was-and she wasn't just Luce Price from Thunderbolt, Georgia. She was every girl she'd ever been, an amalgamation of experience, mistakes, achievements, and, above all, love.
She wa ~ Lauren Kate

When a court officer suggested quarantine for Nerissa, she grabbed the man's pen and jammed it into the back of his hand, screaming that he was a Crimson Guard witch come to remove her memories and replace them with bird-song.
They decided to skip quarantine after that. ~ Caitlin Kittredge

I don't wish for the red house back, not really, yet in a way, I wish for everything back that ever was, everything that once seemed like forever and yet has vanished ... Standing here on an empty hilltop in New Hampshire, as a bulldozer slowly pushes the debris of a small red house into a neat pile, I allow, just for a moment, the past to push hard against the walls of my heart. Being alive, it seems, means learning to bear the weight of the passing of all things. It means finding a way to lightly hold all the places we've loved and left anyway, all the moments and days and years that have already been lived and lost to memory, even as we live on in the here and now, knowing full well that this moment, too, is already gone. It means, always, allowing for the hard truth of endings. It means, too, keeping faith in beginnings. ~ Katrina Kenison

Manage me, I am a mess, swept under the rug of yesterday's home improvement, a whimsical urge tossed aside for the easy reassurance of home and comfort. I am the photograph tucked away as a book-mark, in a book left half unread, once reopened to find memories crawling back into peripheral sight, faded, creased and lonely. I long to be admired, long to be held, torn and laughed at, laughed with, like a distant relative or an old friend breathing in their last breath. I missed the moment when time collapsed and memory was erased, replaced by finicky social experiments, lost in the blur of intoxication, sucked through multi-colored bendy-straws, making way for a spinning world where hub-caps stood still, but our vision didn't. If I could leave you with only one thing, it would be small, foldable, and made from trees, with a few careless words, scribbled in blue; Take a minute to learn me, take a moment to love me, because I need your love to live,and without it, I am nothing. ~ Alex Gaskarth

It was dusk when Ian returned, and the house seemed unnaturally quiet. His uncle was sitting near the fire, watching him with an odd expression on his face that was half anger, half speculation. Against his will Ian glanced about the room, expecting to see Elizabeth's shiny golden hair and entrancing face. When he didn't, he put his gun back on the rack above the fireplace and casually asked, "Where is everyone?"
"If you mean Jake," the vicar said, angered yet more by the way Ian deliberately avoided asking about Elizabeth, "he took a bottle of ale with him to the stable and said he was planning to drink it until the last two days were washed from his memory."
"They're back, then?"
"Jake is back," the vicar corrected as Ian walked over to the table and poured some Madeira into a glass. "The servingwomen will arrive in the morn. Elizabeth and Miss Throckmorton-Jones are gone, however."
Thinking Duncan meant they'd gone for a walk, Ian flicked a glance toward the front door. "Where have they gone at this hour?"
"Back to England."
The glass in Ian's hand froze halfway to his lips. "Why?" he snapped.
"Because Miss Cameron's uncle has accepted an offer for her hand."
The vicar watched in angry satisfaction as Ian tossed down half the contents of his glass as if he wanted to wash away the bitterness of the news. When he spoke his voice was laced with cold sarcasm. "Who's the lucky bridegroom?"
"Sir Francis Belhaven, I believe."
Ian' ~ Judith McNaught

And at half past nine in the evening at that restaurant table in Portugal," Mary continued, "someone gave me a piece of marzipan and it all came back. And I thought: am I really going to spend the rest of my life without ever feeling that again? I thought: I want to go to China. It's full of treasures and strangeness and mystery and joy. I thought, Will anyone be better off if I go straight back to the hotel and say my prayers and confess to the priest and promise never to fall into temptation again? Will anyone be the better for making me miserable?

"And the answer came back - no. No one will. There's no one to fret, no one to condemn, no one to bless me for being a good girl, no one to punish me for being wicked. Heaven was empty. I didn't know whether God had died, or whether there never had been a God at all. Either way I felt free and lonely and I didn't know whether I was happy or unhappy, but something very strange had happened. And all that huge change came about as I had the marzipan in my mouth, before I'd even swallowed it. A taste - a memory - a landslide... ~ Philip Pullman

There were no such stipulations made when we discussed the agreement."
"Nor were they expressly not made. I am making them now. You received what you requested. Or, have you forgotten?" The words sent a shiver down her spine. He was standing behind her, and she could feel the warm kiss of his breath on her bare neck, sending a river of heat through her.
"I have not forgotten." The words came unbidden, and she closed her eyes.
He laid a hand on her arm and, with virtually no pressure, turned her face to him. When he met her eyes, the anger that had been there was gone, replaced by something much more complex. "Neither have I. And not for lack of trying."
Before she could begin to consider the meaning behind his words, he settled his mouth upon hers, robbing her of thought.
"I've tried to forget that kiss... and the carriage ride... and the fencing club... but you seem to have taken up residence... in my memory."
As he spoke between long, drugging kisses that consumed her senses, he guided Callie across the study and into a large chair near the fireplace. Kneeling in front of her, he cupped one cheek in a strong, warm hand, and met her gaze with a searing look. Shaking his head as though he couldn't quite understand what had come over him, he kissed her again, growling low in the back of his throat. Her hands found their way into his thick, dark hair as he caught her bottom lip in his teeth, nibbling and licking at it until she thought she might pe ~ Sarah MacLean

―The thing about memory is that you can feel it eroding slowly, being stolen away from you by time. It starts with the way you stop hearing his voice in your head. Then it's the color of the shirt he wore last Christmas. Before you know it, your memories have become fragmented, as if the small details were grains of sand blown away by the wind. I should be grateful that I'm starting to remember you less. Instead, I felt lonely. Pieces of you that I once held dear are being ripped apart into tiny shreds of information my brain thinks I can afford to forget. I can feel my heart fighting. It loves the feel of you though for the most part, you hurt. I looked for you in places where I knew I would never find you, in faces I knew I would never recognize. I looked for you hoping that through the sheer force of my will I would find your eyes staring back. But that's the thing about memory - you can feel it eroding slowly, being stolen away from you by time. I want to remember you. But I'm no longer entirely sure I really remember you. It kills me. Have you started remembering me less too? ~ Nessie Q.

I closed what little distance was left between us, one hand sliding through his soft hair, the other gathering the back of his shirt into my fist. When my lips finally pressed against his, I felt something coil deep inside of me. There was nothing outside of him, not even the grating of cicadas, not even the gray-bodied trees. My heart thundered in my chest. More, more, more - a steady beat. His body relaxed under my hands, shuddering at my touch. Breathing him in wasn't enough, I wanted to inhale him. The leather, the smoke, the sweetness. I felt his fingers counting up my bare ribs. Liam shifted his legs around mine to draw me closer.

I was off-balance on my toes; the world swaying dangerously under me as his lips traveled to my cheek, to my jaw, to where my pulse throbbed in my neck. He seemed so sure of himself, like he had already plotted out this course.

I didn't feel it happen, the slip. Even if I had, I was so wrapped up in him that I couldn't imagine pulling back or letting go of his warm skin or that moment. His touch was feather-light, stroking my skin with a kind of reverence, but the instant his lips found mine again, a single thought was enough to rocket me out of the honey-sweet haze.

The memory of Clancy's face as he had leaned in to do exactly what Liam was doing now suddenly flooded my mind, twisting its way through me until I couldn't ignore it. Until I was seeing it play out glossy and burning like it was someone else's mem ~ Alexandra Bracken

I love when he's in these moods, this affectionate. Though it can be said of Gray that he's this way all the time with me. He never has an off day. I've known every single day of our life together so far just what he's thinking and feeling because he tells me, he shows me in so many different, lovely, sometimes depraved ways.

Usually with my clothes off.

Most often with his head between my legs.

And that's where I think this hot kiss is going - forget dinner, forget needing to shower off the busy workday. I'm wholly in this when I grip the back of his head and fall deeper into his mouth, moaning my protest when we part too soon.

His forehead rests to mine.

I spur him on. "Your sugar wife needs attention. You've neglected my needs all day, Grayson."

A growl comes out of his mouth and it delights me. Turns me on. Makes me wetter than a summer rain. "You know how hard that smart mouth of yours makes me. I'm about to put you on your knees. ~ V. Theia

If the queen catches you in here again, Princess, she'll sentence you to do the dishes right alongside me! she heard another voice ring out.
No one was there, but Snow knew the voice. It was Mrs. Kindred, the cook who had survived her aunt's dismissals over the years. When Snow's mother was alive, she'd encouraged her daughter to be friendly with those who helped them in the castle, and Mrs. Kindred had always been Snow's favorite person to chat with. She could see herself sitting on a chair, no more than six or seven, watching Mrs. Kindred chop onions, carrots, and leeks and throw them all into a giant pot of broth. She and Mrs. Kindred only stole a few moments together most days now- she suspected her aunt must have forbidden the cook from talking to her, what with how Mrs. Kindred always quickly sent Snow on her way- but back then she had always peppered the cook with questions. ("How do you cut the carrots so small? Why do leeks have sand in them? What spices are you going to add? How do you know how much to put in?") On one such occasion, she'd been such a distraction that Mrs. Kindred had finally picked her up, holding her high on her broad chest, and let her stir the pot herself. Eventually, she taught her how to dice and chop, too, since Snow wouldn't stop talking. By suppertime, young Snow had convinced herself she'd made the whole meal. She had been proud, too, carrying the dishes out to the dining table that night. ~ Jen Calonita

If you want to draw some advantage from your history, you must accept not only this miracle but also many others. In memory, everything can become miraculous. All you have to do is wish it, and freezing winter turns into spring, miserable rooms fill up with golden tapestries, murderers turn good, and children who cry out of loneliness receive caring teachers who are really the children themselves moved back from adulthood to their early years. Yes, my daughter, the past is not fixed and unalterable. With faith and will we can change it, not erasing its darkness but adding lights to it to make it more and more beautiful, the way a diamond is cut. ~ Alejandro Jodorowsky

Happened to them. And the more confident they became, the more sensory details they added to their false memories ("the place smelled horrible").22 Researchers have created imagination inflation indirectly, too, merely by asking people to explain how an unlikely event might have happened. Cognitive psychologist Maryanne Garry finds that as people tell you how an event might have happened, it starts to feel real to them. Children are especially vulnerable to this suggestion.23 Writing turns a fleeting thought into a fact of history, and for Wilkomirski, writing down his memories confirmed his memories. "My illness showed me that it was time for me to write it all down for myself," said Wilkomirski, "just as it was held in my memory, to trace every hint all the way back."24 Just as he rejected the historians at Majdanek who challenged his ~ Carol Tavris

There is no man,' he began, 'however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man - so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise - unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded. I know that there are young fellows, the sons and grand sons of famous men, whose masters have instilled into them nobility of mind and moral refinement in their schooldays. They have, perhaps, when they look back upon their past lives, nothing to retract; they can, if they choose, publish a signed account of everything they have ever said or done; but they are poor creatures, feeble descendants of doctrinaires, and their wisdom is negative and sterile. We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you are not the result of training at home, by a father, or by masters at school, they have sprung from beginnings of a very different order, by reaction from the influence of everything evil o ~ Marcel Proust

You are not sacrificing me…to anything." – Abigail
"You started this, babe. The choice is simple. Either you die alone, nobly like a good sport, or the entire world dies with you, which I don't think they'd appreciate much. So put on your big-girl pants and own up to what you and your stupidity caused. It's Joe Versus the Volcano time. But in the end, I don't give a shit what you do. With the exception of the cowboy there and my family, I hate people with a passion that makes your feelings for Jess look like a schoolgirl crush. Lovely thing about my current situation, I'm truly immortal. You annihilate humanity and the world…I'm still good. So whatever you decide, it won't affect me personally. I would say you're the one who'll have to live with the guilt. But either way, you're dead. Whatever. I delivered my message. My job here is done, and I need to get back to the one that I'm still not sure how I let them talk me into doing – which is even weirder and scarier than the Dark-Hunter gig. Jess, call me if she wusses, and I'll make sure you survive the holocaust." – Zarek ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

At night, with only the bedside lamp on, I would pretend to sleep and listened to Dad's muffled crying in the semi-darkness, wishing that I could cry like him, that I could bring Stevan back from the dead by the strength of my tears. But they were regular tears carving the same slicing-hot trails down my cheeks, and in the end, I could not summon a distinct kind of grief for Stevan. Just the same grief that has gripped mankind for centuries, which time would inevitably ebb into a notch in one's skin or a small limp in the way one walks or a bottled memory that would only resurface some nights. And soon, you'd struggle to remember how that person talked or how that person used to occupy a customized space in your life. And you don't want to forget, but you don't want to remember either, and there seemed to be no place where you could just exist. ~ V.J. Campilan

Is it always this awkward?" Sara asked. Her voice was hushed.
Derek turned to look at her, his gaze falling to the white rose in her hands. She had taken it from the arrangement of hothouse flowers. Nervously her fingers ruffled the fragile petals.
Self-consciously Sara sniffed the pale blossom and began to insert it back into the huge vase. "It's nice to have roses in January," she murmured. "Nothing in the world has such a lovely scent."
She was so innocently beautiful, with the disordered waves of her hair falling around her face. His muscles tightened in response. He would like to have her painted this way, standing by the table with her head turned toward him, the white flower caught in her fingers. "Bring it here," he said.
She obeyed, coming to him and handing him the rose. He closed his fingers around the plump head of the flower and pulled gently, freeing the petals from their tenuous moorings. Tossing aside the desecrated stem, he opened his hand over the bed. The petals scattered in a fragrant shower. Sara drew in a quick breath, staring at him as if mesmerized. ~ Lisa Kleypas

... What do you want, Ash?"
"Your head," Ash answered softly. "On a pike. But what I want doesn't matter this time." He pointed his sword at me. "I've come for her."
I gasped as my heart and stomach began careening around my chest. He's here for me, to kill me, like he promised at Elysium.
"Over my dead body." Puck smiled, as if this was a friendly conversation on the street, but I felt muscles coiling under his skin.
"This was part of the plan." The prince raised his sword, the icy blade wreathed in mist. "I will avenge her today, and put her memory to rest." For a moment, a shadow of anguish flitted across his face, and he closed his eyes. When he opened them, they were cold and glittered with malice. "Prepare yourself."
"Stay back, princess," Puck warned, pushing me out of the way. He reached into his boot and pullet out a dagger, the curved blade clear as glass. "This might get a little rough."
"Puck, no." I clutched at his sleeve. "Don't fight him. Someone could die."
"Duels to the death tend to end that way." Puck grinned, but it was a savage thing, grim and frightening. "But I'm touched that you care. One moment, princeling," he called to Ash, who inclined his head. Taking my wrist, Puck steered me behind the fountain and bent close, his breath warm on my face.
"I have to do this, princess," he said firmly. "Ash won't let us go without a fight, and this has been coming for a long time now." For a moment, a shadow of regret fl ~ Julie Kagawa

Lucy paused, hands full of green beans, her memory flashing back to the giant pots of crawfish on the stove. Her Mama's green eyes would squint into the steam, hair pulled back, a frown of concentration on her face. The salted water was flavored and ready to receive the "mudbugs" out of their burlap sacks. Other than an onion or maybe an ear of corn, if it wasn't alive when you threw it in, then it shouldn't be in the pot, she'd say. Did her Mama mind that Lucy didn't cook those old family recipes? Was she turning her back on her culinary heritage as surely as Paulette was?
She snapped the ends of the beans faster, glancing at the clock. This whole dinner was breaking her Mama's cardinal rule: don't hurry. She thought if a cook was in a hurry, you might as well just make a sandwich and go on your way. ~ Mary Jane Hathaway

As he breathed the black and grey air into his body he no longer thought of anything as lovely, the way the retiring trees of his boyhood had been; for everything was made up of dirt-clods; and you do construct a mountain from molehills or other over-codified facts. If only the cities had been dynamited before it was too late for him! -- That Pol Pot sure had the right idea, blowing down those ticky-tacky rice paper offices and illuminating the middlemen with bullets of vanguardist light so everyone could get back to the country, don't you think? -- As things stood, even had Bug been able to cover the earth again with forests, after having lived so long in the excremental piles of cement and rusted steel he never could have seen trees as more than tedious identical dirty giant toothpicks unfit to be taken into the mouth' his summer camp, as a dishwasher jail where you breathed in the steam of bad food; and the islands to which he had rowed, as sad unwholesome protuberances, polyps and land-cancers still in the stink of the outhouse -- and all the girls had long since grown up completely to make travesties of their lives, even though some inherited great riches as we used to reckon riches in those days. -- But surely this change in him was necessary, for without wretchedness and degradation of self one will never accomplish anything. ~ William T. Vollmann

I have had a lifelong association with these things. (Odd that the word 'trees' does not apply.) I can accept them and their power and their age because I was early exposed to them. ON the other hand, people lacking such experience begin to have a feeling of uneasiness here, of danger, of being shut in, enclosed and overwhelmed. It is not only the size of these redwoods but their strangeness that frightens them. And why not? For these are the last remaining members of a race that flourished over four continents as far back in geologic time as the upper Jurassic period. Fossils of these ancients have been found dating from the Cretaceous era while in the Eocene and Miocene they were spread over England and Europe and America. And then the glaciers moved down and wiped the Titans out beyond recovery. And only these few are left--a stunning memory of what the world was like once long ago. Can it be that we do not love to be reminded that we are very young and callow in a world that was old when we came into it? And could there be a strong resistance to the certainty that a living world will continue its stately way when we no longer inhabit it? p. 172 Travels with Charley ~ John Steinbeck

After that they browsed for a minute or two in a semi-detached fashion. Nick found a set of Trollope which had a relatively modest and approachable look among the rest, and took down The Way We Live Now, with an armorial bookplate, the pages uncut. "What have you found there?" said Lord Kessler, in a genially possessive tone. "Ah, you're a Trollope man, are you?"

"I'm not sure I am, really," said Nick. "I always think he wrote too fast. What was it Henry James said, about Trollope and his 'great heavy shovelfuls of testimony to constituted English matters'?"

Lord Kessler paid a moment's wry respect to this bit of showing off, but said, "Oh, Trollope's good. He's very good on money."

"Oh…yes…" said Nick, feeling doubly disqualified by his complete ignorance of money and by the aesthetic prejudice which had stopped him from ever reading Trollope. "To be honest, there's a lot of him I haven't yet read."

"No, this one is pretty good," Nick said, gazing at the spine with an air of judicious concession. Sometimes his memory of books he pretended to have read became almost as vivid as that of books he had read and half forgotten, by some fertile process of auto-suggestion. He pressed the volume back into place and closed the gilded cage. ~ Alan Hollinghurst

I'll try just putting one foot in front of the other, and walk a step at a time without rushing. So I can burn the path into my memory while I can still see it. So that when all this is over, I can find my way back. Because I intend to come back. Hopefully with all of us together. ~ Yukako Kabei

So he could talk to Jane and find out what had happened between her and Blakeborough after he left. He could finally get an answer to his marriage proposal.
Proposal? Jane would probably call it a marriage command.
He groaned. Perhaps it wouldn't be a bad idea to talk to her while he waited. He could always pack her off in another hackney before it was time for Meredith to return home. Yes, that would be best.
Climbing inside the hackney, he doffed his hat and shrugged out of his box coat. But all of his perfectly logical reasons for being there went right out of his head the moment he saw her looking so luscious and lovely in her sunny gown.
Because he desired only one thing. Jane. In his arms. Now.
She must have seen the feral need flare in his face, for her eyes went wide. That was the only reaction she had time for, however, before he dragged her into his embrace so he could take her mouth in a hard, urgent kiss.
God, he wanted her. He would never stop wanting her. Fisting his hands in her puffy sleeves to hold her still, he plundered her mouth the way he ached to plunder her body.
Suddenly she shoved him back. "What are you doing? That's not why--"
He clasped her head in his hands, dislodging her bonnet, which tumbled to the floor. Then he kissed her again, demanding her to kiss him back, to need him back. It took her a moment, but then she moaned low in her throat and melted against him.
And he exulted. She was soft, so wonde ~ Sabrina Jeffries