Something Strange And Deadly Quotes

Eleanor," Daniel said. "Miss Fitt! Wake up!"
I fluttered my eyelids open. "I'm not a misfit anymore," I rasped. "I thought I told you that. ~ Susan Dennard

But you cannot know the glimpses I have had, you cannot know there is another, dazzling place, that seems to welcome me! I have been led to it, Helen, by someone marvellous and strange. You won't know this. They will tell you of her, and they will make her seem squalid and ordinary, they will turn my passion into something gross and wrong. You will know, that it is neither of those things. It is only love, Helen - only that.
I cannot live, and not be at her side! ~ Sarah Waters

His silence had begun as something protective, but over the years it has transformed into something near oppressive, something that manages him rather than the other way around. Now he cannot find a way out of it, even when he wants to. He imagines he is floating in a small bubble of water, encased on all sides by walls and ceilings and floors of ice, all many feet thick. He knows there is a way out, but he is unequipped; he has no tools to begin his work, and his hands scrabble uselessly against the ice's slick. He had thought that by not saying who he was, he was making himself more palatable, less strange. But now, what he doesn't say makes him stranger, an object of pity and even suspicion. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

People here say that there is something strange, but only about Dawn. The other girls, they are normal, polite young women. They all look alike, like tiny replicas of their Ma. But Dawn, she looks nothing like them and she acts nothing like them. ~ Carys Jones

Then she had noticed that Arin's fingernails were blackened, and how he kept reaching into his pocket as if to reassure himself that something was there.
She had told herself not to guess. But she could never help guessing. A smile warmed her face.
He shut his eyes in mock chagrin. "Gods, can I keep nothing from you?"
"I didn't mean to."
"Devious thing. I won't give it to you yet. It's for Ninarrith."
Time seemed strange; it was as if the ring were already on her smallest finger, the most vulnerable one.
"It's simple," Arin had hastened to say.
"I will love it."
"Will you wear it?"
"Yes."
"Always?"
"Yes," she had said, "if you show me how to make one for you, too. ~ Marie Rutkoski

There were no houses, no palace, no constructions of any sort; it was rather an immense sea, though the waters were invisible and the shore had disappeared. In this city, seated far from all things, sad last dream lost among the shadows, while the day faded and sobbing rose gently in the perspective of a strange horizon, Anne, like something which could not be represented, no longer a human being but simply a being, marvelously a being, among the mayflies and the falling suns, with the agonizing atoms, doomed species, wounded illnesses, ascended the course of waters where obscure origins floundered. She alas had no means of knowing where she arrived, but when the prolonged echoes of this enormous night were melting together into a dreary and vague unconsciousness, searching and wailing a wail which was like the tragic destruction of something nonliving, empty entities awoke and, like monsters constantly exchanging their absence of shape for other absences of shape and taming silence by terrible reminiscences of silence, they went out in a mysterious agony. ~ Maurice Blanchot

Tancredi and Angelica were passing in front of them at that moment, his gloved right hand on her waist, their outspread arms interlaced, their eyes gazing into each other's. The black of his tail coat, the pink of her dress, combining formed a kind of strange jewel. They were the most moving sight there, two young people in love dancing together, blind to each other's defects, deaf to the warnings of fate, deluding themselves that the whole course of their lives would be as smooth as the ballroom floor, unknowning actors made to play the parts of Juliet and Romeo by a director who had concealed the fact that tomb and poison were already in the script. Neither of them was good, each full of self-interest, swollen with secret aims; yet there was something sweet and touching about them both; those murky but ingenuous ambitions of theirs were obliterated by the words of jesting tenderness he was murmuring in her ear, by the scent of her hair, by the mutual clasp of those bodies of theirs destined to die. . .

For them death was purely an intellectual concept, a fact of knowledge as it were and no more, not an experience which pierced the marrow of their bones. Death, oh yes, it existed of course, but it was something that happened to others. The thought occurred to Don Fabrizio that it was ignorance of this supreme consolation that made the young feel sorrows much more sharply than the old; the latter are nearer the safety exit. ~ Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

Eddie Carroll had just come in from outside, and read Noonan's letter standing in the mudroom. He flipped to the beginning of the story. He stood reading for almost five minutes before noticing he was uncomfortably warm. He tossed his jacket at a hook and wandered into the kitchen.

He sat for a while on the stairs to the second floor, turning through the pages. Then he was stretched on the couch in his office, head on a pile of books, reading in a slant of late October light, with no memory of how he had got there.

He rushed through to the ending, then sat up, in the grip of a strange, bounding exuberance. He thought it was possibly the rudest, most awful thing he had ever read, and in his case that was saying something. He had waded through the rude and awful for most of his professional life, and in those fly-blown and diseased literary swamps had discovered flowers of unspeakable beauty, of which he was sure this was one. It was cruel and perverse and he had to have it. He turned to the beginning and started reading again.

("Best New Horror") ~ Joe Hill

The Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast you first must make it beautiful. In some strange way, I have tried to do that with manic-depressive illness. It has been a fascinating, albeit deadly, enemy and companion; I have found it to be seductively complicated, a distillation both of what is finest in our natures, and of what is most dangerous. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

You will think you take generous views of her; but you will never begin to know through what a strange sea of feeling she passed before she accepted you. As she stood there in front of you the other day, she plunged into it. She said 'Why not?' to something which, a few hours earlier, had been inconceivable. She turned about on a thousand gathered prejudices and traditions as on a pivot, and looked where she had never looked hitherto. ~ Henry James

The Forsytes were resentful of something, not individually, but as a family; this resentment expressed itself in an added perfection of raiment, an exuberance of family cordiality, an exaggeration of family importance, and the sniff. Danger so indispensable in bringing out the fundamental quality of any society, group, or individual was what the Forsytes scented; the premonition of danger put a burnish on their armour. For the first time, as a family, they appeared to have an instinct of being in contact, with some strange and unsafe thing. ~ John Galsworthy

What led me to be an actor is that I have a strange something in me that can drastically change the way I appear to the world. Growing up, I couldn't understand why people would always have different ideas of me - but because of that I became aware of how you can manipulate your own ability to change. And then I learned to make a career of it. ~ Zooey Deschanel

On days like today,
even if I see something that would
make a good picture,
I don't take it out of my pouch.
I take my time
as I walk...
here, between the sky above
and the earth
below...
Its rhythm follows
the pace of my
steps.
A song emerges from
my parted
lips.
As I look around at the world,
out from myself,
I continue walking.
But I carried on
my strange song and
dance
all the way home.
I never took out my camera. ~ Hitoshi Ashinano

Dear Mr. Future Crush,

Right now you are frustratingly just a figment of my imagination, something I daydream about in times of loneliness or boredom.

Before going to sleep I idly wonder what you're going to be like, however that's like trying to imagine a new colour.

So instead you take the form of a happy song, the smell of a cologne, the hero in a novel.

You're a collage of all my happy moments and a sense of comfort during the sad ones.

It's silly I know – even though we've never met I can't help but feel a strange sense of longing and hope.

All I know is that whoever you are, you're going to be amazing.

(Perhaps one day) yours,
___________


P.S. You better like pizza. ~ Will Darbyshire

Memory loss is strange. It's like showing up for a movie after it's started. I'm sure I've missed something. I don't know if it's important or not. So I do the best I can to lose myself in the story and hope the gaps don't matter. Later, I can look it up, or someone will remind me, or maybe it's perfectly fine to not know. ~ Elizabeth Langston

MARCELLUS: But look, Agathon, what strange dark light is glowing amongst the clouds. You would think a sea of flame is blazing behind the clouds. A divine fire! And the sky is like a blue bell. It's as if one can hear it tolling in deep, solemn tones. You might even suspect that up there above us, in unattainable heights, something is taking place of which we shall never know. But at times we can sense it, when that vast silence has settled over the earth. And yet! All this is very confusing. The gods have to pose insoluble riddles for us humans. And the earth does not rescue us from the cunning of the gods; for it too is full of things that confound the senses. Both things and humans confuse me. True enough! Things are very taciturn! And the human soul won't yield up its riddles. You ask and it keeps silent.

AGATHON: Let's live and not ask questions. Life is full of beauty. ~ Georg Trakl

Women have a thirst for order and beauty as for something physical; there is a strange female power of hating ugliness and waste as good men can only hate sin and bad men virtue. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

This was hers and hers alone. Forevermore. Or at least so I thought… but shit didn't work out that way, and then you came along… and circle be damned, I don't want to be finished with you." Now it was her turn to feel poleaxed, her body going numb as she struggled to comprehend what he was saying. "Autumn, I'm in love with you - that's why I came here tonight. And we don't have to be together, and you don't have to get over what I said, but I wanted you to hear that from me. And I also want to tell you that I'm at peace with it, because…" He took a deep breath. "You want to know why Wellsie got pregnant? It wasn't because I wanted a young. It's because she knew that every night when I left the house I could get killed in the field, and as she said, she wanted something to keep on living for. If I had been the one to go? She would have carved out a life for herself, and… the strange thing is, I would have wanted her to do that. Even if it included someone else. I guess I've realized that… she wouldn't have wanted me to mourn her forever. She'd have wanted me to move on… and I have. ~ J.R. Ward

As she gazed into those cool blue eyes, something strange happened in the vicinity of her middle. She suddenly felt like a hungry woman who had just been presented with a tempting dessert. Her moment of sensory weakness embarrassed her, and she frowned. "Damn, you're pretty," Dallie said softly. "Not half as pretty as you," she snapped, determined to squash whatever strangeness was lurking in the air between them. ~ Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Just as that puzzled savage who has picked up - a strange cast-up from the ocean? - something unearthed from the sands? - or an obscure object fallen down from the sky? - intricate in curves, it gleams first dully and then with a bright thrust of light. Just as he turns it this way and that, turns it over, trying to discover what to do with it, trying to discover some mundane function within his own grasp, never dreaming of its higher function.

So also we, holding Art in our hands, confidently consider ourselves to be its masters; boldly we direct it, we renew, reform and manifest it; we sell it for money, use it to please those in power; turn to it at one moment for amusement - right down to popular songs and night-clubs, and at another - grabbing the nearest weapon, cork or cudgel - for the passing needs of politics and for narrow-minded social ends. But art is not defiled by our efforts, neither does it thereby depart from its true nature, but on each occasion and in each application it gives to us a part of its secret inner light. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Helplessness was a strange experience, new to her; she had never found it hard to face things and make decisions; but she was not dealing with things - this was a fog without shapes or definitions, in which something kept forming and shifting before it could be seen ... ~ Ayn Rand

Yeah, impress her with your carpentry skills. Judging by some of the books she reads, she likes big, strong, guys - men who do honest work to build their muscles. She's horny as hell when she comes to bed some nights. I'm thinking you could offer to mend some fencing, finish my deck, or something. Watching you work would get her juices flowing."

"Is this your way of tricking me into doing your yard work?" Connor snickered and raised his beer. "Strange way to go about it, bud. ~ Anne Lange

Well, Mimi Mackson, tell me what you like to bake."
"Lots of things- brownies, cookies, pies, tarts, scones. But cupcakes are my favorite. I like to flavor them with unusual spices and herbs."
"I see. And what's the last thing that you made?"
"Double-chocolate brownies with cinnamon and cayenne, to welcome someone home."
"And prior to that?"
"Cheddar-chive biscuits."
She waved her hand in front of her face like she smelled something bad. "No, no, my word, that will not do at all. Just sweet things, please." She stood and paced behind the desk. "Ha! Cheese and chives! I wouldn't dream of baking, eating, or even serving those, not to win the world."
Well, that was strange. Sweet isn't sweet without savory. One isn't good without the other- I thought everyone knew that. Even the most sugary dessert needs a dash of salt.
Mrs. T sat again. "So tell me then, young Mimi. The best sweet thing you've ever, ever made?"
"Hmm... lemon-lavender cupcakes, I guess. To celebrate friendship. ~ Rajani LaRocca

Memories are strange things. Withough being something I can hold in my hand, they wield a beguiling power over me. Like a mirage in the noontime heat of summer, they dance before my inner eyes and beckon me to find water where there is not water. ~ Joy Sikorski

My best times are midnight to six actually. I'll leaf through my notebooks and if something catches my eye and I feel like I want to transfer it from the notebook to the page, I do, and then comes this very strange process which is difficult to describe in that I'll write until I get stuck or I can't go any further or I'm boring myself or whatever and then I might go to another poem. ~ Rita Dove

By then the man had returned and set the kettle among the embers. Then he looked up, paused, then picked up his share of the bread and reached over to put it in front of me.
"That's yours," I said.
"You appear to need it more than I do," he said, looking amused. "Go ahead. I won't starve."
I picked up the bread, feeling a weird sense of unreality: Did he expect me to be grateful? The situation was so strange I simply had to turn it into absurdity--it was either that or sink into fear and apprehension. "Well, does it matter if I starve?" I said. "Or do Galdran's torturers require only plump victims for their arts?"
The man had started to unload something from the saddlebag at his side, but he stopped and looked up with that contemplative gaze again, his broad-brimmed black hat just shadowing his eyes. "The situation has altered," he said slowly. "You must perceive how your value has changed."
His words, his tone--as if he expected an outbreak of hysterics--fired my indignation. Maybe my situation was desperate, and sooner than later I was going to be having nightmares about it--but not for the entertainment of some drawling Court-bred flunky.
"He'll try to use me against my brother," I said in my flattest voice.
"I rather suspect he will be successful. In the space of one day your brother and his adherents attacked our camp twice. It would appear they are not indifferent to your fate."
I remembered then that he had said something about ~ Sherwood Smith

And a strange, deadly war is raging around the world. Yet, each person who has lost a loved one surely knows secretly, deeply, that no war, no act of revenge, no daisy-cutters dropped on someone else's loved ones or someone else's children, will blunt the edges of their pain or bring their own loved ones back. War cannot avenge those who have died. War is only a brutal desecration of their memory. ~ Arundhati Roy

It's strange, talking about love. I used to hate the word.
Hate is too strong. I was sick of reading about it in books, hearing it in songs, watching it in films. It seemed such a huge burden to place on another person - to love them; to give them something so unbelievably fragile and expect them not to break it or lose it or leave it behind on the No.96 bus. ~ Michael Robotham

The outside world, the world of free time in the yard or the garden or on the street, is only a distant murmur in the sickroom. Inside, a whole world of characters and stories proliferate out of the books you read. The fever that weakens your perception as it sharpens your imagination turns the sickroom into something new, both familiar and strange; monsters come grinning out of the patterns on the curtains and the carpet, and chairs, tables, bookcases and wardrobes burst out of their normal shapes and become mountains and buildings and ships you can almost touch although they're far away ~ Bernhard Schlink

So strange is the human being that in the midst of my new life and fulfilled wishes, I was sometimes aware of a slight, fleeting, subconscious desire for solitude, for even boring and empty days. It seemed to me that the time I had spent at home and the dreary uneventful life from which I was so glad to escape, was something desirable. ~ Hermann Hesse

At first Silas liked the subjects simply because of their strangeness, but slowly he began to believe in the possibilities of what he was reading, in a world filled with secrets and magic. When he was younger, he'd suspected his father believed in many of these things too, so that made it easy for them to talk. As he grew older, Silas began to see the glimmers of hieroglyphic logic behind the occult. There was a reason for these oddities to exist, perhaps as strange connections between the mind and the things people feared or desired. Magic was a conversation. Ghosts were real, and they were watching because something had happened that necessitated their presence. ~ Ari Berk

Whenever Sadie sees engagement rings, she feels a strange mix of emotions: a kind of excitement mixed
with a vague sadness. A longing for a speci??c kind of inclusion she both aspires to and fears. And, oddly, she feels a sense of failure, of
shame. She knows it's nonsensical, but there it is, big inside her, this sense of having screwed everything up, of having lost something she
never had. ~ Elizabeth Berg

HELLO. Hello hello hello hello hello hello.
Hello?
Damn, now I've gone and done it. I've made hello go all abstract and weird. It looks like an alien rune now, something an astronaut would find engraved on a moon rock and go, A strange moon word! I must bring this back to Earth as a gift for my deaf son! And which would then
of course
hatch flying space piranhas and wipe out humanity in less than three days, SOMEHOW sparing the astronaut just so he could be in the final shot, weeping on his knees in the ruins of civilization and crying out to the heavens, It was just helloooooooo!
Oh. Huh. It's totally back to normal now. No more alien doom. Astronaut, I just kept you from destroying Earth,
YOU'RE WELCOME. ~ Laini Taylor

Life is so full of unpredictable beauty and strange surprises. Sometimes that beauty is too much for me to handle. Do you know that feeling? When something is just too beautiful? When someone says something or writes something or plays something that moves you to the point of tears, maybe even changes you. ~ Mark Oliver Everett

If a man must be obsessed by something, I suppose a boat is as good as anything, perhaps a bit better than most. A small sailing craft is not only beautiful, it is seductive and full of strange promise and the hint of trouble. ~ E.B. White

It's so strange how life works: You want something and you wait and wait and feel like it's taking forever to come. Then it happens and it's over and all you want to do is curl back up in that moment before things changed. ~ Lauren Oliver

Something in this meadow and places like it, humble and hidden, offers respite and moments of calm for the wild, adventurous soul that plagues the boys of the world, the wanderer's soul that gnaws and aches inside of them even unto gray manhood. It is the plague of horizons, the plague of the next river bend, the plague that drives men over the vast oceans into strange lands beyond the edges of the maps. ~ R.W. Schmidt

My angel, oh my angel, perhaps our whole earthly existence is now but a pun to you, or a grotesque rhyme, something like "dental" and "transcendental" (remember?), and the true meaning of reality, of that piercing term, purged of all our strange, dreamy, masquerade interpretations, now sounds so pure and sweet that you, angel, find it amusing that we could have taken the dream so seriously (although you and I did have an inkling of why everything disintegrated at one furtive touch
words, conventions of everyday life, systems, persons
so, you know, I think laughter is some chance little ape of truth astray in our world. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, "Musing among the vegetables?" - was that it? - "I prefer men to cauliflowers" - was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace - Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished - how strange it was! - a few sayings like this about cabbages. ~ Virginia Woolf