Stand Still In Time Quotes

Is it possible to fix love and make it stand still in time? Well, we can try, but that would turn our lives into a hell. I haven't been married for more than 20 years to the same person, because neither she nor I have remained the same. That's why our relationship is more alive than ever. I don't expect her to behave as she did when we first met. Nor does she want me to be the person I was when I found her. Love is beyond time, or, rather, love is both time and space, but all focused on one single constantly evolving point
the Aleph. ~ Paulo Coelho

Soul mates meet in a place where time stands still. You recall where you were when the call came in. The vivid colors of the day. The season. The way the sun was streaming in or how the rain fell upon the glass. That's how you know it was your destiny. You can remember the smallest details of your meeting. And you thought it wouldn't matter. ~ Kate McGahan

You still do not quite understand, do you?" she said softly. "I do not want you to change. I fell head over ears in love with you the first time I saw you just because you are who you are. ~ Mary Balogh

Usually, I set one foot in a library and I feel my own internal volume lower. A library is a physical equivalent of a sigh. It's the silence, sure, but it's also the certainty of all those books, the way they stand side by side with their still, calm conviction. It's the reassurance of knowledge in the face of confusion. ~ Deb Caletti

Meghan and I talked about music - she loved Ella Fitzgerald. "What about all the hip acts that college kids love? Do you like any of them?"
"Like who?"
"I don't know all their names. Snoop Diggity Do and all those hip cats." Meghan shook her head and laughed. We talked about movies - she loved anything made before 1964. No wonder I thought she was older; she was an old soul in a young body.
"So what's your favorite movie?" I asked.
"To Kill a Mockingbird." My mother would have liked Meghan. She made my father and me watch To Kill a Mockingbird with her when I was in first grade. It must have been the twentieth time she'd seen it, but she still cried at the parts that made her weepy-eyed the first nineteen times. ~ Donna VanLiere

Lex poked Elysia. "The relationship is going well, it seems."
Elysia's face erupted with worry. "Oh, Lex, I'm so sorry. It just sort of . . . happened. We were in that hotel for so many days, just waiting around to hear word from Croak, waiting for Mort to figure out a way to rescue you guys. And Wicket and Lazlo not letting us leave, we just went a little stir-crazy and - omigod, I must seem like such a bad friend, and all while you were still stuck in that awful jail and poor Driggs and - "
"Lys," Lex said, taking her by the shoulders before she could launch into a full-blown monsoon of tears. "It's fine. I think we've all learned a thing or two about taking happiness where you can get it. Plus . . . you know. It's about time."
"About time? What do you mean?"
"I mean you two have been itching to get into each other's pants since the dawn of earth."
Elysia looked shocked for a moment, then sighed. "I don't know what I'm thinking," she said, staring back and forth between her mostly uneaten sandwich and Ferbus. "He's gross. He's mean. He's ugly. He's a lousy drunk, he's the biggest nerd on the planet, he looks like a leprechaun, his hair is the color of Cheetos - "
"And you luuurve him."
Elysia scowled and crossed her arms. "And I lurve him. ~ Gina Damico

He read the veinings of a leaf, the pattern on a mushroom cap, and divined mysteries, relations, futures, possibilities: the magic of symbols, the foreshadowing of numbers and writing, the reduction of infinitudes and multiplicities to simplicity, to system, to concept. For all these ways of comprehending the world through the mind no doubt lay within him, nameless, unnamed, but not inconceivable, not beyond the bounds of presentiment, still in the germ, but essential to his nature, part of him, growing organically within him. And if we were to go still further back beyond this Rainmaker and his time which to us seems so early and primitive, if we were to go several thousand years further back into the past, wherever we found man we would still find - this is our firm belief - the mind of man, that mind which has no beginning and always has contained everything that it later produces. ~ Hermann Hesse

Hey, Buddy," he said to me. I got a close-up view of his strange, light blue eyes and golden skin as he threw his arms around me and kept walking right over me. I had to throw my arms around him, too, to keep from thudding flat on my back on the dock.
"Oh, pardon me!" he said, pulling me out from under him and setting me on my feet again. "I didn't even see you there."
"That's quite all right," I managed in the same fake-formal tone. His warm hands still held my waist. This was the first time a boy had ever touched my bare tummy. My happy skin sent shocked messages to my brain that went something like, He's touching me! Are you getting this? He's touching me! Eeeeeeee! My brain got it, all right, and put the rest of my body on high alert. My heart thumped painfully, just like in my dream.
But as I looked into his eyes, I saw he was already gone, glancing up the stairs to the marina. If I didn't know better, I'd say he'd been flirting with me. I knew better. He treated all girls this way.
He slid out of my grasp. He may have had to shake one hand violently to extricate it from my friendly vise-like grip. "See you later, Junior," he threw over his shoulder at me as he climbed the steps to the marina. ~ Jennifer Echols

It was never about money for us it was about us against the system. That system that kills the human spirit. We stand for something to those dead souls inching along the freeways in their metal coffins. We show them that the human spirit is still alive ~ Bhikkhu Bodhi

But depression wasn't the word. This was a plunge encompassing sorrow and revulsion far beyond the personal: a sick, drenching nausea at all humanity and human endeavor from the dawn of time. The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order. Old age, sickness, death. No escape for anyone. Even the beautiful ones were like soft fruit about to spoil. And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave, producing more and more new beings to suffer like this was some kind of redemptive, or good, or even somehow morally admirable thing: dragging more innocent creatures into the lose-lose game. Squirming babies and plodding, complacent, hormone-drugged moms. Oh, isn't he cute? Awww. Kids shouting and skidding in the playground with no idea what future Hells await them: boring jobs and ruinous mortgages and bad marriages and hair loss and hip replacements and lonely cups of coffee in an empty house and a colostomy bag at the hospital. Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. People gambled and golfed and planted gardens and traded stocks and had sex and bought new cars and practiced yoga and worked and prayed and redecorated their homes and got worked up over the news and fussed over their children and gossiped about their neighbors and pored over restaurant reviews and found ~ Donna Tartt

We're not going to make it, I said.
The words caught in my throat, choking me. What was it Leslie had said to me when we were discussing Shannon's and Antoinetta's disappearance? 'You're beginning to sound like one of the characters in your books, Adam.' She'd been right. If this were a novel my heroes would have arrived just in the nick of time and saved the day. But real life didn't work like that. Real life had no happy endings. Despite our best efforts, despite my love for Tara [his wife] and my determination to protect her, and after everything we'd been through at the LeHorn house, fate conspired against us. We were still nine or ten miles from home, and night was almost upon us. By the time we got there it would already be too late. I fought back tears. I had the urge just to lie down in the middle of the road and let the next car run over me. ~ Brian Keene

There's still this thing that happens after you break up with
someone. It barely takes any time to work. All you have to do
is continue with your life, and then when you find yourself in a
room with her again it's as if you're a different person. Maybe
your posture is a little more confident. Maybe your laughter is
louder. You're wearing perfume she's never smelled before and
you have a new way of pinning back your hair. You don't even
have to say anything because your presence alone is enough to
say Look at who I am without you. ~ Nina LaCour

His hands slid from around me, hovering over the scar encircling my neck that was still healing from the collar. He leaned away from me and the hardness carved its way back onto his face.
I took hold of his armor vest, pulling him back to me. But the guard was going back up over him, one thought at a time. "I don't belong to you." I repeated the words I said to him that night he pulled the stitches from my arm. This time, to lift the weight that pressed down onto him and silence whatever words were whispering in his mind.
And because a small part of me still wanted them to be true.
"Yes, you do." He pulled the hair back out of my face so he could look at me. "Like I belong to you. ~ Adrienne Young

Please don't take him away from this world. Please don't let him die here in my arms, not after everything we've been through together, not after You've taken so many others. Please, I beg You, let him live. I am willing to sacrifice anything to make this happen- I'm willing to do anything You ask. Maybe you'll laugh at me for such a naive promise, but I mean it in earnest, and I don't care if it makes no sense or seems impossible. Let him live. Please. I can't bear this a second time.
Tell me there is still good in this world. Tell me there is still hope for all of us. ~ Marie Lu

But you shouldn't have let her. That's the only way with these fanciful women that chaw high
innocent or guilty. She'd have come round in time. We all do! Custom does it! It's all the same in the end! However, I think she's fond of her man still
whatever he med be of her. You were too quick about her. I shouldn't have let her go! I should have kept her chained on
her spirit for kicking would have been broke soon enough! There's nothing like bondage and a stone-deaf taskmaster for taming us women. Besides, you've got the laws on your side. Moses knew. ~ Thomas Hardy

I find it wholesome to be alone in the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. i never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men then when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows. The really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge College is as solitary as a dervis in the desert. The farmer can work alone in the field or the woods all day, hoeing or chopping and not feel lonesome, because he is employed; but when he comes home at night he cannot sit down in a room alone, at the mercy of his thoughts, but must be where he can "see the folks," and recreate, and as he thinks remunerate, himself for his day's solitude; and hence he wonders how the student can sit alone in the house all night and most of the day without ennui and "the blues;" but he does not realize that the student, though in the house, is still at work in his field, and chopping in his woods, as the farmer in his, and in turn seeks the same recreation and society that the latter does, though it may be a more condensed form of it. ~ Henry David Thoreau

As long as you hold on to your anger for the wrong man of the past, he will forever have control over your ability to be happy in the future." A lot of you have moved on physically, but you still carry the pain and the anger that he caused you inside. Give yourself a fair chance to find true happiness. Now is the time to finally let him go. ~ Amari Soul

My style hasn't changed much in all these sixty years. I still use, most of the time, existing light and try not to push people around. I have to be as much a diplomat as a photographer. People don't often take me seriously because I carry so little equipment and make so little fuss ... I never carried a lot of equipment. My motto has always been, "Keep it simple". ~ Alfred Eisenstaedt

Listen to me, Artemisia.
Your hands are not your life.
Your gift does not flow
from these bones and tendons.
They could slice off your hands
and you would still
find a way to paint.

You may have to let the bones
grow back together,
to let the wounds close.
But the body is its own
amazing piece of art.

It will heal, in time. ~ Joy McCullough

I've walked a lot in the mountains in Iceland. And as you come to a new valley, as you come to a new landscape, you have a certain view. If you stand still, the landscape doesn't necessarily tell you how big it is. It doesn't really tell you what you're looking at. The moment you start to move the mountain starts to move. ~ Olafur Eliasson

For there is much to do, amounting in fact to a remaking of modern society. All democratic experiments, all revolutions, all demands for equality have so far, in every instance, stopped short of sexual equality. Every society has in its prestige structures a series of subtle, interacting codes of dominance that always, everywhere, finally rank men higher than women. Nowhere has any society successfully dispensed with the age-old sex-role division of labor and the rewards in goods and power that accompany it. Nowhere do women enjoy the rights, privileges, possibilities and leisure time that men do. Everywhere men still mediate between women and power, women and the state, women and freedom, women and themselves. ~ Rosalind Miles

For a long time I spent my weary days in a fog of what might be and what has been and I guess you could say im still learning how to accept what is. ~ Nikki Rowe

In the long evenings in west Beirut, there was time enough to consider where the core of the tragedy lay. In the age of Assyrians, the Empire of Rome, in the 1860s perhaps? In the french mandate? In Auschwitz? In Palestine? In the rusting front-door keys now buried deep in the rubble of Chatila? In the 1978 Israeli invasion? In the 1982 invasion? Was there a point where one could have said: Stop, beyond this point there is no future? Did I witness the point of no return in 1976? That 12 year-old on the broken office chair in the ruins of the Beirut front line. Now he was in his mid-twenties - if he was still alive - a gunboy, no more. A gunman, no doubt ... ~ Robert Fisk

Helsinki may not be as cold as you make it out to be, but California is still a lot nicer. I don't remember the last time I couldn't walk around in shorts all day. ~ Linus Torvalds

Interesting outfit."

Clearly unabashed, she merely glanced down at herself, slicked long-fingered, bloodred-tipped hands over her hips and thighs. Then laughed low in her throat. "I know. It's a little over the top, isn't it? But I've got a hot date tonight and zero time to go home to change."

Shock reverberated in his gut and zinged down the nerve rich column of his spinal cord. Taking a hot step forward, he demanded before he could stop himself, "With who?"

She gave him a cool look, clearly wondering what the hell business he thought it was of his. Still, she answered him, which he hadn't actually expected.

"Eduardo," she said, drawing the syllables out, her lips caressing them as if they were made of Godiva chocolates. "He's an - " Cutting herself off, she shook her head. "Well. You don't give a rat's rear end who he is."

"Sure I do," he forced himself to say in a bored tone, dismayed to discover that part of him was seriously tempted to grab those spandex- wrapped arms and shake the information out of her. ~ Susan Andersen

Yet some would say, why women's history at all? Surely men and
women have always shared a world, and suffered together all its rights
and wrongs? It is a common belief that whatever the situation, both
sexes faced it alike. But the male peasant, however cruelly oppressed,
always had the right to beat his wife. The black slave had to labor for
the white master by day, but he did not have to service him by night as well. This grim pattern continues to this day, with women bearing an extra ration of pain and misery whatever the circumstances, as the
sufferings of the women of war-torn Eastern Europe will testify. While
their men fought and died, wholesale and systematic rape - often
accompanied by the same torture and death that the men suffered -
was a fate only women had to endure. Women's history springs from
moments of recognition such as this, and the awareness of the difference is still very new. Only in our time have historians begun to look at the historical experience of men and women separately, and to
acknowledge that for most of our human past, women's interests have been opposed to those of men. Women's interests have been opposed by them, too: men have not willingly extended to women the rights and freedoms they have claimed for themselves. As a result, historical advances have tended to be "men only" affairs. When history concentrates solely on one half of the human race, any alternative truth or reality is l ~ Rosalind Miles

If you're going to give me the third degree," she tells him, "let's get it over with. Best to withhold food or water; water is probably best. I'll get thirsty before I get hungry."
He shakes his head in disbelief. "Do you really think I'm like that? Why would you think that?"
"I was taken by force, and you're keeping me here against my will," she says, leaning across the table toward him. She considers spitting in his face, but decides to save that gesture as punctuation for a more appropriate moment. "Imprisonment is still imprisonment, no matter how many layers of cotton you wrap it in." That makes him lean farther away, and she knows she's pushed a button. She remembers seeing those pictures of him back when he was all over the news, wrapped in cotton and kept in a bombproof cell.
"I really don't get you," he says, a bit of anger in his voice this time. "We saved your life. You could at least be a little grateful."
"You have robbed me, and everyone here, of their purpose. That's not salvation, that's damnation."
"I'm sorry you feel that way."
Now it's her turn to get angry. "Yes, you're sorry I feel that way, everyone's sorry I feel that way. Are you going to keep this up until I don't feel that way anymore?"
He stands up suddenly, pushing his chair back, and paces, fern leaves brushing his clothes. She knows she's gotten to him. He seems like he's about to storm out, but instead takes a deep breath and turns back to her.
"I know wha ~ Neal Shusterman

Ask me about my childhood, and I will tell you to walk to the edge of the woods with a choir of crickets chirping from every direction, a hot, humid breeze brushing through your hair, your feet, bare and callused. Stand there, unmoving, and watch the dance of ten thousand fireflies blinking on and off in the darkness. Inhale the scent of cured tobacco, freshly plowed southern soil, burning leaves, and honeysuckle. Swallow the taste of blackberries, picked straight from the bushes, and lick your teeth, the after-taste still sweet in your mouth. Now, stretch out on the ground and relax all your muscles. Watch nature's festival of flickering lights. ~ Brenda Sutton Rose

There was this one time in Vegas when I took four Victoria's Secret models and did one gram off each of their bodies within, like, 45 minutes. I declared myself King of Vegas and decided to remodel my hotel room with my bare hands to resemble King Louis XIV's bedroom at Versailles. Knocked down two entire walls, and later had four knuckle surgeries. Still wasn't as high as Rob Ford. ~ Charlie Sheen

Are you sure you don't remember? Your mind seems to be working just fine to me."
"You know what? Just forget it. Whatever it was, I forgive you. Give me my backpack so I can go back to the office. We're about to get busted anyway, just standing here."
"If you really do forgive me, then you wouldn't still be going to the office." He tightens his hold on the strap of my backpack.
"Ohmysweetgoodness, Galen, why are we even having this conversation? You don't even know me. What do you care if I change my schedule?" I know I'm being rude. The guy offered to carry my things and walk me to class. And depending on which version of the story I believe, he either asked me out on Monday already, or he did it indirectly a few seconds ago. None of it makes any sense. Why me? Without any effort, I can think of at least ten girls who beat me out in looks, personality, and darker foundation. And Galen could pull any of them.
"What, you don't have a question for my question?" I ask after a few seconds.
"It just seems silly for you to change your schedule over a disagreement about when the Titanic-"
I throw my hands up at him. "Don't you see how weird this is for me?"
"I'm trying to, Emma. I really am. But I think you've had a tough couple of weeks, and it's taking a toll on you. You said every time you're around me something bad happens. But you can't really know for sure that's true, unless you spend more time with me. You should at least acknowledge that." ~ Anna Banks

He still didn't have half an idea how to behave around her. There was a hell of a gap between them in the daylight, a yawning great gap of race, and age, and language that he wasn't sure could ever be bridged. Strange, how the gap dwindled down to nothing at night. They understood each other well enough in the dark. Maybe they'd work it out, in time, or maybe they wouldn't, and that'd be that. Still, he was glad she was there. Made him feel like a proper human man again, instead of just an animal slinking in the woods, trying to scratch his way from one mess to another. ~ Joe Abercrombie

No one ever grows up. They may look grown-up, but it's just the clay of time. Men and women are still children deep in their hearts. Mrs. Neville ~ Robert McCammon

I thought at first she was just dead. Just darkness. Just a body being eaten by bugs. I thought about her a lot like that, as something's meal. What was her-green eyes, half a smirk, the soft curves of her legs-would soon be nothing, just the bones I never saw. I thought about the slow process of becoming bone and then fossil and then coal that will, in millions of years, be mined by humans of the future, and how they would their homes with her, and then she would be smoke billowing out of a smokestack, coating the atmosphere.

I still think that, sometimes. I still think that, sometimes, think that maybe "the afterlife" is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable. Maybe she was just a matter, and matter gets recycled. ~ John Green

I am realizing people hurt in different ways. No pain looks the same. They don't laugh at the same jokes. They stop tending to the garden. Leave all the lights off. Pick at their fingernails.
I try not to focus on what their hurt looks like so much anymore, but what still remains the same; their perfume, their favorite colors and hiding places, and what it means to feel better. Getting out of bed. A good, warm lunch at the diner. Curling their hair or doing the dishes.
Regardless of what sadness looks like, wearing their body like old clothes, I watch the way they come back to themselves, every time. Granting what time they need for themselves. Undressing the loneliness. Filling the absence.
How gorgeous it is to watch someone be well. ~ Schuyler Peck

And the God who ruled absolutely in the life and fortunes of the most powerful monarch of that time still rules in the fortunes and destinies of governments today. No government or dictator is so powerful as to be beyond the sway of His sovereign rule over all the nations of the earth. GOD ~ Jerry Bridges

What book(s) changed your life and why? I could probably list books for days, so I'll just list a few favorites: The Giver by Lois Lowry, Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle, the Animorphs series by K.A. Applegate, 1984 by George Orwell, the Bible, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, and Juliet by Andras Visky (which is a play, but I think it still counts). ~ Veronica Roth

I have reveled in my littleness and irresponsibility. It has relieved me of the harassing desire to live, I feel content to live dangerously, indifferent to my fate; I have discovered I am a fly, that we are all flies, that nothing matters. It's a great load off my life, for I don't mind being such a micro-organism - to me the honour is sufficient of belonging to the universe - such a great universe, so grand a scheme of things. Not even Death can rob me of that honour. For nothing can alter the fact that I have lived; I have been I, if for ever so short a time. And when I am dead, the matter which composes my body is indestructible - and eternal, so that come what may to my "Soul," my dust will always be going on, each separate atom of me playing its separate part - I shall still have some sort of a finger in the Pie. When I am dead, you can boil me, burn me, drown me, scatter me - but you cannot destroy me: my little atoms would merely deride such heavy vengeance. Death can do no more than kill you. ~ W.N.P. Barbellion

Will bit at his lip. This was the last time Jem, as Jem, might ever touch him. The sharp memory went through him like a knife - of years of Jem's light tap on his shoulder, his hand reaching to help Will up when he fell, Jem holding him back when he was furious, Will's own hands on Jem's thin shoulders as Jem coughed blood into his shirt. Listen to me. I am leaving, but I am living. I will not be gone from you entirely, Will. When you fight now, I will be still by you. When you walk in the world, I will be the light at your side, the ground steady under your feet, the force that drives the sword in your hand. We are bound, beyond the oath. The Marks did not change that. The oath did not change that. It merely gave words to something that existed already. ~ Cassandra Clare

We want in so many different ways to be," he began again. "This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man he will never on his heap of mud keep still. He want to be so, and again he want to be so. . . . " He moved his hand up, then down. . . . "He wants to be a saint, and he wants to be a devil - and every time he shuts his eyes he sees himself as a very fine fellow - so fine as he can never be. . . . In a dream. . . . " 'He ~ Joseph Conrad

Oncoming death is terrible enough, but worse still is oncoming death with time to spare, time in which all the happiness that was yours and all the happiness that might have been yours becomes clear to you. You see with utter lucidity all that you are losing. ~ Yann Martel

you like men. So let's honour your tradition and do this your way." She came back wearing a strap-on. Martha took it in her hands and was surprised to see her fingers looked pale and gentle, unusually feminine against the skin-coloured rod. She wanted to take it in her mouth, but Petra said no again. "When you want a man, how do you want him?" she heard. "What do you ask your men to do? Tell me." She brushed her mouth against Martha's knees and thighs, then pulled apart her legs and slid in like a snake. They both stood still for a moment. Petra kissed her and did not stop kissing when she started swaying, and Martha was filled with slithering and enveloped by a thousand arms. Later they lay entangled, forgetting about time. ~ Lydia Perovic

As a kid I never knew what I wanted to be when I grow up, but the only thing I knew was that I wanted to create things. And then I wanted to be an astronaut. I would paint stars and the atmosphere and then frame and hang the universe up on my bedroom wall. A few years down the line while I was still stargazing, I came to realize that I'm halfway around the world chasing something and the whole time it's in my backyard. From the very beginning I was who I always wanted to be. ~ Shawn Lukas

There is a way to practice hard and be physical without pads. You can still be a physical football team and be efficient in practice without pads. The 49ers practiced like that for a long period of time in the 1980s under Bill Walsh and were extremely successful when all the other teams were practicing in pads. ~ Jimmy Johnson

Give up all the wild ideas that buzz round you like wasps. Or like bluebottles. […] Find a nice, ordinary girl, not too attractive or you'll be jealous all the time, not too bright or you'll be anxious all the time, not too rich or you'll have nothing to strive for, not too original or she'll upset people. There are plenty of them, and all of them are available to a young postman like you. Those are the terms offered."

The terrier had come to a sudden standstill, as if he had been a white gun dog on one of the estates.

"You don't live like that," said Robin from the bed.

"I don't live at all," replied Rosetta. "Haven't you realized?"

"Perhaps I have." Now Robin was staring at her: momentarily still that muggy evening; for seconds rigid as the dog.

Rosetta smiled. "I am the person every postman meets in the end."

"I'm a provisional postman only. I told you that clearly," remarked Robin, starting once more to relax.

"Do what I tell you. What else is there for you? Only wasps and bluebottles. ~ Robert Aickman

Owen felt his mouth curve into a grin as he heard the familiar clap, clap, clap behind him.
That was one of his favorite sounds - high heels on the wooden dock of the Boys of the Bayou swamp boat tour company.
He took his time turning and once he did, he started at the shoes.
They were black and showed off bright red toenails. The straps wrapped sexily around trim ankles and led the eye right up to smooth, toned calves. The heels matched the black polka dots on the white skirt that thankfully didn't start until mid-thigh, and showed off more tanned skin.
He straightened from his kneeling position in one of the boats as his eyes kept moving up past the skirt to the bright red belt that accentuated a narrow waist and then to the silky black tank that molded to a pair of perfect breasts.
He was fully anticipating her lips being bright red to go with that belt and her toenail polish. God, he loved red lipstick. And high heels. In any color.
But before he could get to those lips, she used them, to say, "Oh, dammit, it's you."
Owen's gaze bypassed her mouth to fly to her eyes. Because he'd know that voice anywhere.
Madison Allain was home.
A day early.
Not that an extra day would have helped him prepare. He'd been thinking about her visit for a week and was still as wound tight about it as he'd been when Sawyer, his business partner and cousin, had told him that she was coming home. For a month.
Owen stood just watching her, fi ~ Erin Nicholas

Mosquito [ ... ] had asked Ear to marry him, whereupon Ear fell on the floor in uncontrollable laughter. "How much longer do you think you will live?" she asked. "You are already a skeleton." Mosquito went away humiliated, and any time he passed her way he told Ear that he was still alive. ~ Chinua Achebe