The Black Earl Quotes

This is right. You know it is." His other hand touched her cheek and curved around the back of her head. "Pennhyll wants you. The Black Earl wants you. I want you. And I will not dishonor you by offering you anything less than my name. I don't give a damn how many times I've made love to you in my head, I want you in life, undisputably and without the Black Earl standing around. When next we make love, Olivia, you will be my wife, and James must find a way to overcome his disappointment."
-Sebastian to Olivia ~ Carolyn Jewel

He's not here. The Black Earl."

"I know."

"So, for the moment, we are safe from that madness."

"I am always safe with you. No matter what happens, no matter what, I am safe with you and not with anyone else."

He inhaled. "How long have you been seeing the Black Earl?"

"A few days now." She bit her lower lip. "You?"

"Since I came to Pennhyll." He walked to the fireplace. She turned sideways on her chair, but all he did was stare at the fire, hands clasped and pressed against the small of his back. The fingers of one hand clenched and unclenched. He turned. "What of me? How long have I been in your head?"

"Before the Black Earl, I think. Only I didn't know they weren't just dreams."

"More and more intimate." His mouth thinned. "I confess to once or twice in my life imagining making love to a woman I admire. God knows you're a pretty woman, but I don't just imagine being with you. When I make love to you, you're not thoughts and images in my head, you're in my arms, real and warm. I can taste you and breathe in the scent of you, feel your skin against mine. We've never made love, but I've been inside you. Jesus, Olivia, you know I have."

She nodded.

"Hell, for all we know it's possible I've made a child in you." His eyes pinned her. "Did anything like that happen between you and Andrew?"

"No."

"You sound certain."

"I am."

"You ~ Carolyn Jewel

She ran and didn't slow until she came to a hallway that terminated in a multipaned window of thick, old-fashioned glass. Her breath rasped in her throat, but the dizziness and nausea eased enough that she stood steadier on her feet. She heard again the gentle ringing of metal sliding against metal. Musty air rose up with the same smell of leather and dust, an acrid undertone beneath. She whipped her head toward the end of the hall. At first she didn't see anything. The light shifted and swirled, and the swordsman materialized from the shadows. Gold and red emblazoned his tunic in a chevron against a cobalt background. The sword was back in its scabbard, strapped across his back. He was tall, with broad shoulders and dark hair, and he looked like Sebastian. Timed to the wind stirring the ivy outside, he vanished through the wall. ~ Carolyn Jewel

When Sebastian reached his room, the Black Earl stood by his bed. Sebastian turned away, fingering the cufflink in his pocket. He didn't need the Black Earl's help in debauching Olivia anymore, he had apparently at last managed that well enough all on his own. He threw himself onto a chair, full of his memory of his hands on Olivia. Cold air sent a prickle along the backs of his arms. He opened his eyes and saw the Black Earl again. In one hand, he gripped a sword of unearthly silver, but held downward so that the point of the weapon touched the floor. He wept as if his heart were broken. "Aidez-la" Help her.
Sebastian heard nothing but the roar of those words tearing through his soul. Help her.
The Black Earl, weeping still, turned to the stone wall. A rent marred his crimson tunic, the edges jagged and blackened, and then he, too, vanished and left behind him nothing but an aching, unfillable emptiness.
Help her. ~ Carolyn Jewel

Air swirled over her shoulders leaving a wake of chilled skin. To her left something stirred in the shadows. She blinked. The swordsman stood by the fire, as clear and solid as day. Her heart thundered in her ears so loud he must surely hear. She started to sit up, then remembered her naked state. Water sloshed in the tub. "I beg your pardon."

He inclined his head. Steam from the water swirled, but Olivia saw his dark hair. He was tall and wore a tunic worked with red and gold. A leather strap crossed from right shoulder to left waist and held the scabbard fastened across his back. A jeweled belt circled his waist. His eyes matched the blue of the sky. The way he stood struck her as familiar. She closed her eyes. He was still there when she opened them again. "I am not mad," she said. "Is that you? Edith?"

Even with the distance between them and the mist swirling in the air, she saw his blue eyes, the arrogant set to his shoulders that came of years of wealth and breeding. His grin sent a flare of alarm up her spine. He took a step toward her, and for one dreadful moment, she was convinced he was as real as she was. He tipped his head and spread his arms wide, as if to prove himself harmless. "Go away." She wasn't afraid of him precisely. She was afraid of being mad. "Please, just go away."

He shook his head.

"I am not mad," she whispered.

He shook his head again. "I wish you were real. ~ Carolyn Jewel

To me the industry has always said that the lovers and haters and principal characters will always be white in Hollywood, and black people will always be appendages of those kinds of dramas, or they will be comedic outlets. It will never change. ~ Haile Gerima

Black power got to moving so fast that we miscalculated the fallout. I certainly have to take some of the responsibility of that; but there was no way we anticipated the response. ~ Cleveland Sellers

There are a thousand ways for a boy of fifteen to go wrong. The most gently reared will lash out, battered by gusts of mindless fury. The brightest can be swamped by black despair. The sweetest may turn sullen and withdrawn. The most rational are quick to anger. ~ Mary Doria Russell

There's competition among women everywhere you go. But back home, we understand that you can look like a variety of things and still be from the same culture. What I'm saying is that I've never felt like I was a light-skinned black woman. Never felt that way because we shared the same culture back home. ~ Grace Gealey

The black man today will only find solitude in one place: prison. ironically, he becomes most free while incarcerated. ~ Darnell Lamont Walker

Loaded my black patent leather bag with sherry, cream cheese (for grammy's apricot tarts), thyme, basil, bay leaves (for Wendy's exotic stews - a facsimile of which now simmers on the stove), golden wafers (such an elegant name for Ritz crackers), apples and green pears.
I was getting worried about becoming too happily stodgily practical: instead of studying Locke, for instance, or writing - I go make an apple pie, or study the Joy of Cooking, reading it like a rare novel. Whoa, I said to myself. You will escape into domesticity & stifle yourself by falling headfirst into a bowl of cookie batter. ~ Sylvia Plath

I had to lull Mom and Hank into believing I was in the right frame of mind to be taken into public. If I exited my bedroom foaming at the mouth and dressed in black LOVE SUCKS tee, my plan would never get off the ground. ~ Becca Fitzpatrick

For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish ora German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making "ladies" dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase. ~ Stephanie Coontz

Nobody wants somebody who wants them for what they have or the position their in- you want somebody who wants you for you. In case it all goes crazy and it all turns to dust. I want somebody who loves me in the welfare line, eating gumbo, eating fish,black eyed peas and rice. I want somebody that loves me. God wants you to love him, not his cars, not his house, not his blessing- love him. ~ T.D. Jakes

Amy turned to Nellie. "Can you create a diversion to draw the clerk outside?"
The au pair was wary. "What kind of diversion?"
"You could pretend to be lost," Dan proposed. "The guy comes out to give you directions, and we slip inside."
"That's the most sexist idea I've ever heard," Nellie said harshly. "I'm female, so I have to be clueless. He's male, so he's got a great sense of direction."
"Maybe you're from out of town," Dan suggested. "Wait–you are from out of town."
Nellie stashed their bags under a bench and set Saladin on the seat with a stern "You're the watchcat. Anybody touches those bags, unleash your inner tiger."
The Egyptian Mau surveyed the street uncertainly. "Mrrp."
Nellie sighed. "Lucky for us there's no one around. Okay, I'm going in there. Be ready."
The clerk said something to her–probably May I help you? She smiled apologetically. "I don't speak Italian."
"Ah–you are American." His accent was heavy, but he seemed eager to please. "I will assist you." He took in her black nail polish and nose ring. "Punk, perhaps, is your enjoyment?"
"More like a punk/reggae fusion," Nellie replied thoughtfully. "With a country feel. And operatic vocals."
The clerk stared in perplexity.
Nellie began to tour the aisles, pulling out CDs left and right. "Ah–Artic Monkeys–that's what I'm talking about. And some Bad Brains–from the eighties. Foo Fighters–I'll need a couple from those guys. And don't forget Linkin Par ~ Gordon Korman

As she conceived it, tea had to be as black as tar and as strong as a sinner's conscience. Or the other way around. As black as that conscience and as strong as tar. And sweet. ~ Sergei Lukyanenko

Cleopatra: Oh, Charmian, Where think'st thou he is now? Stands he or sits he?
Or does he walk? Or is he on his horse?
O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony!
Do bravely, horse, for wott'st thou whom thou mov'st?
The demi-Atlas of this earth, the arm
And burgonet of men. He's speaking now,
Or murmuring "Where's my serpent of old Nile?"
For so he calls me. Now I feed myself
With most delicious poison. Think on me,
That am with Phoebus' amorous pinches black
And wrinkled deep in time. Broad-fronted Caesar,
When thou wast here above the ground, I was
A morsel for a monarch. And great Pompey
Would stand and make his eyes grow in my brow.
There would he anchor his aspect, and die
With looking on his life. ~ William Shakespeare

It seems that people are more comfortable with the private outrage about gay marriage, because when you are outraged about this issue, it requires no work. There's no work that you have to do when you're outraged about a gay couple. There is work that you have to do if you want to see black fathers raise their children. There is work that you have to do if you want to see a school develop. ~ Otis Moss III

I would love to do a Black Widow movie. That's perfect, I would love to do that. That character is really interesting: she doesn't have any superpowers; she just has extraordinary skills, and the world that she comes from, being this ex-K.G.B. assassin, I find that really fascinating, yeah. ~ Neil Marshall

I shall not attempt here to describe my marriage. Some impression of it will doubtless emerge. For the present story, its general nature rather than its detail is important. It was not a success. At first I saw her as a life-bringer. Then I saw her as a death-bringer. Some women are like that. There is a sort of energy which seems to reveal the world: then one day you find you are being devoured. Fellow victims will know what I mean. Possibly I am a natural bachelor. ~ Iris Murdoch

My black brothers and sisters - of all religious beliefs, or of no religious beliefs - we all have in common the greatest binding tie we could have. We are all black people! ~ Malcolm X

The nurses' job is emotional and distressing. Their day-to-day work is dealing with people withering and falling to pieces. So black humour is essential for them cope with that. It's just a consequence of their environment. ~ Peter Capaldi

I honestly believe you can never tell if a relationship is going to last. In my own marriage, which is going on 14 years, I don't think of it as 'I'm going to be with this person forever.' Instead, I think of more like, 'I'll probably be with this person for the next six weeks. Then I'll re-evaluate.' ~ Michael Ian Black

The newcomer stood well over six feet, as tall as any Warden. His hair was dark, the color of obsidian, and it reflected blue in the dim light. Lazy locks slipped over his forehead and curled just below his ears. Brows arched over golden eyes and his cheekbones were broad and high. He was attractive. Very attractive. Mind-bendingly beautiful, actually, but the sardonic twist to his full lips chilled his beauty. The black T-shirt stretched across his chest and flat stomach. A huge tattoo of a snake curled around his forearm, the tail disappearing under his sleeve and the diamond-shaped head rested on the top of his hand. He looked my age. Total crush material - if it wasn't for the fact that he had no soul. ~ Jennifer L. Armentrout

Why is is that all people in Hollywood think, oh short, black and tattoos, ohhh he's in the music industry? No motherfucker, I'm an Author. ~ Slicktor Victor Robinson

Ultimately the white man should leave the United States and the black people should go back to Africa. ~ Bobby Fischer

It's about time you saw how fortunate you are. You have ... the most virile man in the world." He grinned, and in his eyes, black as sin, she saw the devil inside him laughing. But he was her devil, and she loved him madly.
"The most conceited, you mean," she said.
He bent his head until his great Usignuolo nose loomed as inch from hers, "The most virile, " he repeated firmly. "You are pathetically slow if you haven't learned that by now. Fortunately for you, I am the most patient of tutors. I shall prove it to you."
"You patience?" she asked.
"My virility. Both. Repeatedly." His black eyes glinted. "I will teach you a lesson you'll never forget. "
She tangled her fingers in his hair and brought his mouth to hers. "My wicked darling," she whispered. "I should like to see you try. ~ Loretta Chase

Women are interchangeable as sex objects; women are slightly less disposable as mothers. The only dignity and value women get is as mothers: it is a compromised dignity and a low value, but it is all that is offered to women as women. Having children is the best thing women can do to get respect and be assured a place. The fact that having children does not get women respect or a place is almost beside the point: poor women don't get respect and live in dung heaps; black women don't get respect and are jailed in decimated ghettos; just plain pregnant women don't get respect and the place they have is a dangerous one - pregnancy is now considered a cause of battery (stress on the male, don't you know): in perhaps 25 percent of families in which battery occurs, it is a pregnant woman who has been battered. In fact, having children may mean both increased violence and increased dependence; it may significantly worsen the economic circumstances of a woman or a family; it may hurt a woman's health or jeopardize her in a host of other ways; but having children is the one social contribution credited to women - it is the bedrock of women's social worth. Despite all the happy smiling public mommies, the private mommies have grim private recognitions. One perception is particularly chilling: without the children, I am not worth much. The recognition is actually more dramatic than that, much more chilling: without the children, I am not. ~ Andrea Dworkin

Perfection was a surface thing. The epidermis. Cut a few layers deep, you begin to see some darker shades. Cut to the bone - pitch black. ~ Blake Crouch

I don't doubt for a moment that the revolution will result in a nonracial society. I have just come from being a patient in Groote Schuur Hospital where they now have integrated wards. For the first time in my life, I have seen it working. The patients were mixed, the staff was mixed, and the medical officers were mixed; it was totally integrated. It was beautiful. White and black together. And it works. To me that is terribly exciting. ~ Helen Joseph

The condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak, it means then that if you have a prophetic sensibility, you are committed to loving others and if you love others, you hate injustice. ~ Cornel West

They held each other close and turned their backs upon the end.
The hills that split asunder and the black that ate the skies;
The flames that shot so high and hot that even dragons burned;
Would never be the final sights that fell upon their eyes.
A fly upon a wall, the waves the sea wind whipped and churned -
The city of a thousand years, and all that men had learned;
The Doom consumed it all alike, and neither of them turned"
―Tyrion Lannister and Jorah Mormont, quoting a poem about the Doom ~ George R.R. Martin

Doesn't the world inside a black and white photograph seem more real? It's because the real world is losing its color ~ Tablo

Sadly, whites are rarely open to what black and brown folks have to say regarding their ongoing experiences with racist mistreatment. And we are especially reluctant to discuss what that mistreatment means for us as whites: namely that we end up with more and better opportunities as the flipside of discrimination. ~ Tim Wise

What could be worse than dead? But all around him, the evidence was clear. Only weeks before, the NYPD had shot down a fifteen-year-old black boy, a student, for next to nothing. The shooting had started the riots, pitting young black men and some black women against the police force. The news made it sound like the fault lay with the blacks of Harlem. The violent, the crazy, the monstrous black people who had the gall to demand that their children not be gunned down in the streets. ~ Yaa Gyasi

Oh, man,' Beck breathed. 'Check out the car.' It was white with a black top. The hood looked as as long as a football field. 'Sure is big,' was all I could manage to say. Beck gazed longingly at the beast, his eyes glowing in appreciation. 'You know what that is?'
'Uh, no. Should I?'
'It's a fully restored, two-door 1973 Monte Carlo. Muscle car, big time.'
'Bet it's hard to park. ~ Marilee Brothers

Thou knowest all; I seek in vain
What lands to till or sow with seed -
The land is black with briar and weed,
Nor cares for falling tears or rain.
Thou knowest all; I sit and wait
With blinded eyes and hands that fail,
Till the last lifting of the veil
And the first opening of the gate.
Thou knowest all; I cannot see.
I trust I shall not live in vain,
I know that we shall meet again
In some divine eternity. ~ Oscar Wilde

They all stood unwilling on the sandbar, holding to the net. In the eastern sky were the familiar castles and the round towers to which they were used, gray, pink, and blue, growing darker and filling with thunder. Lightning flickered in the sun along their thick walls. But in the west the sun shone with such a violence that in an illumination like a long-prolonged glare of lightning the heavens looked black and white; all color left the world, the goldenness of everything was like a memory, and only heat, a kind of glamor and oppression, lay on their heads. The thick heavy trees on the other side of the river were brushed with mile-long streaks of silver, and a wind touched each man on the forehead. At the same time there was a long roll of thunder that began behind them, came up and down mountains and valleys of air, passed over their heads, and left them listening still. With a small, near noise a mockingbird followed it, the little white bars of its body flashing over the willow trees.

'We are here for a storm now,' Virgil said. 'We will have to stay till it's over.'

("The Wide Net") ~ Eudora Welty

Here's the thing. We do a movie with a predominantly black cast, and it's put in a category of being a black film. When other movies are done with a predominantly white cast, we don't call them a white film. I'm trying to remove the stigma off things they call black films. ~ Kevin Hart

Did you know that the Russians sent dogs into space? My mother told me this when I was a boy. Nobody knew the effects of space on a body, you see, so they sent dogs first. They found two little mongrels on the streets of Moscow. Pchelka, which means Little Bee, and Mushka, which means Little Fly. They went up in Sputnik 6. They were supposed to get into orbit and come right back. But the rockets misfired and shot them into space.

Whenever I look at the night sky, I think about those dogs. Wearing these hand-stitched spacesuits, bright orange, with their paws sticking out. Big fishbowl helmets. How… crazy. Floating out and out into space. How bewildered they must have been, dying from oxygen deprivation. For what? They would have happily spent their days rummaging through trashcans.

For all anyone knows these dogs are still out there. Two dead mongrels in a satellite. Two dog skeletons in silly spacesuits. Gleaming dog skulls inside fishbowl helmets. They'll spin through the universe until they burn up in the atmosphere of an uncharted planet. Or get sucked into a black hole to be crushed into a ball of black matter no bigger than an ant turd. ~ Craig Davidson

I was the only black girl at my junior high school. I had an afro, a Jamaican accent, I looked really old. ~ Grace Jones

I think it's important for us to recognize that although historically black communities have been very progressive with respect to issues of race and with respect to struggles for racial equality, that does not necessarily translate into progressive positions on gender issues, progressive positions on issues of sexuality and in the latter 1990s we have to recognize the intersectionality, the interconnectedness of all of these institutions and attitudes. ~ Angela Davis

It's never a good thing when the black volhv says "Uh-oh" and then runs for his life. ~ Ilona Andrews

The monster is bigger than the human. It represents abundance - overabundance. ... It has lots of eyes, extra arms, too many teeth. Everything about it is too many and too much. ~ Holly Black

You notice that all the minorities are going to be voting for Barack Obama because he's a minority. He's going to be their hero; he's going to be their white knight if you will, or in this case black knight. ~ Frosty Wooldridge

There is a bench in the back of my garden shaded by Virginia creeper, climbing roses, and a white pine where I sit early in the morning and watch the action. Light blue bells of a dwarf campanula drift over the rock garden just before my eyes. Behind it, a three-foot stand of aconite is flowering now, each dark blue cowl-like corolla bowed for worship or intrigue: thus its common name, monkshood. Next to the aconite, black madonna lilies with their seductive Easter scent are just coming into bloom. At the back of the garden, a hollow log, used in its glory days for a base to split kindling, now spills white cascade petunias and lobelia.

I can't get enough of watching the bees and trying to imagine how they experience the abundance of, say, a blue campanula blosssom, the dizzy light pulsing, every fiber of being immersed in the flower. ...

Last night, after a day in the garden, I asked Robin to explain (again) photosynthesis to me. I can't take in this business of _eating light_ and turning it into stem and thorn and flower...

I would not call this meditation, sitting in the back garden. Maybe I would call it eating light. Mystical traditions recognize two kinds of practice: _apophatic mysticism_, which is the dark surrender of Zen, the Via Negativa of John of the Cross, and _kataphatic mysticism_, less well defined: an openhearted surrender to the beauty of creation. Maybe Francis of Assissi was, on the whole, a kataphatic mystic, as was Thér ~ Mary Rose O'Reilley

That has not yet been put to the test. I got my fourth-degree black belt this winter. When I make martial arts noises, thousands flee in terror. Don't test me."
"Can you hear that? It's my knees knocking."
"They're wise to fear me. ~ Nora Roberts

Before Lyndon Johnson intervened to make sure blacks would become dependent on the government for just about everything they needed to live, black participation in the labor market was equal to or greater than that of whites. Today the "official" African-American unemployment rate - which doesn't take into account the enormous number of blacks who aren't even trying to find jobs - is around 14 percent. In fact, when you count those who don't even try to find a job, it's nearly 50 percent. When the numbers are added up, under this administration more than 60 percent of young black people are no longer even part of the labor force. It's the lowest ever recorded in our history. ~ Michael Savage

It's probably wrong to believe there can be any limit to the horror which the human mind can experience. On the contrary, it seems that some exponential effect begins to obtain as deeper and deeper darkness falls-as little as one may like to admit it, human experience tends, in a good many ways, to support the idea that when the nightmare grows black enough, horror spawns horror, one coincidental evil begets other, often more deliberate evils, until finally blackness seems to cover everything. And the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity. That such events have their own Rube Goldberg absurdity goes almost without saying. At some point, it all starts to become rather funny. That may be the point at which sanity begins either to save itself or to buckle and break down; that point at which one's sense of humor begins to reassert itself. ~ Stephen King