4
" You really shouldn’t have come,” Lord Blackthorne said, his hand slipping across my faceto cup my jaw, fingers brushing my cheek. I shrieked, shrinking back and kicking at my captorwith stocking-covered feet. “Such a pretty child, in such an ugly place. Tell me, do you thinkyour dear husband would mind if I stole a kiss from the bride?”Kicking him in the shin, I spun, making him release me. I climbed off whatever I’d landedon, aiming my palms out and wishing that I could see what the heck was happening. Flamesfrom dozens of candles blinked at me as they lit with the power of my mind. Lord Blackthornetouched my shoulder, his other hand curving around the bodice of my gown, toying with thebeading along the neckline. "
7
" Anxiety felt like a grapnel anchor had been pickaxed into your back, one prong in each lung, one through the heart, one through the spine, the weight curving your posture forward, dragging you down to the murky depths of the sea floor. The good news was that you kind of got used to it after a while. Got used to the gasping, brink-of-heart-attack feeling that followed you everywhere. All you had to do was grab one of the prongs that stuck out from the bottom of your sternum, give it a little shake, and say, “Listen, asshole. We’re not dying. We have shit to do. "
― Krystal Sutherland , A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares
8
" Then she understood that what she needed was the motion to a purpose, no matter how small or in what form, the sense of an activity going step by step to some chosen end across a span of time. The work of cooking a meal was like a closed circle, completed and gone, leading nowhere. But the work of building a path was a living sum, so that no day was left to die behind her, but each day contained all those that preceded it, each day acquired its immortality on every succeeding tomorrow. A circle, she thought, is the movement proper to physical nature, they say that there's nothing but circular motion in the inanimate universe around us, but the straight line is the badge of man, the straight line of a geometrical abstraction that makes roads, rails and bridges, the straight line that cuts the curving aimlessness of nature by a purposeful motion from a start to an end. The cooking of meals, she thought, is like the feeding of coal to an engine for the sake of a great run, but what would be the imbecile torture of coaling an engine that had no run to make? It is not proper for man's life to be a circle, she thought, or a string of circles dropping off like zeros behind him--man's life must be a straight line of motion from goal to farther goal, each leading to the next and to a single growing sum, like a journey down the track of a railroad, from station to station to--oh, stop it! "
― Ayn Rand , Atlas Shrugged
12
" My mind is curiously alert; it's as though my skull had a thousand mirrors inside it. My nerves are taut, vibrant! the notes are like glass balls dancing on a million jets of water. I've never been to a concert before on such an empty belly. Nothing escapes me, not even the tiniest pin falling. It's as though I had no clothes on and every pore of my body was a window and all the windows open and the light flooding my gizzards. I can feel the light curving under the vault of my ribs and my ribs hang there over a hollow nave trembling with reverberations. How long this lasts I have no idea; I have lost all sense of time and place. After what seems like an eternity there follows an interval of semiconsciousness balanced by such a calm that I feel a great lake inside me, a lake of iridescent sheen, cool as jelly; and over this lake, rising in great swooping spirals, there emerge flocks of birds of passage with long slim legs and brilliant plumage. Flock after flock surge up from the cool, still surface of the lake and, passing under my clavicles, lose themselves in the white sea of space. And then slowly, very slowly, as if an old woman in a white cap were going the rounds of my body, slowly the windows are closed and my organs drop back into place. "
― Henry Miller , Tropic of Cancer (Tropic, #1)
18
" So,” I said. “Exactly how long have the two of you been together? I assume that you’ve been going hot and heavy ever since that night at Fletcher’s house when the bounty hunters interrupted you. Am I right?”
Finn and Bria didn’t look at me or each other.
“Right,” Bria mumbled. “Although if it makes you uncomfortable—”
“Then Gin’s just going to have to deal with it,” Finn cut her off.
Bria stared at him in surprise.
“What?” Finn said. “I worked too hard and too long to get you into my bed to just cut you loose now, cupcake.”
Bria’s eyes narrowed. “Cupcake?”
“Cupcake.” Finn grinned at her. “Or would you prefer snuggle bunny?”
Bria’s hand drifted down to the gun on her leather belt, as though she wanted to pull it out and shoot Finn with it. Well, it was good to know I wasn’t the only one who occasionally had that reaction to him.
...
Then I fixed them both with a hard stare. “Just don’t ask me to take sides when the two of you go at each other. Okay?”
They nodded, then looked at each other. Finn waggled his eyebrows in a suggestive manner, and Bria snorted. But she couldn’t stop a grin from curving her lips. "
― Jennifer Estep , Spider’s Revenge (Elemental Assassin, #5)
19
" He imagines the water running in thick curving lines, like the drawings of the tree’s roots, cutting through stone and spilling over the earth. And then he reverses the flow of water, letting his imagination take over, and he sees the water racing north, uphill, towards the Catskills, weaving around towns, beneath bridges, rushing over stones and cutting through the trees, until it lands at the feet of Alice Pearson, who stands on the shore, looking out at the place where the water meets the sky. "
― Beth Hahn , The Singing Bone
