28
" Don’t look at me like that, I see those pink cheeks when you talk about him,” she observed. “In my day, if I learned anything, it was to tell the ones you love how much love them. When I was your age, I fell in love with a beautiful woman. You know, fifties and all, I never told her, and she married a man that abused her terribly.” She paused, and Artemis could tell her eyes were dampening. “I went to her funeral two years after she moved away. In her things, there was a letter for me, telling me how much love she’d held in her heart and couldn’t speak. I was happy, my husband and my kids, but I always wonder, what woulda happened if I’d told her how much I loved her.” She smiled again. “Just don’t waste time, that’s what I’ll say. Call it old advice from an interfering old woman. "
― Beverly L. Anderson , Stolen Innocence (Doctor's Training #1; Chains of Fate #1)
30
" Dr. Urbino caught the parrot around the neck with a triumphant sigh: ça y est. But he released him immediately because the ladder slipped from under his feet and for an instant he was suspended in the air and then he realized that he had died without Communion, without time to repent of anything or to say goodbye to anyone, at seven minutes after four on Pentecost Sunday.Fermina Daza was in the kitchen tasting the soup for supper when she heard Digna Pardo's horrified shriek and the shouting of the servants and then of the entire neighborhood. She dropped the tasting spoon and tried to run despite the invincible weight of her age, screaming like a madwoman without knowing yet what had happened under the mango leaves, and her heart jumped inside her ribs when she saw her man lying on his back in the mud, dead to this life but still resisting death's final blow for one last minute so that she would have time to come to him. He recognized her despite the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her, and he looked for her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, more grief-stricken, more grateful that she had ever seen them in the half century of a shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath:" Only God knows how much I loved you. "
31
" Tirelessly they flew on and on, and tirelessly she kept pace. She felt a fierce joy possessing her, that she could command these immortal presences. And she rejoiced in her blood and flesh, in the rough pine bark she felt next to her skin, in the beat of her heart and the life of all her senses, and in the hunger she was feeling now, and in the presence of her sweet-voiced bluethroat dæmon, and in the earth below her and the lives of every creature, plant and animal both; and she delighted in being of the same substance as them, and in knowing that when she died her flesh would nourish other lives as they had nourished her. "
― Philip Pullman , The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials, #2)
32
" AlmondineTo her, the scent and the memory of him were one. Where it lay strongest, the distant past came to her as if that morning: Taking a dead sparrow from her jaws, before she knew to hide such things. Guiding her to the floor, bending her knee until the arthritis made it stick, his palm hotsided on her ribs to measure her breaths and know where the pain began. And to comfort her. That had been the week before he went away.He was gone, she knew this, but something of him clung to the baseboards. At times the floor quivered under his footstep. She stood then and nosed into the kitchen and the bathroom and the bedroom-especially the closet-her intention to press her ruff against his hand, run it along his thigh, feel the heat of his body through the fabric.Places, times, weather-all these drew him up inside her. Rain, especially, falling past the double doors of the kennel, where he’d waited through so many storms, each drop throwing a dozen replicas into the air as it struck the waterlogged earth. And where the rising and falling water met, something like an expectation formed, a place where he might appear and pass in long strides, silent and gestureless. For she was not without her own selfish desires: to hold things motionless, to measure herself against them and find herself present, to know that she was alive precisely because he needn’t acknowledge her in casual passing; that utter constancy might prevail if she attended the world so carefully. And if not constancy, then only those changes she desired, not those that sapped her, undefined her.And so she searched. She’d watched his casket lowered into the ground, a box, man-made, no more like him than the trees that swayed under the winter wind. To assign him an identity outside the world was not in her thinking. The fence line where he walked and the bed where he slept-that was where he lived, and they remembered him.Yet he was gone. She knew it most keenly in the diminishment of her own self. In her life, she’d been nourished and sustained by certain things, him being one of them, Trudy another, and Edgar, the third and most important, but it was really the three of them together, intersecting in her, for each of them powered her heart a different way. Each of them bore different responsibilities to her and with her and required different things from her, and her day was the fulfillment of those responsibilities. She could not imagine that portion of her would never return. With her it was not hope, or wistful thoughts-it was her sense of being alive that thinned by the proportion of her spirit devoted to him." ory of Edgar Sawtelle" As spring came on, his scent about the place began to fade. She stopped looking for him. Whole days she slept beside his chair, as the sunlight drifted from eastern-slant to western-slant, moving only to ease the weight of her bones against the floor.And Trudy and Edgar, encapsulated in mourning, somehow forgot to care for one another, let alone her. Or if they knew, their grief and heartache overwhelmed them. Anyway, there was so little they might have done, save to bring out a shirt of his to lie on, perhaps walk with her along the fence line, where fragments of time had snagged and hung. But if they noticed her grief, they hardly knew to do those things. And she without the language to ask. "
33
" She needs to wake up," said Boots. " Hazard is crying. When does she wake up?" Gregor could not find it within him to give his standard reply. To pretend that in a short time Thalia would be back with them, laughing and happy. And somehow it seemed wrong to try. Boots was getting older. Very soon, she would begin to realize the truth on her own, anyway. " She's not going wake up," he told her. " She's dead." " She doesn't wake up?" said Boots." No, not this time," said Gregor. " This time, she had to go away." Boots looked around at all their faces, at Hazard crying. " Where did she go?" No one had an answer. " Where is Thalia when she doesn't wake up?" The question hung in the air for an eternity. Finally, it was Howard who spoke up. " Why, she's in your heart, Boots." " My heart?" said Boots, putting both hands on her chest." Yes. That's where she lives now," said Howard." She can fly away?" asked Boots, pressing her palms tightly against her heart as if to keep Thalia from escaping." Oh, no, she will stay there forever," said Howard. "
35
" Jillian had charged into the bathroom on seven, but she just shot straight to ten. Her nature may be reserved, but she didn’t take shit off anybody. “Don’t patronize me. And don’t you dare come down here and judge us!” She pointed her finger directly at AJ. “We’re the ones doing the heavy lifting, so people like you can come along at the very end and ride along on our coattails. You can act tough all you want, but it’s just an act, AJ. You, with your expensive suits and shiny shoes,” she sneered. “You wouldn’t survive one minute out there on those streets. You’re weak.” Before she realized what was about to happen, AJ seized her by the shoulders and threw her against the wall. Pinning her with her own body, she pressed her index finger over Jillian’s lips. “That’s enough.” Those glittering green eyes warned Jillian not to say another word. The impact had completely knocked the breath out of her. AJ pressed her body tighter into hers, preventing Jillian from taking a replenishing breath, so she breathed short shallow breaths through her nose. Her heart pounded. What was happening? She wasn’t in control of the situation, and oddly enough, for once she didn’t want to be. She had just been manhandled, yet she had no desire to fight back. Instead, she wanted to hook her leg around AJ’s waist and draw her closer to where AJ’s heat seared her core. "
― Kat Evans , The Domme Tamer