Home > Work > Jane Steele
1 " I hope that the epitaph of the human race when the world ends will be: Here perished a species which lived to tell stories. We tell stories to strangers to ingratiate ourselves, stories to lovers to better adhere us skin to skin, stories in our heads to banish the demons. When we tell truth, often we are callous; when we tell lies, often we are kind. Through it all, we tell stories, and we own an uncanny knack for the task. "
― Lyndsay Faye , Jane Steele
2 " But I will be a beautiful disaster. "
3 " And in a way I have always thought that words are alive a little, for they can whisper sweet nothings and roar dragon flame with equal efficiency. "
4 " Though I no longer presumed to have a conscience, I have never once lacked feelings. "
5 " Charles says that he does not care what sort of Jane I am so long as I am his Jane; Sardar says that he does not care what sort of Jane I am so long as I am my own Jane; Sahjara says that she does not care what sort of Jane I am so long as she is my Sahjara. Thus I am daily three Janes, and so the luckiest of all. "
6 " In this impossible future, I would not have just murdered yet another man, Sahjara would break mighty stallions , Mr Thornfield would love me, and everyone would lose the look we had of folk waiting for the axe to fall. "
7 " Penned creatures suffer, but the more so when they imagine a pen what ain’t there "
8 " Some tragedies bind us, as lies do; they are ropes braided of hurt and bitterness, and you cannot ever fully understand how pinioned you are until the ties are loosened. "
9 " We are all of us daily decaying, after all; the speed is our only variant. "
10 " I relate to this story almost as I would a friend or a lover - at times I want to breathe its entire alphabet into my lungs, and at others I should prefer to throw it across the room. "
11 " If I must go to hell to find my mother again, so be it: I will be another embodied disaster. But I will be a beautiful disaster. "
12 " Some cities bustle, some meander, I have read; London blazes and it incinerates. London is the wolf's maw. From the instant I arrived there, I loved every smoldering inch of it "
13 " secrets decay, as corpses do, growing ranker over time. "
14 " We tell stories to strangers to ingratiate ourselves, stories to lovers to better adhere us skin to skin, stories in our heads to banish the demons. When we tell the truth, often we are callous; when we tell lies, often we are kind. Through it all, we tell stories, and we own an uncanny knack for the task. "
15 " My earlier metaphor had been wrong, I discovered. The splash of ink from the pen dropping onto the page looked nothing like a spray of blood at all. "
16 " You cannot know what it means, reader, to have thought yourself despised for your unworthiness for a period of years - to have supposed your very nature poison, and your friend right to have thus abandoned you - and to learn thereafter that you were loved not too little but too well. "
17 " As soon as I could leave off stroking his skin, I touched the mark at my own neck and blessed it; for we are doers of deeds, he and I, and as such lose parts of our flesh along the way, and can only pray to meet friends and lovers who can help to stitch us back again, and that we can make them whole in turn. • "
18 " but people cannot help being who they are.” “They can help the things they do because of who they are, however. "
19 " can’t give any credence to the Bible because so many villains quote it. "
20 " Confident I remain, however, and I find myself hopeful as well -- if the world is wide enough for me to find someone, who knows what miracles lurk behind each and every closed door? Charles Thornefield and I are far from perfect; but we are perfect for each other, and perhaps in the end, our chains bind us more closely than anyone who has never been a prisoner can imagine. "