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21 " A word of advice: Do not ever kill for love, or you will find yourself tethered, staked to the ground when your cleanest instincts require you to run for your life without a backwards glance. Killing for love is one of the most tangled acts you can commit, reader, in an already twisted world. "
― Lyndsay Faye , Jane Steele
22 " I hope that the epitaph of the human race when the world ends will be: Here perished a species which lived to tell stories. "
23 " Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. "
24 " Until something has been taken from you, it is difficult to gauge what sort of holes will be left by its absence. "
25 " Miss Steele can a man make a greater blunder than to ignore the intuition of a woman? "
26 " I bit the inside of my lip until I could taste all I had left of my mother, which was her blood. "
27 " One can grow accustomed to carrying unseeable scars, as if the tattoo one wears is inked in flesh tone over flesh tone; but nevertheless one is still covered in secret, painted with secret, stained by it. "
28 " That accidents happen is a universal principle - and perhaps the only universal principle worth mentioning, for it governs an enormous percentage of our daily lives. "
29 " Still I caught glimpses of another creature there in the tress, one with round eyes and a predator's hungry stare; but by the time I understood that I was the prey, my fate had already been sealed. "
30 " There is no practice more vexing than that of authors describing coach travel for the edification of people who have already travelled in coaches. As I must adhere to form, however, I will simply list a series of phrases for the unlikely reader who has never gone anywhere: thin eggshell dawn-soaked curtains stained with materials unknown to science; rattling fit to grind bones to powder; the ripe stench of horse and driver and bog. Now "
31 " You owe your attacker no debt, Miss Steele. It is, as I have proven, a logical impossibility? Promise to try? "
32 " Knowing that home was hateful to us both, I imagined that her calling me by the word meant I was expedient, or sturdy; but if I could only keep her hand in mine, I knew I would give my four limbs and my heart for the privilege, becoming instead four walls and a roof. "
33 " I always knew my grip upon the thread of time was tenuous, and the harder I clutched, the sooner it would break. Therefore, do not weep for me, my tender sweet love-- we must all resign ourselves to the final snapping of that bond between soul and death, and though it is a present unworthy of your grace and beauty, you must know that I gift my soul to you. "
34 " By day I taught Sahjara, who brought me unceasing small presents ranging from orange flower cakes to bouquets of jolly red berries; by night, I imagined my employer making the sort of inappropriate advances which would have made most governesses flee the estate forthwith, and in graphic detail, complete with bare thighs and calloused fingers and the diagonal notches which rest so sweetly above the hipbones when a gentleman is in training, as I had no doubt whatsoever Mr. Thornfield was. "
35 " Flattery, I have found, is a great treat for those born innately selfish. "
36 " There was Fiona Fiddick’s faculties for both humour and sewing, which enabled her to hide the words FEED ME in an embroidered nosegay of coral peonies which Miss Sheffleton proudly hung upon the classroom wall. "
37 " There is no practice more vexing than that of authors describing coach travel for the edification of people who have already travelled in coaches. As I must adhere to form, however, I will simply list a series of phrases for the unlikely reader who has never gone anywhere: "
38 " Shadows are curious entities; they are lightless and yet cast a shape into the world, just as I do. "
39 " Whom should I despise, since the one Lord made us all? "
40 " I was terrified to meet Mr. Thornfield; when I had not been glib, I had been obstreperous, a truly heady concoction of undesirable traits. "