8045441
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It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.
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struggle
nightmare
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Joseph Conrad |
06b5e63
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"It was almost like a reverse nightmare, like when you wake up from a nightmare, you're so relieved. I woke up into a nightmare." "And what is that nightmare, Craig?" "Life."
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life
nightmare
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Ned Vizzini |
4be6a6d
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Better to end this dream before it becomes a nightmare.
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life
love
nick-norah-s-infinite-playlist
reality-check
nightmare
|
Rachel Cohn |
9f77a37
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This was a nightmare scenario for any bodyguard: stuck in the middle of a transparent tube, several miles underwater, with a murdering band of fugitives at one end and an enthralled but still highly skilled police officer at the other.
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nightmare
|
Eoin Colfer |
6a16b05
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For a moment he felt a wild hope: perhaps this really was a nightmare. Perhaps he would awake in his own bed, bathed in sweat, shaking, maybe even crying . . . but alive. Safe. Then he pushed the thought away. Its charm was deadly, its comfort fatal.
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|
reality
eddie
stephen
it
pennywise
nightmare
king
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Stephen King |
c8acc1e
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You're a tough guy, but I'm a nightmare wrapped in the apocalypse.
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tough-guy
threat
nightmare
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James S.A. Corey |
64bc71f
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I sit alone in a dead world. The wind blows hot and dry, and the dust gathers like particles of memory waiting to be swept away. I pray for forgetfulness, yet my memory remains strong, as does the outstretched arm of the oppressive air. It seems as if the wind has been there since the beginning of the nightmare. Sometimes loud and harsh, a thousand sharp needles scratching at my reddened skin. Sometimes a whisper, a curious sigh in the black of night, of words more frightening than pain. I know now the wind has been speaking to me. Only I couldn't understand because I was too scared. I am scared now as I write these words. Still, there is nothing else to do.
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|
world
fear
whispers
wind
needles
forgetfulness
dead
nightmare
memory
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Christopher Pike |
cf34f76
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All of this while I left lifted by a strange new medium, a strange element--I now tell you that I was newly buoyant in a brighter life. In the midst of a hymn, God had disappeared. It was like waking from a nightmare in which I'd been paralyzed. Like discovering that gravity itself had been only a bad dream.
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life
gravity
nightmare
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Denis Johnson |
9e282b7
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In the daylight we know what's gone is gone, but at night it's different. Nothing gets finished, not dying, not mourning;
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mourning
grief
dream
dreams
nightmares
nightmare
dying
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Margaret Atwood |
02acec9
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It was like a great bee come home from some field where the honey is full of poison wildness, of insanity and nightmare, its body crammed with that over-rich nectar and now it was sleeping the evil out of itself.
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scary-reality
poison
nightmare
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Ray Bradbury |
f1f72d7
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And then I realize: this isn't dirty water falling from the sky. It is--literally--blood. I look up, and a droplet of blood splashes directly into my eye. I curse, rubbing my face, trying to get the blood out, but it's everywhere, it's like trying to dry off in the middle of the ocean. Shielding my face as best I can, I stare up into the sky. I am in the center of a cyclone. Giant white clouds swirl like a spiraling galaxy above me, the eye a tiny dark speck. The storm rages, throwing out bloody rain like punches, the wind so vicious it tears my clothes and cuts my skin. Representative Belles's mind is swirling with dark thoughts--bloody thoughts--and they have created the biggest storm I have ever seen. I have to stop the cyclone. I have to get him into a peaceful reverie, something that he can hold on to while I root around his brain, looking for answers. I focus all of my concentration on stopping the bloody rain. The drops come slower and slower. I take a deep breath, imagining the clouds breaking up, spinning into fluffy bits of cotton-candy like clouds. I don't open my eyes until the sounds of beating rain disappear and I can feel the warmth of the Mediterranean sun on my face.
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rain
cyclone
mediterranean
reverie
clouds
stop
sky
sun
storm
nightmare
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Beth Revis |
7a7b2e9
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Sometimes Geraldine feels like she can drive forever. Maybe that's partially why she took a job at Milo General Motors. Driving is the best means of escape that the human race has, at least, that's her opinion. She's never had the guts to try drugs before, both because her sister was a junkie in the last few months she knew her, and because she's heard the overdose horror stories, seen 'Requiem for a Dream', smelled the vapours of a meth lab that Julia's boyfriend built, heard the crunching glass of crack vials and heroine needles when they happen to break. Even this alone is too surreal, not to mention that if she were high or tripping on acid or whatever the drug of choice may be, this would give the ghosts more power to morph into something even more nightmarish than they already are.
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car-dealership
druggie
requiem-for-a-dream
cocaine
junkie
crack
needle
escapism
drive
car
surreal
ghost
nightmare
drugs
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Rebecca McNutt |
eeec411
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"First, all I could see was this beautiful face, this beautiful girl's face; like a white, slightly luminous mask, swimming detachedly against enfolding darkness. As if a little private spotlight of its own was trained on it from below. It was so beautiful and so false, and I seemed to know it so well, and my heart was wrung. There was no danger yet, just this separate, shell-like face mask standing out. But there was danger somewhere around, I knew that already; and I knew that I couldn't escape it. I knew that everything [ was about to do, I had to do, I couldn't avoid doing. And yet, oh, I didn't want to do it. I wanted to turn and flee, I wanted to get out of wherever this was. ("Nightmare")"
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femme-fatale
nightmare
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Cornell Woolrich |
f81f236
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No task is a long one but the task on which one dare not start. It becomes a nightmare.
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procrastination
nightmare
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Charles Baudelaire |
104ab4f
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By the time she awoke she couldn't even remember if she had a dream or a nightmare. There had only been a deathlike peace.
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|
sleep
dream
death
dreams
amanda
awoke
building-122
deathlike
group-2
kings-park
kings-park-psychiatric-center
kings-park-state-hospital
kppc
kpsh
psych-ward
jason-medina
peace
hospital
nightmare
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Jason Medina |
7232bf4
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"Maldonado's face was ghastly. 'That' she said, pointing below the bed where the cat lurked, 'and that' - pointing to what lay on the floor - 'prove it was no dream. Do dreams leave marks behind them?' ("I'm Dangerous Tonight")"
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nightmares
nightmare
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Cornell Woolrich |
9d645e6
|
Dreams are just lies that we tell ourselves while we're asleep.
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|
sleep
deams
false
cynical
fake
lie
nightmare
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Rebecca McNutt |
ac39750
|
Then the man smiled, and his smile was a shock, for it was all on one side, going up in the right cheek and down in the left. There was nothing, rationally speaking, to scare anyone about this. Many people have this nervous trick of a crooked smile, and in many it is even attractive. But in all Syme's circumstances, with the dark dawn and the deadly errand and the loneliness on the great dripping stones, there was something unnerving in it. There was the silent river and the silent man, a man of even classic face. And there was the last nightmare touch that his smile suddenly went wrong.
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smile
nightmare
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G.K. Chesterton |
eef7ce4
|
"It was so awful! And he kept on looking at me and I knew I must get out of bed or he'd come and touch me. I did, too, but when I got out I wasn't me-I was a little white bunny. And he started out of the room and I had to go with him for fear he'd touch me. It felt so horrid, going out with him and looking back at mother there asleep. "We went into the main part of the house, and one of the big front doors was open, and we went out through it. And then he gave a big jump, and so did I, and it took us clear up into the sky. We couldn't fly, but we kept jumping and jumping. "Sometimes we stayed in the sky a little while, jumping from cloud to cloud, and the moon would get closer and closer and bigger and bigger, and its face would change and get horrible and grin at us until it seemed like its mouth was a mile wide and open, to swallow us up. And then we'd come down again and jump from one cliff to another, and the sea would be roaring down under us, and the waves all grey and cold and moving around and boiling like they were mad or afraid. "We went all over the island and sometimes we jumped over the sea to the mainland and back again; and sometimes I tried to get away and run back to Mother - I thought she'd know me even if I was a bunny - but always, whichever way I turned, the hare was there in front of me, and his teeth were shining. "We kept it up all night, and I was so tired and cold and miserable, and so scared. I didn't know whether he would ever let me go home or whether he would take me to Aunt Sarai. Then finally I did get away and the hare chased me!" She broke off, her voice rising again to a wail. "It was so awful! I ran all over the island, into all sorts of queer little places that I never knew were there before - it seems so different after dark - and finally, when two or three times I'd been so tired that I thought I just couldn't go any farther, before he caught me, I saw the house in front of me and the front door still open and I started to run in, and then I thought - what if they'd planned it that way, and Aunt Sarai had come down from her portrait and was inside there in the dark, waiting for me?"
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moon
hare
rabbit
witch
nightmares
nightmare
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Evangeline Walton |
b39a693
|
It was to apologize, and apologizing means he remembers what happened, and that means being trapped in a nightmare that's already come true.
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came-true
nightmare
horror
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Beth Revis |
bb67377
|
Therefore I see no wrong in riding with the Nightmare to-night; she whinnies to me from the rocking tree-tops and the roaring wind; I will catch her and ride her through the awful air. Woods and weeds are alike tugging at the roots in the rising tempest, as if all wished to fly with us over the moon, like that wild, amorous cow whose child was the Moon-Calf. We will rise to that mad infinite where there is neither up nor down, the high topsy-turveydom of the heavens. I will ride on the Nightmare; but she shall not ride on me.
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fantastic-beasts
nightmare
|
G.K. Chesterton |
dbf7da6
|
"He asked, looking at her dark-rimmed eyes, "You do not sleep?" She shivered. "No. I do not want to sleep any more. I sleep too much already. It is so cold, where Quincy sends me in my sleep. Deep into the house, farther in, not into the house we see. It is as if that house were a face, and when you see a face you can't see the brain or the thoughts of the person behind it. And it is so strange - the house inside the house." ******** "How is it strange - this that you call the house inside the house?" She said vaguely, her eyes growing glassy, "Strange. Shapes change, and sizes. The rooms are different: bigger and blacker and longer and the shadows are full of things. Creatures - or sometimes the rooms get smaller, fewer, and the furnishings change and change, like the scenes in a kaleidoscope, and I see the people in the portraits walking about in them."
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vision
nightmare
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Evangeline Walton |
1ab3e06
|
The splendor of that moment, its transcendent glory and aliveness, haunted him. He could thrust it aside by day, but it poisoned his dreams by night, calling to him and pleading with him to unlock the chains he'd bound about it.
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rage
dreams
chain
aliveness
berserker
haunt
pleading
splendor
unlock
haunting
yearn
haunted
chains
glory
moment
desire
nightmare
|
David Weber |
5268aef
|
The broken pink pillars, in the half-light, might have been waiting to fall down on him: the pool, covered with green scum, its steps torn away and hanging by one rotting clamp, to close over his head. The shattered evil-smelling chapel, overgrown with weeds, the crumbling walls, splashed with urine, on which scorpions lurked - wrecked entablature, sad archivolt, slippery stones covered with excreta - this place, where love had once brooded, seemed part of a nightmare.
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love
stones
ruins
nightmare
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Malcolm Lowry |
99bb922
|
It was for me a moment of great peace. I did not know then that it was the last, the very last moment of peace, the end of the old innocent world, the final moment before I was plunged into the nightmare of which these ensuing pages tell the story.
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|
narrator
iris-murdoch
peace
nightmare
foreshadowing
|
Iris Murdoch |
7b427fe
|
from under the ground, from under the waters, they clutch at us, they clutch at us, we won't let go.
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|
grief
loss
poetry
dreams
poetic
dreaming
grieving
nightmares
nightmare
|
Margaret Atwood |
5ca8374
|
Hot, bright heat filled him like some ecstatic poison, and Hartan's pony shied in terror as a wordless howl burst from his throat. His dripping ears were flat to his skull, fire crackled in his brown eyes, his huge sword blurred in a whirring figure eight before him, and the brigand running at him gawked in sudden panic. The raider's feet skidded in mud as he tried to brake, but it was far too late. He was face-to-face with the worst nightmare of any Norfressan, a Horse Stealer hradani in the grip of the Rage, and a thunderbolt of steel split him from crown to navel.
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|
fear
brigand
ecstatic
gawk
hradani
ecstasy
steel
thief
skirmish
heat
sword
panic
fire
fight
terror
poison
nightmare
howl
|
David Weber |
db5e33c
|
I'm sorry about the screaming. I thought you were him.
|
|
life
christina-dodd
virtue-falls
thriller
nightmare
suspense
|
Christina Dodd |