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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 6cea438 | As she moved swiftly and noiselessly through the vast palace cellar, odd noises weltered toward her. Voices and echoes of water rippled through the air as if, in some magic chamber, whales and dolphins cavorted among young maidens in great tanks of water. When she reached it, all the fish turned into laundry, stirred and beaten in steaming cauldrons by glum, limp-haired women as wet as mackerels. | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| 05cb9d3 | When he held a candle across the threshold, the black swallowed the fire completely. When he tried to step across it, he felt nothing beneath his foot. Sometimes he heard rain, a bird-cry, wind soughing through tall trees; mostly he was aware only of an intimation of vastness, silence, as though he stood at the edge of a world. He saw nothing. So he let the charcoal imagine what might lie on the other side of the door. | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| 52ec0a3 | He is not here to help me with this; you must take his place.' Ducon started to speak, faltered. He stared at her, the bruise on his face suddenly vivid against his pallor, as if she had struck him. | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| cf3ff16 | What a dull place the world would be if all the mysteries in it were solved. | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| 49e99e5 | Then, as Mag worried the crock into her basket, trying not to squash goats' eyes and violets, the young man reached across the counter and seized her hand. She gazed at him in wonder. He had thick, moist fingers, and she needed her hand to shift the eyes. 'Mag,' he said huskily. His heavy, earnest face was sheened with sweat and the bluish shadow of his first beard. 'How can you not see how we belong to one another? We've grown up together,.. | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| 5280258 | She descended, not through the nearest hole as was her childhood habit, but more sedately down a marble staircase that began life in the upper world as an innocent stairway from a cellar door. Below, Faey complained about her tardiness, but was too busy to press for explanations. A gentleman from the palace had sent a request, with gold, for a method of detecting poison. Mag sighed. It would be a smelly afternoon. | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| 890db43 | She spread her hands. That morning they had been soft as feathers, jeweled, polished, and perfumed. Now they were crisscrossed with blood and dirt, wearing only bruises for jewels | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| 3e0eb16 | There was a drop of human blood in her, and in her father . . . it brought both of them visions at times, living dreams of the world beyond the wood. Her father had learned to ignore them, for they meant nothing to him. She, still learning words for her own world, did not make such distinctions: Everything was new, everything spoke to her and had a name; she had not yet learned that something could mean nothing. | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| fc71584 | Now the wood in early morning was utterly silent. She walked carefully through damp leaves, around tangles of bramble and vine, trying not to disturb the stillness. She could not see the sky, only green and shadow woven thickly above her, yelding not a scrap of blue. She breathed soundlessly. So did the wood around her, she felt; it seemed a live thing, alert and watching her, trees trailing whisps of morning mist, their faces hidden, their.. | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| 7c407f8 | He had made tiny pipes of feathers he had found along the streets; birds answered him here as they had in the hinterlands. A night-bird, singing back to his playing, showed him the loose bar in the iron fence, the furrowed earth along which the bar swung sideways, that told him, as the bird did, that others came here secretly. Around him, the sleeping city dreamed, tossed fretfully, muttered, dreamed again. | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| 995c992 | Oh...if you were older...It is not a bad thing, itself, but it is a bad thing to be used by men, to have them choose what you must be, and what you must not be, to have little choice in your life. If you were older, you could choose your own way. | choice older | Patricia A. McKillip | |
| a0299f9 | The giant Grof was hit in one eye by a stone, and that eye turned inward so that it looked into his mind and he died of what he saw there. | Patricia A. McKillip | ||
| a53f04b | But where, in all she taught her son, was it about thou shall own no one, havin been owned once your own self. Don't go back to Egypt after God done took you outa there. | Edward P. Jones | ||
| 2476fb4 | It has puzzled me that men, who claim more and more authority over women, show such fear of those whom they call weak. Perhaps they are hoping that women will come to believe that they need to be protected and dominated, but I cannot imagine any woman being so foolish. | religion | Kate Horsley | |
| 0e79f51 | Knowledge often spoils devotion. | Kate Horsley | ||
| 6823aa1 | Teaching is a sacred art. This is why the noblest druid is not the one who conjures fires and smoke but the one who brings the news and passes on the histories. The teacher, the bard, the singer of tales is a freer of men's minds and bodies, especially when he roams without allegiance to one chieftain or another. But he is also a danger to the masters if he insists upon telling the truth. The truth will inevitably cause tremors in those who.. | freedom power teaching truth | Kate Horsley | |
| 8d02763 | I want this party. | Philippa Carr | ||
| b967298 | Augustus wasn't driving the wagon very fast because he had his family together again and all time was now spread out before him over the valley and the mountains forever and ever. | Edward P. Jones | ||
| 448e149 | A few women had cried, remembering the way Henry smiled or how he would join them in singing or thinking that the death ofanyone, good or bad, master or not, cut down one more tree in the life forest that shielded them from their own death; but most said or did nothing. | Edward P. Jones | ||
| f878440 | She went through her memory for the time, for the day, she and and her husband told him all about what he should and should not do. No goin out into them woods without Papa or me knowin about it. No steppin foot out this house without them free papers, not even to go to the well or the privy. Say your prayers every night...Pick the blueberries close to the ground, son. Them the sweetest, I find. If a white man say the trees can talk, can da.. | Edward P. Jones | ||
| 1e9c8dc | Best hurry, he thought. Best get outa this weather. He wanted to die but he really didn't want to catch a cold to do it. | Edward P. Jones | ||
| a6510c0 | But he was a free and clear man, and the law said so. Augustus never hurt me, never said bad to me. What Harvey done was wrong. But tellin you don't put me on the nigger side. I'm still on the white man side, John. I'm still standin with the white. God help me if you believe somethin else about me. | Edward P. Jones | ||
| a0d6621 | Without all that young stuff, Stamford, you will die a slave. And it will not be a pretty die. | Edward P. Jones | ||
| b936cfb | His droning on and on was a bit soothing, far more than Calvin's hand on her arm or the children's smiling up at her. His talking told her in some odd way that one day the pain would at least be cut in half. | Edward P. Jones | ||
| 4914266 | It mattered not how long he had wandered in the wilderness, how long they had kept him in chains, how long he had helped them and kept himself in his own chains; none of that mattered now. He patted the baby's back, turned around and went back to the Richmond Home for Colored Orphans. No, it did not matter. It mattered only that those kind of chains were gone and that he had crawled out into the clearing and was able to stand up on his hind.. | Edward P. Jones | ||
| c8377b1 | On each of two porches lie big chunks of serpentine--smooth as talc, mottled black and green. When you see rocks like that on a porch, a geologist is inside. | John McPhee | ||
| f83a5c8 | On his way home, Giberson met the Devil himself at a bridge. The Devil told him to play his violin, and while Giberson played the Devil danced. Then the Devil played the violin while Giberson danced. Giberson was the kind of dancer of whom people said things like "I seen him put a looking glass on the floor and dance on it--he was that light when he danced." But the Devil danced even more lightly and beautifully than Giberson, and the Devil.. | John McPhee | ||
| 2364257 | I'm addicted to the entire planet. I don't want to leave it. I want to get down into it. I want to say hello. On the beach, I could have stopped all day long and looked at those damned shells, looked for all the messages that come not in bottles but in shells... | david-brower john-mcphee nature science shells | John McPhee | |
| 7d2aa94 | A small cabin stands in the Glacier Peak Wilderness, about a hundred yards off a trail that crosses the Cascade Range. In midsummer, the cabin looked strange in the forest. It was only twelve feet square, but it rose fully two stories and then had a high and steeply peaked roof. From the ridge of the roof, moreover, a ten-foot pole stuck straight up. Tied to the top of the pole was a shovel. To hikers shedding their backpacks at the door of.. | conservation development environment nature-writing sierra-club | John McPhee | |
| 9cdb31d | Outside the basement door was a covered pen that housed a rooster and a seagull. The rooster had been on his way to Colonel Sanders' when he fell off a truck and broke a drumstick. Someone called Carol, as people often do, and she took the rooster into her care. He was hard of moving, but she had hopes for him. He was so new there he did not even have a name. The seagull, on the other hand, had been with her for years. He had one wing. She .. | David Remnick | ||
| 34fd2bd | The simplest solution is an immediate cessation of all hostilities between you and the League of Nobles," Vidad said to Omnius. "You keep your Synchronized Worlds, and the free humans keep their League Worlds. In exchange, the mutual aggression ends. There will be no further deaths, no further violence between machine and man." | Brian Herbert | ||
| e2cdce3 | Eventually, if Quinto Paolo succeeded in his mission, at least Vorian Atreides would understand. Xavier asked for nothing more. | Brian Herbert | ||
| 1c6f1e4 | Dhartha's deep blue eyes flashed. "This is not about pride, Aurelius Venport. This is only about killing a pest of the desert." | Brian Herbert | ||
| 1684e36 | She suspected that Iblis Ginjo was a dangerous, duplicitous man, but saw no one more qualified to take the Jihad where it needed to go. For his own reasons, he did, after all, espouse the same cause as her Sorceresses: the utter annihilation of thinking machines. Iblis would, however, require the closest sort of scrutiny and would have to be handled with excruciating care. | Brian Herbert | ||
| 376ae1c | Looking around, Ishmael noted that the humans in control here didn't seem to care. Why is their religious fervor acceptable, while ours is a matter of scorn? | Brian Herbert | ||
| ae913ba | Would it ... would it be possible for me to speak with them?" "No," the secondary said. In his exalted position, Iblis Ginjo was unaccustomed to hearing such a response." | Brian Herbert | ||
| 5cea9a5 | Jool Noret, we admire you. You are the scourge of Omnius." "I am merely doing my job." | Brian Herbert | ||
| 75c4133 | Arrakis is ours because we have taken it," Selim announced. "We have learned to survive under the harshest circumstances, without depending upon the benevolence of strangers or trade with offworld intruders." | Brian Herbert | ||
| 196b3c9 | I have seen into the heart of the universe. | Brian Herbert | ||
| 39cee94 | No matter the challenge, his people knew how to endure. | Brian Herbert | ||
| 284dd18 | My child, human love is an infinite resource. No matter how many times it is expended, whether stolen or given away, love can grow again--like a flower from a bulb--and fill your heart. | Brian Herbert | ||
| 9d3cf3c | I will take their ridiculous peace and shove it down their cold metal throats. | Brian Herbert | ||
| 1155737 | So I have failed you?" "Not at all. Your human frailties are not your fault." | Brian Herbert | ||
| 0df81cd | Seurat's flowmetal face gleamed in the lights from his update ship's cockpit. "Then I regret having been such an excellent teacher." | Brian Herbert |