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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 6454afc | This story is about the eschatology of shadow puppets. | Ellen Datlow | ||
| 58cae8b | I clung to the misty margin and watched the grasslands through much of the day, noting the way the light shifted and phantom sprites sometimes moved through the air above the rippling strands, auroral presences like the vaporous dreams of things hidden below the soil. | Ellen Datlow | ||
| 9fc7a5a | Any idea what started it?" "No obvious point of origin, but Perry Horne will be out later and he can tell us more." Joe unzipped his jacket a little way and palmed sweat from his throat. "I don't need a fire marshal to tell you it wasn't an accident, though." Peck sighed and stiffened his jaw. The fire chief nodded, started toward the ruin. Peck followed. They skirted the yard where dry grass ticked, then crossed to the house's eastern face.. | Ellen Datlow | ||
| 9ec7991 | Sometimes God needs a sacrifice. Sometimes the road is complicit. No life is sacrosanct. | Ellen Datlow | ||
| a118e62 | You know how in our brains, behind all the recent flashy developments that gave us stuff like emotions and aesthetics and cosmic awareness, there's this lizard brain. It's what makes the heart beat and what stays alert to odd noises and sudden movements in the dark while we sleep. Don't wonder where the dinosaurs went, there's a bit of one inside each of us. | Ellen Datlow | ||
| 7946f6d | Then, just now, I went into my bedroom to find something else, and Lovecraft looked down on me. He's dull metallic grey. His head is elongated, his eyes blank discs. It's a bust of the author I received years ago for winning an award, and it's always seemed scary. For a while I dressed him up in a D'Artagnan hat, complete with plume, and a pair of sunglasses with pink heart-shaped rims. But a young visitor wanted those for her Barbie. Now h.. | Ellen Datlow | ||
| c1bfded | When the zombies win, their quest to eat and infect human flesh will continue unabated. They will have known only gorging, only feasting; they will not understand the world as anything other than a screaming buffet on the run. Yet there will be only silence and vacant rooms where once there was food, and the zombies, in their slow and stumbling way, will be surprised. | Ellen Datlow | ||
| cd62ec4 | We look about in puzzlement at our world, with a sense of unease and disquiet. We think of ourselves as scholars in arcane liturgies, single men trapped in worlds beyond our devising. The truth is far simpler: there are things in the darkness beneath us that wish us harm." His" | Ellen Datlow | ||
| 743fdd0 | Angels can't die yet I imagine it. A psychiatrist at that place once told me it was a projection. Like with movies. Light passes through the film and it gets bigger on the screen. I guess he was saying thought and faith have that kind of power. But he had no fucking idea who he was dealing with. | Ellen Datlow | ||
| 54205d9 | Chickens have a twenty-minute memory. We primates cope through booze and denial. Dial up more of that denial part, you'll last longer. | Ellen Datlow | ||
| e222c4a | Rudge was not a pessimist, but he'd lived long enough to know that hope had to be kept on a short leash. | Ellen Datlow | ||
| 274c72c | It's easier to acquiesce. Everyone does, they tell him. | Ellen Datlow | ||
| 489b495 | WHEN WALLY BENNETT was a kid, his parents taught him to say this prayer: Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. He had stopped saying the prayer at nine or ten, and he had always found it disturbing, for two reasons. One: Dying in his sleep was not a pleasant thought, not something Wally wished to entertain; the idea that the Lord was poised above his slee.. | Ellen Datlow | ||
| 2adb7d5 | Her name was Flower, oddly imprecise for one so much herself, as though her parents had wrestled with names like Daisy, Violet, and Rose, lost their way amid so many choices, and settled for this generic solution. | Ellen Datlow | ||
| 7fbf504 | I'd go with her, like a flash I'd go, if this were anything more than a dream, anything more than an infidel's sour regret, anything more than eleven thousand words cast like a handful of sand across the face of the ocean. | Ellen Datlow | ||
| e02539d | If the Governor speaks of ideals, they are "selfless ideals"; if he speaks of paths to be taken, they are "untrod paths." The Governor is one who leaves no cliche unturned," | Ellen Datlow | ||
| 18f358f | Before. Yes, before, I sailed my little boat on a placid sea of ignorance. Was I blissful? Oh my, yes. Before the truth floated like jetsam towards me, fouling my rudder . . . | Ellen Datlow | ||
| 199c0d7 | On a bleak day in April, just before the first crocuses broke through the sodden gray of autumn leaves, Ann, that was her name, Krey's love, got Stage 1 of Dying Stupidly. A scratch from a squirrel she was feeding got infected. Some days later, they gave her penicillin. Then they put her in the hospital where she got streptococcal pneumonia. From scratch to burial took a month. | Ellen Datlow | ||
| a48e5b3 | I was taught that the villagers and the slum dwellers were like animals," she said. "It was the responsibility of people of the educated classes to see to it rules were followed and order maintained. Animals can't think for themselves. Animals have no feelings." | Ellen Datlow | ||
| 8f3e519 | were like plaque in the arteries of the imagination, they clogged the sense of what was possible. Maybe | Ellen Datlow | ||
| e150afb | I subscribe to the tea-kettle theory of art," she'd responded. "Open the valve and the energy escapes." | Ellen Datlow | ||
| c955788 | She understands why people hate her, now. By existing, she reminds them of their smallness. By being different, she forces them to redefine "enemy." By doing her best for herself, she challenges them to become worthy of their own potential." | Ellen Datlow | ||
| 9b0ef44 | Any adult with an ID can get a free "reader identification" and use the library." | Patricia Schultz | ||
| 2327e10 | As Herman Melville wrote in Moby Dick, I had "an everlasting itch for things remote." | Patricia Schultz | ||
| fdda3af | There really is no downside to travel, save a little jet lag and a dented bank account. A small price to pay for a million-dollar experience. | Patricia Schultz | ||
| 8e661ef | He felt, though, that if love was the desire to possess someone, it was in reality the poor substance of self-love. It seemed to him that a greater, truer love was the desire to open a cage - be it made of iron bars or the bones of tormented injustice - and set the nightbird free. | love | Robert R. McCammon | |
| dd418dd | It had been a joyful day for frogs and mud hens. For the human breed, however, the low gray clouds and chill rain coiled chains around the soul. | Robert R. McCammon | ||
| 9c1cb62 | No one would be able to name what had happened or would wish to name it. Rape was a word that came not be spoken at High Point Farm. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| fb65f81 | In so sick a society as ours how is it possible that any citizen is healthy, at all? | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 1b8375f | Not hearing impaired but just not hearing which is a way of not caring.) | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| c0a09a0 | First marriage, and nothing so sweet! You don't know it at the time. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| c3ec76e | A library is a mausoleum: books of the dead. And so many. And so many secrets lost to him forever. Hadn't time for it all and if he couldn't do it all then there was no point in doing any of it. For such an effort would be like drawing a single breath in the knowledge that you would not draw another. You were fated to suffocate, to die. You were fated to become extinct. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| ebafe53 | All prices of all things--at least, useless beautiful things like rare books--are inherently absurd, rooted in the human imagination and in the all-too-human predilection to desperately want what others value highly, and to scorn what others fail to value. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| 73274b6 | He said no break is permanent. Like a bone that heals crooked, still it will heal. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| de4e852 | He had no idea of my misery. It would have surprised him to think that I was a human creature with a soul. | horror | Joyce Carol Oates | |
| 93e3905 | Ian...paused for a moment on the threshold and stared, overcome by a sudden sense of confronting, not the men and women who were his friends, but a gathering of souls. How strange we are to one another, he thought. Each soul was encased in flesh, bound by an envelope of skin, turned inward, immersed in silence. The soul was light, or flame--its heat small, ephemeral, easily extinguished. Ian stared and felt afraid: yet felt, in that instant.. | Joyce Carol Oates | ||
| c57060d | 11. Never give up on yourself Everyone may give up on you but never give up on yourself, because if you do, it will also become the end. Believe that anything can be achieved with effort. Most important of all, we must understand that dyslexia is not just a hindrance to learning; it may also be considered a gift. Multiple studies have proven that dyslexic people are highly creative and intuitive. Not to mention the long list of dyslexic peo.. | Craig Donovan | ||
| 19ebe49 | The color has faded out of the sky. It is grey, becoming darker as the world turns herself round a little more. The clouds are long and black and ragged, like the wings of stormbattered dragons. | dragons nature sky | Keri Hulme | |
| 821c93f | The one I'm looking at now is Sylvia Plath. The colors are a translucent sort of jade, pale gold, and, in a few places, milky white. Running jagged and clear, horizontally, through the middle of the canvas, is a line I recognize immediately and, after a long second, place as a line from the poem, "Daddy." | Ella James | ||
| d75e863 | The sea that morning was iridescent and dark. My wife and my sister were swimming--Diana and Helen--and I saw their uncovered heads, black and gold in the dark water. I saw them come out and I saw that they were naked, unshy, beautiful, and full of grace, and I watched the naked women walk out of the sea. | John Cheever | ||
| 49af516 | Paint me a small railroad station then, ten minutes before dark. Beyond the platform are the waters of the Wekonsett River, reflecting a somber afterglow. The architecture of the station is oddly informal, gloomy but unserious, and mostly resembles a pergola, cottage or summer house although this is a climate of harsh winters. The lamps along the platform burn with a nearly palpable plaintiveness. The setting seems in some way to be at the .. | John Cheever | ||
| b1b60b9 | Trace listened to the story, but how could he get excited? Francis had no powers that would let him re-create a brush with death - particularly in the atmosphere of a commuting train, journeying through a sunny countryside where already, in the slum gardens, there were signs of harvest. | John Cheever | ||
| 83a5eb6 | You might say that he had lost the gift of evoking the perfumes of life: sea water, the smoke of burning hemlock, and the breasts of women. He had damaged, you might say, the ear's innermost chamber, where we hear the heavy noise of the dragon's tail moving over the dead leaves. | John Cheever | ||
| 050a47a | I did another commercial. Don't lose your loved ones, I wrote, because of excessive radioactivity. Don't be a wallflower at the dance because of strontium 90 in your bones. Don't be a victim of fallout. When the tart on Thirty-sixth Street gives you the big eye does your body stride off in one direction and your imagination in another? Does your mind follow her up the stairs and taste her wares in revolting detail while your flesh goes off .. | John Cheever |