Quotes from Elizabeth Hand

Please inform His Excellency that his use of the word soon is inaccurate," she said coldly. "It means in a timely manner, which, in my case, obviously no longer applies.

You'd have to be so careful, more careful than we can even imagine, to keep that one spark alive. Because that's what kept you alive, in the cold and the dark.

You articulate logical answer under pressure, Mem Leonowens," Monkut pronounced without looking at her. "That is very kind of—," panted Anna. "—but irritating superior attitude King find most unbeautiful. However, it will serve you well given decision I now make.

People forget that the colliers didn't just bring the canaries into the mines to warn them against the gases. They took them down because they sang so beautifully, even in the dark.

Please, Mem, it is too hot. Can you make some now?" Anna smiled. She smoothed strands of sweat-dampened hair from the child's brow and said, "Oh, Fa-Ying! Just because your father can make it rain doesn't mean I can make it snow." "At last I discover her limitations." Anna whirled to find herself eye-to-eye with the King on his royal elephant. She bowed respectfully and adopted a more formal tone. "I have many, Your Majesty.

But talent—if you don't encourage it, if you don't train it, it dies. It might run wild for a little while, but it will never mean anything. Like a wild horse. If you don't tame it and teach it to run on track, to pace itself and bear a rider, it doesn't matter how fast it is. It's useless.

You build a character, a shell, and if you build it right, something comes to live inside it.

Endless longing; a face you'd known since childhood, since birth almost; a body that moved as though it were your own. These were things you never spoke of, things you never hoped for; things you could never admit to. Things you'd die for, and die of.

No lights shone beyond the windows of his room. The reflection from the bedside lamp seemed insubstantial as a candle flame; the darkness outside a solid mass, huge and inescapable, that pressed against the panes. His room sat beneath the eaves, where the wind didn't roar but crooned, a sound like mourning doves.

At the door I paused. 'So what was your spirit animal?' 'A dolphin. Fun in the sun, endless summer. What about you?' 'Dee Dee Ramone,' I said, and left.

Poetry] was a form of incantation, a means of welding the world inside his head to the one that surrounded him, words the fiery chain that bound it all together.

If the retreat house was a trap, it was a very nice one.

Her earliest memory was of wings. Luminous red and blue, yellow and green and orange; a black so rich it appeared liquid, edible. They moved above her and the sunlight made them glow as though they were themselves made of light, fragments of another, brighter world falling to earth about her crib. Her tiny hands stretched upwards to grasp them but could not: they were too elusive, too radiant, too much of the air.

I should have been more frightened; that came later.

has proved to be true. You have a first city as you have a first lover, and this was mine.

Our gaze changes all that it falls upon. 

There are no trees in Iceland," - "We have a joke, do you know it?" She took a breath, then said, "What do you do if you get lost in a forest in Iceland?" I shook my head. "I dunno." "Stand up.

It was a big deal when a new record came out; you'd buy it then find one of your mates who had a stereo and everyone would come over to listen to it together for the first time.

Me, I drink to remember. If the right music's playing, if it's dark enough and I'm loaded, I can sometimes catch a flicker of that 3:00 A.M. feeling I used to live for.

It can fuck you up, if you meet the most important person in your life when you're sixteen, seventeen. You imprint on them, and you never escape from it. That's what happened to me.

Have you ever seen a bird without its beak? Horrible, just tiny dead eyes and a hole in its face.

Remember me at Winterlong.

But mostly I'm just respectful of old ways. I believe things for a reason, and in the old days they did things for a reason. And if you don't understand why—well, you might end up opening a few doors better left closed. That's all.

Christmas was gone. Brendan didn't even hate it, because how could you hate something that was dead?