Quotes from Sarah Monette

At home, it was part of my life that Ivo was always watching me, unblinking, the slits of his pupils expanding and contracting as a cat's do when it considers whether or not to pounce on its prey.

The picture that emerged from Mildred's entries was of a pretty, charming, willful child who was accustomed to get her own way with the confidence of an empress.

You put a guy who wants to control everything in the same room with a guy who'd rather wlak into a bonfire than listen when somebody tells him not to, and it's your own damn fault if you're surprised when things get ugly.

Amelia Stapleton had frozen herself in a kind artificial girlhood which apparently resonated with the ghost of Georgiana Truelove. In fact, I saw a dreadful symmetry between the two: both of them unable to grow up, both of them preserved like insects in amber at this point of trauma, where their lives ended-Miss Stapleton's only metaphorically, but Georgiana Truelove's with a most dreadful literality.

This was merely the malignant hand of coincidence.

Like many predators, boys hunt in packs.

I heard the clicking of hells, like the tapping of tiny hooves, and there appeared in front of me two, tiny withered crones. I thought I had to be dreaming still, for they were identical, dressed in the same dark red, with small, black, cunning eyes in their pale, wrinkled faces. They looked as if they put up their silvery-white hair in its coiled braids using each other as a mirror, and there were long, dangling earrings of marcasite and jet.

I had neither proof nor explanation, only that mad inner surety that I suspect is characteristic of all those who hear voices in an empty room, whether those voices be spectral or merely delusional.

He rolled the syllables of my name out of his mouth as if they were at once contemptible and marvelous.

The hotel was a blazing citadel, a palace of electricity in the city's cold gloom.

I suppose she was pretty-at least everyone seemed to think so-but her mouth was small and ungenerous, and her eyes was hard. Her voice was high-pitched and always rather breathless, and she lisped slightly. The quality of her voice was childlike, innocent, and that was a deception worthy of the Serpent in Eden.

I could see her blush, even through her tan, but her eyes were steady and unapologetic.

A room more clearly meant to delight the heart of a bibliophile I could not imagine.

The museum may lose things," I said, "but it never throws them away.

I did not know how to help her; I was not the hero for whom she waited, the man whose touch could dissolve the wall around her and set her free.

If I'd thought Ulfrikr wee serious in his complaints," Ulfbjorn said, "I would have told you. I wanted to spare you worrying about something that isn't worth your attention." Frithulf snorted. "Spend some more time with Isolfr and you'll realize just what a lost cause that is. You can't spare him worry, Ulfbjorn. All it does is make him worry about why you're sparing him.

There were so many lies, all of them precious, all of them necessary.

His eyes were green and cold and brilliant with murder.

I miss my fox-headed brother. Keeper

There ain't nothing worse than getting fired by somebody you hate, because it means they

I'm a cat burglar.

I do not like children. I do not know how to speak to them. They frightened and confused me when I was a child myself, and they frighten and confuse me now that I am an adult.

What you're asking me to do is monstrous." "So? Ain't we both monsters?

Asking why the creature had chosen to give me its bone was pointless. My foolish and unwilling foray into necromancy had made me attractive to such things, as a magnetic is attractive to iron.