Quotes from Sarah Monette

He had come to believe in the fullness and flowering of his love for her, that he knew Violet's every mood, every thought; but now he seemed to be losing her, and this sense that she was drifting away, borne on a current he could not feel, made him angry because it made him afraid.

He began to laugh again, a croaking, rasping vile sound that made me want to stop my ears with my fingers.

He turned and strode out of the square with the brisk arrogance of a man who had never imainged the possibility of his being in the wrong.

Victoria wasn't beautiful, but a stern regularity of feature made her uncompromisingly handsome.

It is a rose, planted in your hear, and as its thorns tear you so does it thrive and flower.

I felt as if I walked inside a cold shadow, a shadow cast by bricks and mortar.

Old incompetence is incompetence still.

Magic is all about metaphors.

The tourmaline eyes were both grave and wicked, and Violet felt herself blushing.

The Spire is a bad card. It can mean a literal tower, but it also means a fall from a height, whether literal or figurative, the destruction of something old and valuable. It means isolation, abandonment. It is the card of the scapegoat." "All of them things?" He raises an eyebrow at me. "The card also means falling to prey to your own self-confidence.

My roses still bloom, for I will not let them fade, but the weeping willows have choked out the cherry trees, and all the chrysanthemums and snapdragons have become love-lies-bleeding and anemones and hydrangeas of the deepest indigo blue. You are missed, my only violet.

She hadn't been a beautiful woman when she was alive; her jaw was too heavy, eyes too small. But she'd clearly been a woman with appaling force of character; the heavy jaw was almost balanced by the uncompromising line of her mouth, and those small, flat, gray eyes reminded me of the one time I had come face to face with a rattlesnake somewhere out in the Grasslands to the west of the Bastion.

For Lilah, the light made everything worse. It was harder than the dark uglier, and anything it showed her would be true beyond any hope of redemption.

Visitors come on two legs, on four, on the sweeping sinuosity of scaled legless bodies. There are perches in front of every exhibit for those who come by wing, whethered feathered or mebranous, and the Museum does its best to accomodate those whose habitual method of locomotion is aquatic.

It had been foolish of Dothaw to underestimate Vyell's intiative, but many men looked at his size and the beauty of his face and assumed that there could be nothing but witless amiability behind such a facade, an assumption which Vyell was not above fostering.

What happened was I hit the cold place inside my head, the place where I'd been when I killed people for a living, the place especially where I ended up when a job looked like it was going bad. I can't describe it so it makes sense. It's really cold and really clear and nothing in the world matters except not fucking up the job-in this case, getting my damn brother on board this ship because it was what he'd said he wanted.

Gideon was there, warm and green and smelling slightly of cloves but not at all of bitterness and death, and I could hear no voices in my head at all.

Rebuff and rejection, and I know I was far too tired to deal with him without making things worse.

Is it so wrong to be needed?

I look up at the stars, serene and brilliant and out of reach.

He smiled. Not one of the dazzlers he used to get his own way. Just a smile, a little one kind of crooked. And Kethe, it was like I'd never been made at him at all.

There was the way she moved and the way she looked at people and the way she'd turned herself into Nobbie Wainwright on the way Aiaia. She'd been playing a governess when we met her, but that wasn't what she was.

Once you sell your soul to the Bastion, you never get it back.

It is hard to swerve Ocean and Sky from their deepest desires.