Quotes from Sarah Monette

He smiled at me over his shoulder, a little smile and kind of twisted, but it meant he was glad I was here, and it made me warm all the way to my fucking toes. Yeah, I'm an idiot, thanks for noticing.

Titan Clocks were made with iron and gold and human bone; they did not break, and they did not fail.

The bad days were when the world wouldn't stay out of his head, when everyone he looked at wore a swirling crown of color, and everything he touched carried the charge of someone else's life.

A river flows through the city's heart, sullen and sluggish, but brown and hungry and strong. And the city itself is a snarl, a brawl, a festered wound. It seethes and rails and bides its time.

I have a long and inglorious history of wanting what hurts me.

She was tall, slender, lithe. She wore her hair in smooth black curls around the perfect oval of her face, and her eyes were pale gray, the color of fog. She wore the clothes of a lady with neither apology not discomfort, dark purple poplin trimmed with black lace, high-necked and formfitting with a great swag of bustle behind. She saw us and made her way across the room without hesitation.

This was what he'd been before Strych got him. This was the part of him that was my brother down to the bone.

I'd seen him hurting, so he turned around and hurt me. Like a clockwork bear. Wind him up and watch him go.

He met my eyes-only for a moment, but enough that I knew we saw each other, as we so rarely did, plainly.

Noirance isn't about not being able to see. It's about not being able to find your way out of the dark. Being lost in a maze. Or being the creature in the heart of the maze who waits for the lost to come to it as they always will.

No," I said, barely more than a whisper. "Oh, no." But denial made no more difference to the truth than it ever does. Belle Lune was burning.

The man wore black velvet, and on every branch of his wide-spreading antlers a tiny white candle burned serenely, anchored in its own wax. The man's dark, lambent eyes met Sean's, and Sean knew, then and ever after, that the stag-headed man understood him and loved him as no one in his life would.

The great edifice of the Belfontaine Hotel loomed up out of the darkness and spitting snow and swallowed me whole, like a giant in a fairytale swallowing a fool.

What is mikkary?" "The feeling a room gets when there's been murder done in it," Mildmay said. Kay's face was very still for a moment; then he said slowly, "Yes, I know that feeling well.

I knew that look, that very slight hitch in his eyebrow that said he knew I was going to do what I wanted anyway, and he wasn't going to waste his breath on me. I did not care for that look, but it was better than another quarrel.

There was something terribly stark in the way she said it, an acknowledgment of the hopelessness of the vampires' love for the demi-angels, and at the same time a resolute dignity that rejected pity.

Tonight she understood what the song was trying to say, that the truth was still beautiful, even if it came out of something painful and ugly and heart-breaking.

You help me become someone who can save himself.

Its voice was the voice of clockwork mechanism, full of rust and oil, dust and dead spiders and fragments of macerated time.

His poetry was a bouquet of dead, rotting roses, a sickness, a canker, a stupid, self-indulgent delusion.

The duke's house was a three-story affair with gilded pillars and marble facing, and it was as ugly as a gator in a pink satin ball gown.

The room looked exactly as it had looked when I left the Siddons house for good at the age of eighteen, as if the intervening years had never happened, as if my escape had been nothing but a dream.

All my worst, Bastion-trained instincts came surging up, and I slid off my shoes and trailed along behind her with no heels.

I thought of the boy I had been, his murderous, pent-up hatred, of his strange, silent green glass maelstorm of wrath.