“You said you wanted someone to know you. Maybe I just want to have someone know me too. Without you in this world, the memories of every moment we’ve shared together will be gone. We only exist because others see us. Part of my existence...an important part, only exists because you are here to see it.”
― Jessica Shirvington, quote from Between the Lives
“My Sabine,
I just left your room. You were so beautiful lying there sound asleep that I couldn’t bear to wake you. But I’m not feeling so great and there are things I promised to tell you that I fear I may not get the chance to.
I know you had once hoped that I would be the one to pass on your letters to Maddie once you were gone. But, as it turns out, I think it is going to be me who ends up leaving the letters behind.
Be mad at me. You should. But after that try to understand that I did what I thought was best. I wanted to tell you. So many times I snuck down to your room planning on telling you everything, but I just couldn’t.
Partly it was for you – yes. You needed time and I didn’t want to influence your choices, even once I realised what was happening between us, even more so then. Falling in love with you only made those choices more complicated and I feared that you might choose to stay for me and then, after I was gone, change your mind. I couldn’t let that happen.
Partly the choice was selfish, and for that I am sorry. For so long now people have been trying to fix me, but where they failed, you succeeded. You’ve given me more life in the last couple of weeks that I’ve had in years. Being with you, loving you, making memories with you, fearing for you, wanting to show you the beauty of life instead of the terror – it was bittersweet, but more importantly Sabine, it was real.
I know this is the part when I beg you to go on, live your life and be happy. But I don’t need to say those things. I know you. Your lives will be extraordinary. You certainly made mine feel that way.
Please find it in your heart to forgive me one day. I wish we had more time, but I want to thank you – for giving me life in my time of death.
My love for you is eternal.
Ethan.”
― Jessica Shirvington, quote from Between the Lives
“Life’s too short. If Ethan taught me anything, that would be it. I want to get on with living mine.”
― Jessica Shirvington, quote from Between the Lives
“Some things are so real you can feel them to your core. It doesn't matter where you go, they go with you. Anywhere.”
― Jessica Shirvington, quote from Between the Lives
“I have two lives and yet I'm a ghost.”
― Jessica Shirvington, quote from Between the Lives
“And then I swallowed hard, knowing that out of everyone, I was best at lying to myself.”
― Jessica Shirvington, quote from Between the Lives
“For now, you will be confined to your room until you earn privileges.'
'Privileges?'
He nodded. 'Once we start working together and you show a willingness to cooperate, we can add privileges to your daily program. Outside time, personal items, television, phone--those kinds of things.'
He checked his watch while I stared at him in horror. Privileges? As in out-frickin'-side time? I was in prison!”
― Jessica Shirvington, quote from Between the Lives
“I can distinctly hear the beatings of the wings of the angel of death,” it went, in improbably elegant English, which Litvinenko had barely learned to speak during his years in exile. “I may be able to give him the slip, but I have to say my legs do not run as fast as I would like. I think, therefore, that this may be the time to say one or two things to the person responsible for my illness. You may succeed in silencing men, but that silence comes at a price. You have shown yourself to be as barbaric and ruthless as your most hostile critics have claimed. You have shown you have no respect for life, liberty or any civilized value. You have shown yourself to be unworthy of your office, to be unworthy of the trust of civilized men and women. You may succeed in silencing one man, but a howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr. Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life.”
― quote from The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin
“She also possessed a very expertly stuffed unicorn, on whose back she liked to make love. Geralt was of the opinion that if there existed a place less suitable for having sex it was probably only the back of a live unicorn.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, quote from Sword of Destiny
“Come back!" the Caterpillar called after her. "I've something important to say."
This sounded promising, certainly. Alice turned and came back again.
"Keep your temper," said the Caterpillar.”
― Lewis Carroll, quote from The Annotated Alice
“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”
― Cormac McCarthy, quote from Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
“Flippancy, the most hopeless form of intellectual vice, was a characterising note of Mr Fadge’s periodical; his”
― George Gissing, quote from New Grub Street
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