“Dear Natasha,
It's the middle of the night. I can't sleep. Thoughts are creeping through my head like darkness slips around the bodies of sky scrapers in every city we've ever been to. From the bottom up, suffocating the life on the street first and then raising to the head and the brain, circling into smog and clouds until the black stretches up so high that nobody can even remember what the stars used to look like.
This is how I feel when I lie awake and think of you. I miss you.”
― Melodie Ramone, quote from Burning Down Rome
“In the naivete of their youth, they believed Fate to be a kind mistress. None of them were prepared for the beast that was about to pick them up by the throats and shake them until their teeth rattled.”
― Melodie Ramone, quote from Burning Down Rome
“He was seven years old the summer that his life ended. He'd always felt like his life was taken the moment that truck rammed into his father and sister. Or at least, the life he would have had was ended before it even began.”
― Melodie Ramone, quote from Burning Down Rome
“Kid's little binges, his forays into intoxication were affecting everyone now. They were affecting their goals and dreams. They were affecting Natasha. She was probably drinking just to deal with him.”
― Melodie Ramone, quote from Burning Down Rome
“But like all moments trapped in time, that moment would end and Joey Boldt, as all the greats before him did, would begin to understand that clinging too tightly to anything results in Time and Fate shaking you until you can't hold on any longer. And then, when you are knocked for a six and lose your grip, they allow you to spiral into a freefall where men are broken and legends are made.”
― Melodie Ramone, quote from Burning Down Rome
“Who is Mr. Jasper?"
Rosa turned aside her head in answering: "Eddy's uncle, and my music-master."
"You do not love him?"
"Ugh!" She put her hands up to her face, and shook with fear or horror.
"You know that he loves you?"
"O, don't, don't, don't!" cried Rosa, dropping on her knees, and clinging to her new resource. "Don't tell me of it! He terrifies me. He haunts my thoughts, like a dreadful ghost. I feel that I am never safe from him. I feel as if he could pass in through the wall when he is spoken of." She actually did look round, as if she dreaded to see him standing in the shadow behind her.
"Try to tell me more about it, darling."
"Yes, I will, I will. Because you are so strong. But hold me the while, and stay with me afterwards."
"My child! You speak as if he had threatened you in some dark way."
"He has never spoken to me about - that. Never."
"What has he done?"
"He has made a slave of me with his looks. He has forced me to understand him, without his saying a word; and he has forced me to keep silence, without his uttering a threat. When I play, he never moves his eyes from my hands. When I sing, he never moves his eyes from my lips. When he corrects me, and strikes a note, or a chord, or plays a passage, he himself is in the sounds, whispering that he pursues me as a lover, and commanding me to keep his secret. I avoid his eyes, but he forces me to see them without looking at them. Even when a glaze comes over them (which is sometimes the case), and he seems to wander away into a frightful sort of dream in which he threatens most, he obliges me to know it, and to know that he is sitting close at my side, more terrible to me than ever."
"What is this imagined threatening, pretty one? What is threatened?"
"I don't know. I have never even dared to think or wonder what it is."
"And was this all, to-night?"
"This was all; except that to-night when he watched my lips so closely as I was singing, besides feeling terrified I felt ashamed and passionately hurt. It was as if he kissed me, and I couldn't bear it, but cried out. You must never breathe this to any one. Eddy is devoted to him. But you said to-night that you would not be afraid of him, under any circumstances, and that gives me - who am so much afraid of him - courage to tell only you. Hold me! Stay with me! I am too frightened to be left by myself.”
― Charles Dickens, quote from The Mystery of Edwin Drood
“bike. “Got the old girl out of”
― Marie Force, quote from Maid for Love
“There is something about that burning of all those letters that gives me pause: why should everything be made clear and be brought into the light? Why keep things, archive your intimacies? Why not let thirty years of shared conversation go spiraling in ash up into the air of Tunbridge Wells? Just because you have it does not mean you have to pass it on . Losing things can sometimes gain you a space in which to live.”
― Edmund de Waal, quote from The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss
“But it was my father’s absences—those hours after he left and before he made it home again—that most defined my childhood and that still most define the person I’ve become.”
― Laura Schroff, quote from An Invisible Thread: The True Story of an 11-Year-Old Panhandler, a Busy Sales Executive, and an Unlikely Meeting with Destiny
“I look at people in a different
perspective. I saw you differently. Shy
with a smart-ass mouth. Reserved, but you
know exactly how to cut loose. Girls like you
I have to watch out for. Girls like you are the
deadliest ones.”
― Shanora Williams, quote from Who He Is
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