“If death is your lover, you don't got to be afraid ever that he will ever leave you”
― Francesca Lia Block, quote from Echo
“I wanted him to hold me, to take care of me. To make the pain dissolve away. I know that this was part of what had ruined everything but I wanted it once more anyway.”
― Francesca Lia Block, quote from Echo
“And then I cried a flood of tears as if I really were a mermaid who had absorbed too much sea into herself. The tears spilled like a balm, like a potion, like a charm. In them swam a little girl whose father was dying without ever having seen her. In them swam a girl whose mother’s magic – the only thing the girl envied more than anything else in the world, the thing that had made her invisible, the most precious thing –might be dying too. In them swam a green-haired girl who had never been touched by the boy to whom she was so devoted that she would have lived with him forever in a shack by the sea or a ruined sand castle even if he never made love to her. My tears were for me, but they were also for him. They were to wash away the thing that had frightened him so much so long ago. The wound inside his thigh. My tears poured out of me and he drank them down his throat. He drank them in gulps deep into himself, swallowing sorrow.
Someday,” he said, “when we are ready, I will give you back your tears.”
― Francesca Lia Block, quote from Echo
“Flowers are reincarnation. They come out of the earth of our ashes. Nothing else looks so soul-like.”
― Francesca Lia Block, quote from Echo
“I will not eat cakes or cookies or food. I will be thin, thin, pure. I will be pure and empty. Weight dropping off. Ninety-nine... ninety-five... ninety-two... ninety. Just one more to eighty-nine. Where does it go? Where in the universe does it go?”
― Francesca Lia Block, quote from Echo
“The next night I went back to the sea dressed in 1950s silk travel scarves – Paris with the Eiffel tower and ladies in hats and pink poodles, Venice with bronze horses and gondoliers, New York in celestial blue and silver. I brought candles and lit the candles, all the candles, in a circle around the lifeguard stand and put a tape in my boom box. I came down the ramp with the sea lapping at my feet and the air like a scarf of warm silk and the stars like my tiara. And my angel was sitting there solemnly in the sand, sitting cross-legged like a buddha, with sand freckling his brown limbs and he watched me the way no boy had ever watched me before, with so much tenderness and also a tremendous sorrow, which was what my dances were about just as much, the sorrow of not being loved the way my womb, rocking emptily inside of me, insisted I be loved, the sorrow of never finding the thing I had been searching for.”
― Francesca Lia Block, quote from Echo
“He squinted up at the straining muscular backs of the stone men supporing the dome. "You'll have to take me to some museums," he said. He was being the young man on the road, following the sun because gray weather made him suicidal, writing his poetry in his mind in diners and gas station men's rooms across the country. "But I did see a show of Hopper once. And I like his light. It was kind of lonely or something.
Or, "The world's a mess, it's in my kiss,' like John and Exene say," he mumbled. We were in a leather store on Market Street being punks on acid with skunk-striped hair and steel-toed boots.”
― Francesca Lia Block, quote from Echo
“You’ll have to take me to some museums,” he said. He was being the young man on the road, following the sun because gray weather made him suicidal, writing his poetry in his mind in diners and gas station men’s rooms across the country.”
― Francesca Lia Block, quote from Echo
“and we have been told that they may come tonight”
― Lois Lowry, quote from Number the Stars
“I was quite happy in my new place, and if there was one thing that I missed, it must not be thought I was discontented; all who had to do with me were good, and I had a light airy stable and the best of food. What more could I want? Why, liberty!”
― Anna Sewell, quote from Black Beauty
“Her room was warm and lightsome. A huge doll sat with her legs apart in the copious easy-chair beside the bed. He tried to bid his tongue speak that he might seem at ease, watching her as she undid her gown, noting the proud conscious movements of her perfumed head.
As he stood silent in the middle of the room she came over to him and embraced him gaily and gravely. Her round arms held him firmly to her and he, seeing her face lifted to him in serious calm and feeling the warm calm rise and fall of her breast, all but burst into hysterical weeping. Tears of joy and relief shone in his delighted eyes and his lips parted though they would not speak.
She passed her tinkling hand through his hair, calling him a little rascal.
—Give me a kiss, she said.
His lips would not bend to kiss her. He wanted to be held firmly in her arms, to be caressed slowly, slowly, slowly. In her arms he felt that he had suddenly become strong and fearless and sure of himself. But his lips would not bend to kiss her.
With a sudden movement she bowed his head and joined her lips to his and he read the meaning of her movements in her frank uplifted eyes. It was too much for him. He closed his eyes, surrendering himself to her, body and mind, conscious of nothing in the world but the dark pressure of her softly parting lips. They pressed upon his brain as upon his lips as though they were the vehicle of a vague speech; and between them he felt an unknown and timid pressure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odour.”
― James Joyce, quote from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
“It's strange," I say to Day later, as we both curl up on the floor. Outside, the hurricane rages on. In a few hours we'll need to head out. "It's strange being here with you. I hardly know you. But...sometimes it feels like we're the same person born into two different worlds."
He stays quiet for a moment, one hand absently playing with my hair. "I wonder what we would've been like if I'd been born into a life more like yours,and you had been born into mine. Would we be just like we are now? Would I be one of the Republic's top soldiers? And would you be a famous criminal?"
I lift my head off his shoulder and look at him. "I never did ask you about your street name.Why 'Day'?"
"Each day means a new twenty-four hours. Each day means everything's possible again.You live in the moment, you die in the moment,you take it all one day at a time." He looks toward the railway car's open door, where streaks of dark water blanket the world. "You try to walk in the light.”
― Marie Lu, quote from Legend
“But this is not a fairy-tale. This is about REAL WITCHES.”
― Roald Dahl, quote from The Witches
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