Quotes from Summer of Night

“The sunset was that long, achingly beautiful balance of stillness in which the sun seemed to hover like a red balloon above the western horizon, the entire sky catching fire from the death of day; a sunset unique to the American Midwest and ignored by most of its inhabitants. The twilight brought the promise of coolness and the certain threat of night.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Summer of Night

“People always pay a lot of money for things that make them stupid.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Summer of Night

“Sometimes Duane imagined that he was the single crewman on a receding starship, already light-years from Earth, unable to turn around, doomed never to return, unable even to reach his destination in a human lifetime, but still connected by this expanding arc of electromagnetic radiation, rising now through the onionlike layers of old radio shows, traveling back in time as he traveled forward in space, listening to voices whose owners had long since died, moving back toward Marconi and then silence.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Summer of Night

“He suspected that Duane had lived in those lofty realms of thought, listening to the voices of men long dead rising from books the way he'd once said he listened to late-night radio shows in his basement.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Summer of Night

“Old Central School still stood upright, holding its secrets and silences firmly within. Eighty-four years of chalkdust floated in the rare shafts of sunlight inside while the memories of more than eight decades of varnishings rose from the dark stairs and floors to tinge the trapped air with the mahogany scent of coffins. The walls of Old Central were so thick that they seemed to absorb sounds while the tall windows, their glass warped and distorted by age and gravity, tinted the air with a sepia tiredness. Time moved more slowly in Old Central, if at all. Footsteps echoed along corridors and up stairwells, but the sound seemed muted and out of synch with any motion amidst the shadows. The cornerstone of Old Central had been laid in 1876, the year that General Custer and his men had been slaughtered near the Little Bighorn River far to the west, the year that the first telephone had been exhibited at the nation’s Centennial in Philadelphia far to the east. Old Central School was erected in Illinois, midway between the two events but far from any flow of history.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Summer of Night

“A human being on this world, Duane realized with a shock of recognition approaching vertigo, made no more permanent impression than does a hand thrust in water. Remove the hand, and water rushes in to fill the void as if nothing had ever been there.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Summer of Night

“Дейл тихо опустил голову, зная, что все это — спутник, и пещеру бутлегеров, и многое многое другое — могут повториться и завтра, и через неделю, но что этот момент — друзья сидевшие рядом, едва слышные шорохи летней ночи, голоса родителей снизу, чувство какой-то бесконечности лета, которое как обычно принес август — что этот момент единственный и неповторимы. И что он должен быть сохранен.
И пока Майк и Лоуренс, Кевин, Харлен и Корди провожали глазами светлую точку, на их запрокинутых лицах читалась вера в то, что на их глазах начинается новая эра, Дейл молча следил за ними. Он думал о своем друге Дьюане и о том, как можно описать то, что видишь, словами, как это делал он.
И затем, инстинктивно зная, что такие минуты нужно замечать, но нельзя губить их наблюдениями, Дейл присоединился к друзьям, провожая взглядом Эхо, уже коснувшийся горизонта и начавший тускнеть.”
― Dan Simmons, quote from Summer of Night

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Popular quotes

“The lobby of the Nelson Hotel always smells of the river -- it's in the pores of the place -- but this evening the smell is heavier than usual. It's a smell that makes us think of bad ideas, blown investments, forged checks, deteriorating health, stolen office supplies, unpaid alimony, empty promises, skin tumors, lost ambition, abandoned sample cases filled with cheap novelties, dead hope, dead skin, and fallen arches.

This is the kind of place you don't come to unless you've been here before and all your other options are pretty much foreclosed. It's a place where men who left their families two decades before now lie on narrow beds with pee-stained mattresses, coughing and smoking cigarettes.”
― Stephen King, quote from Black House

“I’ll check on you when I get home. I love you, baby. (Kiefer)
I love you too, Daddy. (Kiara)
What the hell was that action? (Syn)
I think it’s something called ‘paternal concern.’ (Nykyrian)
What…? You sure? I thought that crap was a myth. (Syn)
No, really. I watched it once in a documentary. It was fascinating. Believe it or not, there are people out there who actually have feelings for their progeny. (Nykyrian)
Get the fuck out. No way. You’re screwing with my head again, aren’t you? (Syn)
No, I swear. You just saw it with your own eyes. I did not make that shit up. (Nykyrian)
Yeah but it’s really messing with my concept of the natural order of the universe. Paternal love? What’s next? Limb regrowth? Genetic splicing reversals? (Syn)”
― Sherrilyn Kenyon, quote from Born of Night

“We mythologists know very well that myths and legends contain borrowings, moral lessons, nature cycles, and a hundred other distorting influences, and we labor to cut them away and get to what might be a kernel of truth. In fact, these same techniques must be applied to the most sober histories, for no one writes the clear and apparent truth—if such a thing can even be said to exist.”
― Isaac Asimov, quote from Foundation and Earth

“Did you see Grace is back with us?"
Megan did see me. She saw me jump off a cliff and crawl under an Iranian fence. Megan has seen plenty. And I can't help but hold my breath, waiting on her answer.
"Hi," Megan says, turning to me. "Welcome home."
Home. The word hits me. I've spent all my life thinking that I didn't have one, but now that I'm back I can't deny that I've spent more my life on Embassy Row than in any other place-that maybe it just wasn't my mother's childhood home. In a way, it's mine, too.”
― Ally Carter, quote from All Fall Down

“For men, the softer emotions are always intertwined with power and pride. That was why Karna waited for me to plead with him though he could have stopped my suffering with a single world. That was why he turned on me when I refused to ask for his pity. That was why he incited Dussasan to an action that was against the code of honor by which he lived his life. He knew he would regret it—in his fierce smile there had already been a glint of pain.

But was a woman's heart any purer, in the end?

That was the final truth I learned. All this time I'd thought myself better than my father, better than all those men who inflicted harm on a thousand innocents in order to punish the one man who had wronged them. I'd thought myself above the cravings that drove him. But I, too, was tainted with them, vengeance encoded into my blood. When the moment came I couldn't resist it, no more than a dog can resist chewing a bone that, splintering, makes his mouth bleed.

Already I was storing these lessons inside me. I would use them over the long years of exile to gain what I wanted, no matter what its price.

But Krishna, the slippery one, the one who had offered me a different solace, Krishna with his disappointed eyes—what was the lesson he'd tried to teach?”
― Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, quote from The Palace of Illusions

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