“Ivy, I pray that it's you reading this.
And if you are, well, I suppose you're the new me... - Scarlet, in her diary”
― Sophie Cleverly, quote from The Lost Twin
“I don't want to be lost forever. - Scarlet, in her diary”
― Sophie Cleverly, quote from The Lost Twin
“First, she tipped the cold, sloppy leftovers from her plate into my lap. I heard her say 'whoops!', as if she'd forgotten how her own hands worked.
...
I stood up, my dress dripping with food, and slapped her as hard as I could.
Penny screamed and clutched at her cheek. The whole hall went silent. I shook out my stinging hand.
"Whoops!" I echoed.”
― Sophie Cleverly, quote from The Lost Twin
“And the reflection didn't move.
It stared at me.
She stared at me.
And then Scarlet's hand moved too, and met mine against the cool glass.”
― Sophie Cleverly, quote from The Lost Twin
“I can pick this... My governess used to shut me in the airing cupboard when I wouldn't do my sums. But I was resourceful! - Ariadne”
― Sophie Cleverly, quote from The Lost Twin
“Her eyes are like a snake's. - Scarlet, in her diary, about Violet”
― Sophie Cleverly, quote from The Lost Twin
“That witch... It was her. She took the diary. It has to be. I'm going to kill her... Penny. - Ivy”
― Sophie Cleverly, quote from The Lost Twin
“Where are your manners, Miss Grey?" - Miss Fox
"Probably in the same place where you left yours." - Ivy”
― Sophie Cleverly, quote from The Lost Twin
“But what was so great about marriage? I had been married and married. It had its good points, but it also had its bad. The virtues of marriage were mostly negative virtues. Being unmarried in a man's world was such a hassle that anything had to be better. Marriage was better. But not much. Damned clever, I thought, how men had made life so intolerable for single women that most would gladly embrace even bad marriages instead. Almost anything had to be an improvement on hustling for your own keep at some low-paid job and fighting off unattractive men in your spare time while desperately trying to ferret out the attractive ones. Though I've no doubt that being single is just as lonely for a man, it doesn't have the added extra wallop of being downright dangerous, and it doesn't automatically imply poverty and the unquestioned status of a social pariah.
Would most women get married if they knew what it meant? I think of young women following their husbands wherever their husbands follow their jobs. I think of them suddenly finding themselves miles away from friends and family, I think of them living in places where they can't work, where they can't speak the language. I think of them making babies out of their loneliness and boredom and not knowing why. I think of their men always harried and exhausted from being on the make. I think of them seeing each other less after marriage than before. I think of them falling into bed too exhausted to screw. I think of them farther apart in the first year of marriage than they ever imagined two people could be when they were courting. And then I think of the fantasies starting. He is eyeing the fourteen-year-old postnymphets in bikinis. She covets the TV repairman. The baby gets sick and she makes it with the pediatrician. He is fucking his masochistic little secretary who reads Cosmopolitan and things herself a swinger. Not: when did it all go wrong? But: when was it ever right?
.......
I know some good marriages. Second marriages mostly. Marriages where both people have outgrown the bullshit of me-Tarzan, you-Jane and are just trying to get through their days by helping each other, being good to each other, doing the chores as they come up and not worrying too much about who does what. Some men reach that delightfully relaxed state of affairs about age forty or after a couple of divorces. Maybe marriages are best in middle age. When all the nonsense falls away and you realize you have to love one another because you're going to die anyway.”
― Erica Jong, quote from Fear of Flying
“She couldn’t run away from him. She’d be running from her own heart.”
― Kerrelyn Sparks, quote from All I Want for Christmas is a Vampire
“Tarzan hungry, dijo el Mumintroll trepando una liana. Tarzan eat now!
¿Qué dice?, preguntó Snif
Dice que ahora va a comer, dijo la señorita Snork. Verás, es lo único que sabe hacer. Habla en inglés como todos los que viven en la selva.”
― Tove Jansson, quote from Finn Family Moomintroll
“They met near the southern limit of the establishment grounds and for a while they spoke in an abbreviated and Aesopic language. They understood each other well, with many decades of communication behind them, and it was not necessary for them to involve themselves in all the elaboration's of human speech.
Daneel said in an all but unhearable whisper, "Clouds. Unseen."
Had Daneel been speaking for human ears, he would have said, "As you see, friend Giskard, the sky has clouded up. Had Madam Gladia waited her chance to see Solaria, she would not, in any case, have succeeded."
And Giskard's reply of "Predicted. Interview, rather," was the equivalent of "So much was predicted in the weather forecast, friend Daneel, and might have been used as an excuse to get Madam Gladia to bed early. It seemed to me to be more important, however, to meet the problem squarely and to persuade her to permit this interview I have already told you about.”
― Isaac Asimov, quote from Robots and Empire
“Say it, do it, preach it, shout it, but never, absolutely never, believe your own bullshit.”
― Steve Berry, quote from The Templar Legacy
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