“Stop shining your lantern in my face."
"It's such a lovely face.”
― Y.S. Lee, quote from The Traitor in the Tunnel
“He smiled. "I suppose I thought we'd have a madly impractical, terrifyingly modern sort of marriage. One based on love. Not to mention dangerous undertakings and hair's-breadth escapes from burning buildings, high ledges and exploding sewers."
"And bickering."
"Always that, yes."
"Assuming I want to marry at all."
"True. I know of no good way of forcing you to do anything."
"And you're mad enough to think it could work - one day?"
He cupped her face in his hands. His smile was so brilliant it seemed to illuminate the room. "I think it would be heaven."
She trembled, then. "You have a very strange idea of heaven."
"Kiss me and see.”
― Y.S. Lee, quote from The Traitor in the Tunnel
“I am madly, ridiculously, passionately in love with you. I don’t care about your past. Your race does nothing to change my feelings. I love you, you stubborn little fool. Is that clear enough for you?”
― Y.S. Lee, quote from The Traitor in the Tunnel
“Her Majesty Victoria, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland Queen, Defender of the Faith, had a lamp shade on her head. Again.”
― Y.S. Lee, quote from The Traitor in the Tunnel
“He looked at her for a moment, amazed. "How did you know that? How can a servant girl like you understand so much?"
Because self-absorbed man-children are common as weeds, thought Mary. But she said, "I don't know, sir. I only guessed.”
― Y.S. Lee, quote from The Traitor in the Tunnel
“My dearest Mary,
Both my words and my conduct at our last meeting were ungentlemanly - born of haste and high emotion, rather than friendship and good judgement - and yet I cannot find it within me to apologize. I am glad I kissed you; glad to have revelled in your scent, your taste, the touch of your hands; glad, even, to have quarrelled with you because during those moments of anger, I was in your presence.
Mary, you are the most singular woman I know: intelligent, brave and honest, and I crave your friendship. I confess to only the haziest notion of what I ask, having never been friends with a woman before. My friendships are male and conventional; pleasant and without distinction. But a friendship with you would be a bright, new, rare thing - if you would do me the honour.
I expect that what I ask is impossible. But it is sweet to dream, Mary, and thus I tender one last, insolent, unapologetic request: write to me only if you can say yes.
Yours,
James”
― Y.S. Lee, quote from The Traitor in the Tunnel
“If you ever need to poison someone, do it with a bacon sandwich”
― Y.S. Lee, quote from The Traitor in the Tunnel
“The door was locked, but that didn’t deter him. He pulled her tight against him, her back against his chest, his breath loud and moist in her ear. His arm was locked about her waist — he was surprisingly strong, despite his doughy appearance — and he fumbled her skirts again. He wanted her to struggle. He wanted her to cry, to beg, to be terrified.”
― Y.S. Lee, quote from The Traitor in the Tunnel
Y.S. Lee
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“Her happiness, like that of most of us, was ever in the future,—never reached but always coming. ”
― Anthony Trollope, quote from The Way We Live Now
“Who would be so base as to pick on a wizened, shriveled old lady, well stricken in years, who has consecrated her entire life to the needy and the destitute? On the other hand, who would be so incurious as to leave unexamined the influence and motives of a woman who once boasted of operating more than five hundred convents in upward of 105 countries—“without counting India”? Lone self-sacrificing zealot, or chair of a missionary multinational? The scale alters with the perspective, and the perspective alters with the scale.”
― Christopher Hitchens, quote from The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
“There he is, tall, tanned, Italian, sophisticated. So what do you do?"
I said, "Er, leap on him and snog him within an inch of his life? Taking care not to strangle myself on his false beard, or disturb his banana.”
― Louise Rennison, quote from Then He Ate My Boy Entrancers
“When I consider the brief span of my life absorbed into the eternity which precedes and will succeed it—memoria hospitis unius diei praetereuntis (remembrance of a guest who tarried but a day)—the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put me here? By whose command and act were this place and time allotted to me?”
― Blaise Pascal, quote from Pensées
“Hecuba had the mistaken notion, just like my poor mama, that all a girl had to do was to get married and all her problems were solved overnight.”
― Costas Taktsis, quote from The Third Wedding
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