“You fainted and I caught you. It was the first time I'd supported a human. You had such heavy bones. I put myself between you and gravity. Impossible.”
“The thought of flight has melted me, I am less solid than liquid, then I'm going up and going invisible like steam.”
“Sometimes I imagine a whole future made out of the moment after I've died and you are still sitting beside me.'
'You imagine I'll be there at your deathbed?'
'Yes.'
'And if I stayed away, would you live for ever?”
“Why do you come here?"
"I promised."
"I release you from your promise!"
"It wasn't you I promised," the angel said quietly.”
“Do you no longer believe in your luck?'
'You're not my luck, fallen angel, or even my dearest friend. You're my love. My true love.”
“Books can be the people we never get to meet, ancestors or far neighbors.”
“So, did you need to hear that? Did you really need to know more?' Xas asked.
'Yes. It's always better to know more.'
'God help you,' Xas said with feeling.”
“I know that you're a virgin and as bodiless as any paralytic. I know I'm old and not as handsome as I once was. But I know you love me as I love you.'
And he kissed the angel.”
“And what of those losses that seem unbearable? Separations from people we feel we can't live without?'
'Perhaps our ruin honours the strength of our love.”
“I knew I was in danger from the moment I proposed visiting you a second time. I knew because God warned me by sending the whirlwind that pulled a few feathers.'
'But you still came every year.'
'God is my maker but not my master. And I don't think he was saying “Thou shalt not”, rather, “I think you're going to regret this..”'
'So, you go freely, with hints. If God made a suggestion to me I'm sure I'd take it. I mean, I assume He has, but I've misunderstood.”
“He said, ‘Don’t mind what happened to me. Don’t be angry. I’m a frail creature with certain crude reflexes.”
“Xas was whiteskinned, smooth. Even his mouth was pale, more blurred than coloured, like a wine stain wiped on the mouth of a statue. But Xas was no statue. Sobran could see his blood moving, a vein in the angel's neck that pulsed, and with each pulse variations of brightness in his skin, like cloud shadows passing across a wheat field, each pass of light a surprise. Where his skin was worked, the calluses on his hands, it was the same fleshy rose as the nipples of a darkhaired girl who has never suckled a child.”
“Xas reappeared and showed every sign of winding himself around Sobran permanently, like -Sobran complained - some parasitic vine.”
“The angel took a deep breath then huffed out hard through his nose, like an impatient parade horse.
"I returned because it pleased me to promise you, and to keep my promise. I returned to see what happened about your love troubles. That first night, the night we met, I'd only stopped here to rest. The rose bush I carried was heavy. Or, to be exact, its damp roots were. It was of no great height and pruned back to dead wood, little more than a bag of roots in soil. I dropped it when I caught you – when you fainted. And I lost it. But the year it rained and I went down to your house I saw that someone had found and planted it. The pink rose I carried from Denmark and was transporting to my garden.”
“I don't know what God intends, or what qualifies Him to forgive me,' Sobran said”
“You fainted and I caught you. It was the first time I supported a human. You had such heavy bones. I put myself between you and gravity.
Impossible.”
“Every day time stopped and Sobran saw Xas, the sun reflecting off his raised wings, white chest watermarked by tears dried in fine dust; bare skin and colourless nipples, as innocent as a child's; the double signature, seagreen and vermilion, awake and vivid; a whitelipped white face and eyes, abysmal, inimical, like the sea seen through holes in an icefield. It was like being in love, this remembering, because Sobran couldn't put Xas out of his mind. And it was like shame. Because he grew so tired defending himself from the pain of this one recollection, Sobran forgot everything else he knew about the angel.”
“Xas put his face close to Sobran's and said, soft and succinct, "Listen, and take this in. The terms of the pact are this: 'Xas shall go freely. God shall have his pains and Lucifer his pleasures.' So, if you please yourself and me the way you want, Sobran, you will be pleasing the devil. And I will not give you to him.”
“Listen to me," Jordan begged urgently, somehow convinced that she would stay alive if she understood how much she meant to him. "Listen to what my life was like before you hurtled into it wearing that suit of armor— Life was empty. Colorless. And then you happened to me, and suddenly I felt feelings I never believed existed, and I saw things I'd never seen before. You don't believe that, do you, darling? But it's true, and I can prove it." His deep voice ragged with unshed tears, Jordan recited his proof: "The flowers in the meadow are blue," he told her brokenly. "The ones by the stream are white. And on the arch, by the arbor, the roses are red."
Lifting her hand to his face, he rubbed his cheek against it. "And that's not all I noticed. I noticed that the clearing by the pavilion—the one where my plaque is—looks like the very same one where we had our duel a year ago. Oh, and darling, there's something else I have to tell you: I love you, Alexandra."
Tears choked his voice and made it a tormented whisper. "I love you, and if you die I'll never be able to tell you that.”
“Have you ever felt like you could cry because you know you just heard the most important thing anybody in the world could have spoke at that second?”
“Schellenberg had the habit of calling people he didn't like whores, and this term suited him well - and when I think about it, it's true that the insults people prefer, the ones that come most spontaneously to their lips, often in the end reveal their own hidden faults, since they naturally hate what they most resemble.”
“Her blood felt laced with black powder. How could she have forgotten what it was like to burn on a fuse before him?”
“Anybody can look at you. It's quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see.”
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