“It truly sucks to doubt your friends when you only have one or two of them, I realized.”
― Lilith Saintcrow, quote from Working for the Devil
“He wiped away the tears, tenderly, and I forgot to weep as he told me silently everything I always wanted to hear. ”
― Lilith Saintcrow, quote from Working for the Devil
“—leave me," Japhrimel snarled. "You will not leave me to wander the earth alone—breathe, damn you, breathe!”
― Lilith Saintcrow, quote from Working for the Devil
“Really, I scolded myself, you should have known that you'd end up in a stone dungeon with no facilities. That's how these things always end up, isn't it?”
― Lilith Saintcrow, quote from Working for the Devil
“Lucas went even paler. “Then you’re on the track to suicide,” he whispered. “Take my advice, Valentine. Run. Run as fast as you can, for as long as you can. Steal whatever bit of life you can. You’re already dead.”
― Lilith Saintcrow, quote from Working for the Devil
“I have set you as a seal upon my heart; I will not return to Hell.”
― Lilith Saintcrow, quote from Working for the Devil
Lilith Saintcrow
Born place: in The United States
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“No one knows better than I how unworthy I am.'
A sentimental sigh and an inarticulate murmur from Selina showed that this frank avowal had moved her profoundly. Upon Abby it had a different effect. 'Trying to take the wind out of my eye, Mr Calverleigh?' she said.
If he was disconcerted he did not betray it, but answered immediately: 'No, but, perhaps - the words out of your mouth?'
Privately, she gave him credit for considerable adroitness, but all she said was: 'You are mistaken: I am not so uncivil!'
'And it isn't true!' Fanny declared passionately. 'I won't permit anyone to say such a thing - not even you, Abby!'
'Well, I haven't said it, my dear, nor am I likely to, so there is really no need for you to fly up into the boughs!”
― Georgette Heyer, quote from Black Sheep
“All I know about this fine, sweaty life, my own or anyone else’s, is that in a little while I’ll rise up and leave this astonishing place that gives shelter to dead people. This graveyard. And go. Walking first on one rail and then the other.”
― Raymond Carver, quote from All of Us: The Collected Poems
“Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations.
The stretch of Hudson Street where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet. I make my own first entrance into it a little after eight when I put out my garbage gcan, surely a prosaic occupation, but I enjoy my part, my little clang, as the junior droves of junior high school students walk by the center of the stage dropping candy wrapper. (How do they eat so much candy so early in the morning?)
While I sweep up the wrappers I watch the other rituals of the morning: Mr Halpert unlocking the laundry's handcart from its mooring to a cellar door, Joe Cornacchia's son-in-law stacking out the empty crates from the delicatessen, the barber bringing out his sidewalk folding chair, Mr. Goldstein arranging the coils of wire which proclaim the hardware store is open, the wife of the tenement's super intendent depositing her chunky three-year-old with a toy mandolin on the stoop, the vantage point from which he is learning English his mother cannot speak. Now the primary childrren, heading for St. Luke's, dribble through the south; the children from St. Veronica\s cross, heading to the west, and the children from P.S 41, heading toward the east. Two new entrances are made from the wings: well-dressed and even elegant women and men with brief cases emerge from doorways and side streets. Most of these are heading for the bus and subways, but some hover on the curbs, stopping taxis which have miraculously appeared at the right moment, for the taxis are part of a wider morning ritual: having dropped passengers from midtown in the downtown financial district, they are now bringing downtowners up tow midtown. Simultaneously, numbers of women in housedresses have emerged and as they crisscross with one another they pause for quick conversations that sound with laughter or joint indignation, never, it seems, anything in between. It is time for me to hurry to work too, and I exchange my ritual farewell with Mr. Lofaro, the short, thick bodied, white-aproned fruit man who stands outside his doorway a little up the street, his arms folded, his feet planted, looking solid as the earth itself. We nod; we each glance quickly up and down the street, then look back at eachother and smile. We have done this many a morning for more than ten years, and we both know what it means: all is well.
The heart of the day ballet I seldom see, because part off the nature of it is that working people who live there, like me, are mostly gone, filling the roles of strangers on other sidewalks. But from days off, I know enough to know that it becomes more and more intricate. Longshoremen who are not working that day gather at the White Horse or the Ideal or the International for beer and conversation. The executives and business lunchers from the industries just to the west throng the Dorgene restaurant and the Lion's Head coffee house; meat market workers and communication scientists fill the bakery lunchroom.”
― Jane Jacobs, quote from The Death and Life of Great American Cities
“As it was, nothing happened except the two of us watching the sea come in and go out again, listening to the birds, sheltering from the rain when it came, and lying silent as the sky changed from blue to white to gold. For hours we lay side by side, breathing softly together, watching thin rivulets of water run down the cliffs and into the sea, feeling the world slowly revolve around us as we leaned into each other for warmth--and for something else, something I couldn't quite name, something glorious, frightening, and unforgettable.”
― Meg Rosoff, quote from What I Was
“Consider the turtle. Perchance you have worried, despaired of the world, meditated the end of life, and all things seem rushing to destruction; but nature has steadily and serenely advanced with the turtle’s pace. The young turtle spends its infancy within its shell. It gets experience and learns the way of the world through that wall. While it rests warily on the edge of its hole, rash schemes are undertaken by men and fail. French empires rise or fall, but the turtle is developed only so fast. What’s a summer? Time for a turtle’s egg to hatch. So is the turtle developed, fitted to endure, for he outlives twenty French dynasties. One turtle knows several Napoleons. They have no worries, have no cares, yet has not the great world existed for them as much as for you? —Henry David Thoreau Journal August 28, 1856”
― Mary Alice Monroe, quote from The Beach House
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