“I meant,” said Ipslore, bitterly, “what is there in this world that makes living worthwhile?”

Death thought about it.

CATS, he said eventually, CATS ARE NICE.

“Curse you!”

MANY HAVE, said Death, evenly.

  —  Sourcery (Terry Pratchett)

She loved any library, big or little; there was something about all that knowledge, all those facts waiting patiently to be found that never failed to give her a shiver. When friends couldn't be found, the books were always waiting with something new to tell. Life that was getting too much the same could be shaken up in a few minutes by the picture in a book of some ancient temple newly discovered deep in a rain forest, a fuzzy photo of Uranus with its up-and-down rings, or a prismed picture taken through the faceted eye of a bee.

And though she would rather have died than admit it – no respectable thirteen-year-old ever set foot down there – she still loved the children's library too. Nita had gone through every book in the place when she was younger, reading everything in sight – fiction and nonfiction alike, fairy tales, science books, horse stories, dog stories, music books, art books, even the encyclopedias.

Bookworm, she heard the old jeering voices go in her head, four eyes, smart-ass, hide-in-the-house-and-read. Walking encyclopedia. Think you're so hot. “No,” she remembered herself answering once, “I just like to find things out!” And she sighed, feeling rueful. That time she had found out about being punched in the stomach.

She strolled between shelves, looking at titles, smiling as she met old friends – books she had read three times or five times or a dozen. Just a title, or an author's name, would be enough to summon up happy images. Strange creatures like phoenixes and psammeads, moving under smoky London daylight of a hundred years before, in company with groups of bemused children; starships and new worlds and the limitless vistas of interstellar night, outer space challenged but never conquered; princesses in silver and gold dresses, princes and heroes carrying swords like sharpened lines of light, monsters rising out of weedy tarns, wild creatures that talked and tricked one another...

I used to think the world would be like that when I got older. Wonderful all the time, exciting, happy. Instead of the way it is...

  —  So You Want to Be a Wizard (Diane Duane)

A mother is always the beginning. She is how things begin.

  —  The Bonesetter's Daughter (Amy Tan)

But, he was not far off, for presently she heard a troubled movement and a shouting coming along, which filled her with fear. A moment afterwards, and a throng of people came pouring round the corner by the prison wall, in the midst of whom was the wood-sawyer hand in hand with The Vengeance. There could not be fewer than five hundred people, and they were dancing like five thousand demons. There was no other music than their own singing. They danced to the popular Revolution song, keeping a ferocious time that was like a gnashing of teeth in unison. Men and women danced together, women danced together, men danced together, as hazard had brought them together. At first, they were a mere storm of coarse red caps and coarse woollen rags; but, as they filled the place, and stopped to dance about Lucie, some ghastly apparition of a dance-figure gone raving mad arose among them. They advanced, retreated, struck at one another's hands, clutched at one another's head, spun round alone, caught one another and spun round in pairs, until many of them dropped. While those were down, the rest linked hand in hand, and all spun round together: then the ring broke, and in separate rings of two and four they turned and turned until they all stopped at once, began again, struck, clutched, and tore, and then reversed the spin, and all spun round another way. Suddenly they stopped again, paused, struck out the time afresh, formed into lines the width of the public way, and, with their heads low down and their hands high up, swooped screaming off. No fight could have been half so terrible as this dance. It was so emphatically a fallen sport – a something, once innocent, delibered over to all devilry – a healthy pastime changed into a means of angering the blood, bewildering the senses, and steeling the heart. Such grace as was visible in it, made it the uglier, showing how warped and perverted all things good by nature were become. The maidenly bosom bared to this, the pretty almost-child's head thus distracted, the delicate foot mincing in this slough of blood and dirt, were types of the disjoined time.

This was the Carmagnole. As it passed, leaving Lucie frightened and bewildered in the doorway of the wood-sawyer's house, the feathery snow fell as quietly and lay as white and soft, as if it had never been.

  —  A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)

It was a familiar feeling. This feeling of being incomplete in just about every sense. An unfinished jigsaw of a human. Incomplete living and incomplete dying.

  —  The Midnight Library (Matt Haig)

“I pity your kind,” said Dew softly. “Animals grown too intelligent for their own petty needs. I pity your death. It is trivial. Your kind will come and go like the tide. Nothing you do will ever change Earth. It will endure with or without you. You cannot make or create. You can only change what is there, and eventually, it will change back. What a futile life; what a futile death.”

  —  The Extraordinary and Unusual Adventures of Horatio Lyle (Catherine Webb)

“Captain Gills,” blurted our Mr. Toots, one day all at once, as his manner was, “do you think you could think favourably of that proposition of mine, and give me the pleasure of your acquaintance?”

“Why, I tell you what it is, my lad,” replied the Captain, who had at length concluded on a course of action; “I've been turning that there over.”

“Captain Gills, it's very kind of you,” retorted Mr. Toots. “I'm much obliged to you. Upon my word and honour, Captain Gills, it would be a charity to give me the pleasure of your acquaintance. It really would.”

“You see, brother,” argued the Captain slowly, “I don't know you.”

“But you never can know me, Captain Gills,” replied Mr. Toots, steadfast to his point, “if you don't give me the pleasure of your acquaintance.”

The Captain seemed struck by the originality and power of this remark, and looked at Mr. Toots as if he thought there was a great deal more in him than he had expected.

  —  Dombey and Son (Charles Dickens)

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever.

It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Spiritual revelations were conceded to England at that favoured period, as at this. Mrs. Southcott had recently attained her five-and-twentieth blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements were made for the swallowing up of London and Westminster. Even the Cock-lane ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years, after rapping out its messages, as the spirits of this very year last past (supernaturally deficient in originality) rapped out theirs. Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in America: which, strange to relate, have proved more important to the human race than any communications yet received through any of the chickens of the Cock-lane brood.

France, less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her sister of the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding smoothness down hill, making paper money and spending it. Under the guidance of her Christian pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane achievements as sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards. It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of France and Norway, there were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death, already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history. It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of the Revolution. But that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work unceasingly, work silently, and no one heard them as they went about with muffled tread: the rather, forasmuch as to entertain any suspicion that they were awake, as to be atheistical and traitorous.

In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and protection to justify much national boasting. Daring burglaries by armed men, and highway robberies, took place in the capital itself every night; families were publicly cautioned not to go out of town without removing their furniture to upholsterers' warehouses for security; the highwayman in the dark was a City tradesman in the light, and, being recognised and challenged by his fellow-tradesman whom he stopped in his character of 'the Captain', gallantly shot him through the head and rode away; the mail was waylaid by seven robbers, and the guard shot three dead, and then got shot dead himself by the other four, 'in consequence of the failure of his ammunition:' after which the mail was robbed in peace; that magnificent potentate, the Lord Mayor of London, was made to stand and deliver on Turnham Green, by one highwayman, who despoiled the illustrious creature in sight of all his retinue; prisoners in London gaols fought battles with their turnkeys, and the majesty of the law fired blunderbusses in among them, loaded with rounds of shot and ball; thieves snipped off diamond crosses from the necks of noble lords at Court drawing-rooms; musketeers went into St. Giles's, to search for contraband goods, and the mob fired on the musketeers, and the musketeers fired on the mob, and nobody thought any of these occurrences much out of the common way. In the midst of them, the hangman, ever busy and ever worse than useless, was in constant requisition; now, stringing up long rows of miscellaneous criminals; now, hanging a house-breaker on Saturday who had been taken on Tuesday; now, burning pamphlets at the door of Westminster Hall; to-day, taking the life of an atrocious murderer, and to-morrow of a wretched pilferer who had robbed a farmer's boy of sixpence.

All these things, and a thousand like them, came to pass in and close upon the dear old year one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Environed by them, while the Woodman and the Farmer worked unheeded, those two of the large jaws, nad those other two of the plain and the fair faces, trod with stir enough, and carried their divine rights with a high hand. Thus did the year one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five conduct their Greatnesses, and myriads of small creatures – the creatures of this chronicle among the rest – along the roads that lay before them.

  —  A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)

The captain clicked his tongue disapprovingly. “Symmetry is only a property of dead things. Did you ever see a tree or a mountain that was symmetrical? It's fine for buildings, but if you ever see a symmetrical human face, you will have the impression that you ought to think it beautiful, but that in fact you find it cold. The human heart likes a little disorder in its geometry, Kyria Pelagia. Look at your face in a mirror, Signorina, and you will see that one eyebrow is a little higher than the other, that the set of the lid of your left eye is such that the eye is a fraction more open than the other. It is these things that make you both attractive and beautiful, whereas...otherwise you would be a statue. Symmetry is for God, not for us.”

  —  Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (Louis de Bernières)

"Child," said the Voice, "I am telling you your story, not hers. I tell no one any story but his own."

  —  The Horse and His Boy (C. S. Lewis)

“You are fatigued,” said madame, raising her glance as she knotted the money. “There are only the usual odours.”

“I am a little tired,” her husband acknowledged.

“You are a little depressed, too,” said madame, whose quick eyes had never been so intent on the accounts, but they had had a ray or two for him. “Oh, the men, the men!”

“But my dear!” began Defarge.

“But my dear!” repeated madame, nodding firmly; “but my dear! You are faint of heart to-night, my dear!”

“Well, then,” said Defarge, as if a thought were wrung out of his breast, “it is a long time.”

“It is a long time,” repeated his wife; “and when is it not a long time? Vengeance and retribution require a long time; it is the rule.”

“It does not take a long time to strike a man with Lightning,” said Defarge.

“How long,” demanded madame, composedly, “does it take to make and store the lightning? Tell me.”

Defarge raised his head thoughtfully, as if there were something in that too.

“It does not take a long time,” said madame, “for an earthquake to swallow a town. Eh well! Tell me how long it takes to prepare the earthquake?”

“A long time, I suppose,” said Defarge.

“But when it is ready, it takes place, and grinds to pieces everything before it. In the meantime, it is always preparing, though it is not seen or heard. That is your consolation. Keep it.”

She tied a knot with flashing eyes, as if it throttled a foe.

  —  A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)

“Why should we take counsel?” she said in a small, drear voice from below his solid shoulder. “He is gone.” “What is gone may return. The roads lead always two ways, hither as well as yonder.”

  —  The Pilgrim of Hate (Ellis Peters)

That familiar feeling of disconnectedness, the sense that people were mysterious to me in a way they weren't to each other, descended.

  —  Dark Rooms (Lili Anolik)

Stories have a way of changing faces. They are unruly things, undisciplined, given to delinquency and the throwing of erasers. This is why we must close them up into thick, solid books, so they cannot get out and cause trouble.

  —  The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (Catherynne M. Valente)

Comrades, why are we delaying When we should be up and slaying? Turn, your deadly stings displaying, Wave them in the air!

Let no reckless fool provoke us, From our next attempt to smoke us – We will stand no hocus pocus! Let our foes beware!

Vengeance, we agree on! Run, boys, run to Cleon! Raise a shout, and fetch him ou: We know whose side he'll be on!

Here's a man who's roused our fury – Wants-to-stop-us sitting on the jury; But we wasps will soon make sure he Never sits again!

  —  The Wasps (Aristophanes)

Four nights a week Angela O'Meara played the piano in the cocktail lounge at the Warehouse Bar and Gril. The cocktail lounge, commodious and comfortable with its sprawl of couches, plump leather chairs, and low tables, was right there as soon as you walked through the heavy doors of the old establishment; the dining room was farther back, with windows overlooking the water. Early in the week the lounge tended to be rather empty, but by Wednesday night and continuing straight through Saturday, the place was filled with people. When you stepped from the sidewalk through the thick oak doors, there was the sound of piano notes, tinkling and constant; and the talk of the people who were slung back on their couches, or sitting forward in their chairs, or leaning over the bar seemed to accommodate itself to this, so the piano was not so much “background” music as it was a character in the room. In other words, the townspeople of Crosby, Maine, had for many years now taken into their lives the cocktail music and presence of Angie O'Meara.

  —  Olive Kitteridge (Elizabeth Strout)

It seemed to her that she had a way of absorbing the light when she came into a room. It didn't make her brilliant. She emanated a certain quality of darkness, clear and vivid, a kind of negative light.

  —  Last Night in Montreal (Emily St. John Mandel)