“The trains roared by like projectiles level on the darkness, fuming and burning, making the valley clang with their passage. They were gone, and the lights of the towns and villages glittered in silence.”- D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers
“How could it be that two people who really liked each other, and who took a brave crazy leap on not just living together, which lots of mammals do, but swearing fealty and respect in front of a huge crowd, and filing taxes as a joint entity, and spawning a child, and cosigning mortgages and car loans, how could they end up signing settlement papers on the dining room table and then wandering out into the muddy garden to cry?” —Brian Doyle, in his essay Irreconcilable Dissonance
“The shagginess of things, the way they never quite work out as planned and break down every other Tuesday, necessitating wine and foul language and duct tape and the wrong-sized screw quietly hammered in with the bottom of a garden gnome, seems to me the very essence of marriage.” —Brian Doyle, in his essay Irreconcilable Dissonance
“To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else’s heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter.”
-Love in the Time of Cholera
C.S. Lewis on Names
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. —
C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader