If the sun had burnt out and the seas dried up, Arthur might have been mildly troubled. Maria’s death made him distraught.
Pg. 33, Beginner’s Greek, James Collins

In fact, that suited Peter just fine, for somewhere deep in his Celtic-Anglo-Saxon bones, he believed that it was improper for any real man to speak French.
Pg. 50, Beginner’s Greek, James Collins

They were good, decent people. The numbers went into their supercomputers time and again, and time and again the results came out: marriage.
Pg. 53, Beginner’s Greek, James Collins

He really did believe that the universe had been programmed to bring them together. But it hadn’t happened, had it? Why, why, why? Some zeros and ones in the wrong place? Typical glitch? He understood that it would be asking a lot of the universe to reboot and start all over. Or maybe there was an entirely different explanation — this free-will business. If so, then it was still in his power to make it all work, and maybe he could find a way?
Pg. 144, Beginner’s Greek, James Collins

Rather, they were like two acquaintances in a tragedy who, after all the leads had died, had to stay onstage and talk about the weather.
Pg. 165, Beginner’s Greek, James Collins

If by doing so he could save a large city from destruction by a madman in possession of a nuclear device, maybe. But a medium-sized city? No way.
Pg. 272, Beginner’s Greek, James Collins

“When two people are in love,” he said solemnly, “they are parallel lines. That intersect.”
Pg. 324, Beginner’s Greek, James Collins

Wonder, discovery. The point is, part of the fun is learning things about each other, finding the places where you share a border and the others where you are separated by a sea. If you force that process, it’ll never come out right.
Pg. 362, Beginner’s Greek, James Collins

“…writers write out of contempt for their colleagues, out of a desire to have something good to read once in a while.”

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Umberto Eco, Pg 31

“I have so many books. Sorry, we do.”

“Five thousand here. And there’s always some imbecile who comes over and says, my how many books you have, have you read them all?”

“And what do I say?”

“Usually you say: Not one, why else would I be keeping them here? Do you by chance keep the tins of meat after you’ve emptied them? As for the five thousand I’ve already ready, I gave them away to prisons and hospitals. And the imbecile reels.”

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Umberto Eco, Pg 32

But when you actually live a cliché, it feels brand-new, and you are unashamed.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Umberto Eco, Pg 51

“Nothing can shake my belief that this world is the fruit of a dark god whose shadow I extend.”

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Umberto Eco, Pg 65

“Do you know you’re the only man in the world, the only man on the face of the earth from Adam up to now, who when his wife sends him out to buy roses comes home with a pair of dog balls?”

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Umberto Eco, Pg 69

You read any old story as a child, and you cultivate it in your memory, transform it, exalt it, sometimes elevating the blandest thing to the status of myth.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Umberto Eco, Pg 253

I am traveling through a tunnel with phosphorescent walls. I am rushing toward a distant point that appears as an inviting gray. Is this the death experience? Popular wisdom suggests that those who have it and then come back say just the opposite, that you go through a dark, vertiginous passageway, then emerge in a triumph of blinding light. The Hotel of the Three Roses. So either I am not dead, or they lied.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Umberto Eco, Pg 301

Faith in the ungraspable allows me to close my penitential parenthesis. Life as a provident young man had promised me, as a reward, she who was lovely as the sun and pale as the light of the moon. But a single impure thought could snatch her away from me forever. The Unfound Isle, however, since it is unattainable, remains forever mine.
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Umberto Eco, Pg 405

For on those lips to which she’s been misled / Roxane is kissing the words that I just said.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Umberto Eco, Pg 407

For the first time, Marek felt a twinge of uncertainty. Until now, nothing he had seen in this world had seemed out of place, or unexpected. The monastery was just as he had expected. The peasants in the fields were as he had expected. The tournament being set up was as he had pictured it. And when he entered the town ofCastelgard, he again found it exactly as he had thought it would be. Kate had been appalled by the butcher on the cobblestones, and the stench of the tanner’s vats, but Marek was not. It was all as he had imagined it, years ago.

But not this, he thought, watching the knights fight.

It was so fast! The swordplay was so swift and continuous, attempting to slash with both downswing and backswing, so that it looked more like fencing than sword fighting. The clangs of impact came only a second or two apart. And the fight proceeded without hesitation or pause.

Marek had always imagined these fights as taking place in slow motion: ungainly armored med wielding swords so heavy that each swing was an effort, carrying dangerous momentum and requiring time to recover and reset before the next swing. He had read accounts of how exhausted men were after battle, and he had assumed it was the result of the extended effort of slow fights, encased in steel.

These warriors were big and powerful in every way. Their horses were enormous, and they themselves appeared to be six feet or more, and extremely strong.

Marek had never been fooled by the small size of the armor in museum display cases–he knew that any armor that found its way into a museum was ceremonial and had never been worn in anything more hazardous than a medieval parade. Marek also suspected, though he could not prove it, that much of the surviving armor–highly decorated, chiseled and chased–was intended only for display, and had been made at three-quarter scale, the better to show the delicacy of the craftsmen’s designs.

Genuine battle armor never survived. And he had read enough accounts to know that the most celebrated warriors of medieval times were invariably big men–tall, muscular, and they were from the nobility; they were better fed; and they were big. He had read how they trained and how they delighted in performing feats of strength for the amusement of the ladies.

And yet, somehow, he had never imagined anything remotely like this. These men fought furiously, swiftly and continuously-and it looked as if they could go all day. Neither gave the least indication of fatigue; if anything, they seemed to be enjoying their exertions.

As he watched their aggressiveness and speed, Marek realized that left to his own devices, this was exactly the way he himself would choose to fight–quickly, with the conditioning and reserves of stamina to wear down and opponent. He had only imagined a slower fighting style from an unconscious assumption that men in the past were weaker or slower or less imaginative than he was, as a modern man.

Marek knew this assumption of superiority was a difficulty faced by every historian. He just hadn’t thought he was guilty of it.

But clearly he was.

Timeline, Michael Chrichton, Pg 230-231

Children can feel, but they cannot analyse their feelings; and if the analysis is partially effected in thought, they know not how to express the result of the process in words.
Pg 21, Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte

I live in calm, looking to the end.
Pg 61, Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte

If all the world hated you, and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved you and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.
Pg 72, Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte

In that sense I do feel apprehensive – I have no wish to talk nonsense.
Pg 149, Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte

To women who please me only by their faces, I am the very devil when I find out they have neither souls nor hearts – when they open to me a perspective of flatness, triviality, and perhaps imbecility, coarseness, and ill-temper: but to the clear eye and eloquent tongue, to the soul made of fire, and the character that bends but does not break – at once supple and stable, tractable and consistent – I am ever tender and true.
Pg 281-282, Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte

The point is you never say anything. I haven’t a clue what you think about anything important.

Sorry.

Stop it. Stop being so damned… absent.

Ambrose shrugged.

Don’t you care about anything? I mean really have an opinion. Beyond it’s lovely?

Fine, said Ambrose. If you must know. I think the Vela’zquez is remarkable because it doesn’t matter to me that she was an actress or that the sheets are black. I think abstract expressionism is crap. I think Brussels sprouts are crap. I think I could paint but I don’t have the nerve. I think I am an unbelievably lucky man who is married to a woman who I think looks a little like the Rokeby Venus and I think if I open my mouth to say something I think is important I think she will discover she’s married a fool.

You are many things, my love. A fool is not one of them. You’re imagining things.

I am keeping things to myself. Having an opinion doesn’t require sharing it with everybody.
It requires sharing it with me. Because I get to know what you think. I get to know you better than anyone else.

You do. Always have, always will, full stop. Let it go.

One more thing.

What?
You’re wrong.

Am I?

Luck has nothing to do with us.

pg 88-89 The End of the Alphabet, CS Richardson

“There are cultures in which it is believed that a name contains all a person’s mystical power. That a name should be known only to God and to the person who holds it and to very few privileged others. To pronounce such a name, either one’s own or someone else’s, is to invite jeopardy. This, it seemed, was such a name.” – Page 52, The Thirteenth Tale, Diane Setterfield

“I shall start at the beginning. Though of course the beginning is never where you think it is. Our lives are so important to us that we tend to think the story of them begins with our birth. First there was nothing, then I was born…. Yet that is not so. Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Families are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole.”

…

“A birth is not really a beginning. Our lives at the start are not really our own but only the continuation of someone else’s story. Take me, for instance. To look at me now, you would think my birth must have been something special, wouldn’t you? Accompanied by strange portents, and attended by witches and fairy godmothers. But no. Not a bit of it. In fact, when I was born I was no more than a subplot. – Page 58, The Thirteenth Tale, Diane Setterfield

“I needed a lost language. One in which I could communicate with the lost. I used to write one special word over and over again. My sister’s name. A talisman. I folded the word into elaborate miniature origami, kept my pleat of paper always close to me.” – Page 252, The Thirteenth Tale, Diane Setterfield

“All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes—characters even—caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you. Well, it was like that. All day I had been prey to distractions. Thoughts, memories, feelings, irrelevant fragments of my own life, playing havoc with my concentration.”

–        Page 289-290, The Thirteenth Tale, Diane Setterfield

“I used to think I loved rain, but in fact I hardly knew it. The rain I loved was genteel town rain, made soft by all the obstacles the skyline put in its path, and warmed by the rising heat of the town itself. On the moors, enraged by the wind and embittered by the chill, the rain was vicious. Needles of ice stung my face and, behind me, vessels of freezing water burst against my shoulders.

Happy birthday.”

Page 291, The Thirteenth Tale, Diane Setterfield