Tangled Mind

The fat man looked taken aback. "Why, I thought my name is well known even in that lizards'-spawn hell of yours across the Channel," he said.
"I'm sorry, I don't–"
The fat man drew himself up. He snapped his fingers and his servant threw him his cane. The man caught it single-handedly and twirled it. "The name," he said stiffly, "is Verne. Jules Verne." [p. 135]

Phoebe thought, Faith died young and I’ve done nothing but admire her for it, but I don’t want to die – I don’t want to! Her thoughts pounding away like machine-gun fire: I don’t want to die I don’t want to die I want everything back the way it was before I hate this please God if I can just come down please God if I can just have back what I had before. But that’s exactly what you didn’t want, said a different voice, you’ve spent your life longing to throw it away. And Phoebe knew this was so. [location 2939]

They have no idea where they are, or when, but they are beginning to grasp that geography matters less to them than it matters to the living. They make their own journeys with the stories they tell. They fashion – somehow, they don’t yet know how – their own escapes. They survived a barren and virtually unpeopled Arctic: they’ll make a story of this place too. Stories are their breath. Their food. Their blood. And they’re getting stronger. [location 795]

where was that writhing darkness? Why didn’t it show itself so he could just throw her into the dungeon and call off this ridiculous competition? There was something great and deadly concealed within her, and he didn’t like it. [loc. 1788]

"What you're doing is building a horrible kind of logic. People read what you write and they say, 'Yes, he is talking about things that really happen," and they keep reading, and it makes sense to them. You're explaining things that can't be defended, and the explanations themselves are mad, just bizarre – but you offer them with such confidence. It was because she kept the chain on the door, it was because he needed to let off steam after a hard day's scraping and bowing at work, it was because she was irritating and stupid, it was because she lied to him, made a fool of him, it was because she had to die, she just had to, it makes dramatic sense, it was because 'nothing is more poetic than the death of a beautiful woman', it was because of this, it was because of that. It's obscene to make such things reasonable." [location 1515]

... she’d always swum in deep waters, murky in some places, fast-flowing in others, but she’d never seen the danger. That had emerged organically, as a series of developments that had rippled over one another and ultimately carried her too far out of her depth. She was no longer convinced that she could reach the shore, nor even had any idea whether the tide was in ebb or flow. [location 2998]

At ten o'clock this morning, Frau Hutte-Klopstock, the wife of the City Parks Superintendent, handed me a magazine and said she wanted to look like Karsavina in The Firebird .

"Something diaphanous, I thought," she said. "Shimmering. In flame or orange."

Frau Hutte-Klopstock is healthy, she is muscular; she is sportif and athletic. A small glacier in the High Tatras has been named after her and of this one must be glad. But oh God! Karsavina!

Kadmos: Is your soul still quivering?
Agave: I don't understand your words. I have become somehow
sobered, changing from my former state of mind.
Kadmos: Can you hear and respond clearly?
Agave: Yes, for I forget what we said before, father.
Kadmos: To whose house did you come in marriage?
Agave: You gave me, as they say, to Echion, the sown man.
Kadmos: What son did you bear to your husband in the house?
Agave: Pentheus, from my union with his father.
Kadmos: Whose head do you hold in your hands? [lines 1268-1275]

...what if I decreed that from now on, every time you went to evacuate some solid waste, you'd have to do it in a glass room perched in the middle of Times Square, and you'd be buck naked?
Even if you've got nothing wrong or weird with your body -- and how many of us can say that? -- you'd have to be pretty strange to like that idea. Most of us would run screaming. Most of us would hold it in until we exploded.
It's not about doing something shameful. It's about doing something private. It's about your life belonging to you. [chapter 4]