Alexis > Books: delightful‎ (66)

‘The last time you were here,’ the king said finally, ‘you set fire to something.’
Arthur grimaced down at his hands. ‘Yes. I mean–my apologies.’
‘What was it, do you recall?’
Arthur pretended to think about it. ‘Er– I believe it was your wife, sire.’

I don’t believe in safe spaces. They don’t exist. I do, however, believe in dangerous stories: The kind that swirl up from inside you when you least expect it, like the voice of a mad angel whispering of the revolution you are about to unleash. Stories that bend and twist the air as they crackle off your tongue, making you shimmer with glamour, so that everyone around you hangs on to your every intoxicating word. The kind of stories that quiet mad girls dream of to bring themselves comfort after crying themselves to sleep at night, that made your poor starving grandfather cross an entire ocean in search of the unbelievable riches someone once told him were waiting on the other side.

And then she kisses me, a kiss that is deep and ferocious. A kiss about the shock of the impact of bodies, slamming together. A kiss about warrior femmes, bodies painted bright for combat, about writhing snakelike on the dance floor of the battleground. About catching the fist before it hits your face and twisting back the arm that tried to hurt you till it breaks. About refusing ever, ever to forget all the femmes that fought and died before us, about screaming their names to the distant stars.

She glared at him. “Why are you always in a fix? Didn’t they teach you anything at that High Hat Academy?”

“Just Latin and nepotism.”

“Ya,” Joe muttered, “I can’t believe ya told ’em, lassie.”

“Wait a moment, lads,” Joe said. “What cockamamie scheme are ya cookin’ up?”

“They wouldn’t be able to pierce your clit anyway. Yours is too tiny.” “
It is?” I lift my head to see [Cole’s] eyes.
“Incredibly tiny.” He leans up and kisses my lips.

Having a crush on someone who reminded me of a fictional character wasn’t enough. Having things in common wasn’t enough. Her being funny and cool and cute and smart and everything else didn’t matter if I didn’t actually feel something.

“The library was enormous […] It had the air of a cathedral, something venerated and quietly holy - until Nash sneezed very loudly and then said, “For fuck’s sake.”
“This is amazing.”
“Apparently it is where we store all of the dust.”

“Love, sex, Aphrodite, Eros, death . . . It might as well be an instruction manual about how to build a ship, I spent enough time studying vessel plans to eke out horrible little metaphors and turns of phrase that made me want to vomit.”

“In truth, she had never been very vocal in bed, but she’d never really thought about why until this very second, with Jordan’s hot mouth searing through her shirt. Oh was a proclamation. So was yeah and right there and just like that and whatever other words people might say during sex. They were tells. They revealed a piece of yourself, something soft and vulnerable and completely at the other person’s mercy.”

She dreamt of him often though, scenarios that were unequivocally sexual. No symbolism here. Just she and Boone in bare rooms, fucking. Sometimes there were people beating on the doors to get in and see, but they never did. He belonged to her completely, in all his beauty and his wretchedness

He had no way to describe the breed that were not the old ways. They didn’t belong to hell, nor yet to heaven. They were what the species he’d once belonged to could not bear to be. The un-people, the anti-tribe, humanity’s sack unpicked and sewn together again with the moon inside.

When I looked at famous Jay Gatsby, soul gone and some terrible engine he called love driving him now, I could see that for him, the world was always ending. For him, it was all a wreck and a ruin, and he had no idea why the rest of us weren’t screaming.

“That messy entangling anger had gone out of him, leaving him sweeter and more pliable. I didn’t mind the sadness; he wore it like a girl might wear a becoming if old-fashioned veil. It left him open in a way he hadn’t been before, raw and pretty and intriguing.”

Crossing from the main road through the gates of his world, a chill swirled around you, the stars came out, and a moon rose up out of the Sound. It was as round as a golden coin, and so close you could bite it. I had never seen a moon like that before.

“I clench my back teeth, letting a wave of old, familiar embarrassment pass over me. I thought I’d let go of the shame about this part of my life, the way I was basically medicating myself twenty-four hours a day. It’s no different from what millions of people do, good people who are in pain or unsure of where to turn; good people who need a break from everything in this world that’s hard and sad and unforgiving.”

Dark Souls is in some ways an incomplete game, and I like to think that it has been completed by players, by their discoveries as they moved along. I’d love to say that the nature of this incompleteness was completely deliberate. But it is both deliberate and by accident, in different ways.”