Цитаты из книги Jane Steele

I hope that the epitaph of the human race when the world ends will be: Here perished a species which lived to tell stories. We tell stories to strangers to ingratiate ourselves, stories to lovers to better adhere us skin to skin, stories in our heads to banish the demons. When we tell the truth, often we are callous; when we tell lies, often we are kind. Through it all, we tell stories, and we own an uncanny knack for the task.

Extraordinary contradiction, I thought, that she could always condone even the most operatic of my falsehoods, so long as none were directed at her.

I could live a complete lie, I comprehended as I sorted through the knotted threads of dread in my chest; I could not live a partial one.

"Sardar could write a book entitled A Thousand and One Useless Meditations. He knows all when it comes to retribution and forgiveness." "Not all, or he`d have taught us both to stop hating ourselves."

Rolling onto my stomach, I buried my head in my arms and wept. I have seen, employed as a literary phrase, that characters wept as though the world were ending; the world ending, I thought, would be better than continuing to deceive compassionate people, lying from dawn to dusk because to stop lying would mean ceasing to be entangled with them.

I do not know whether the casual reader of novels is acquainted with an anatomical curiosity known as the femoral artery; without too much medical meandering, although you might suppose that cutting a man`s throat would be the fastest way to slaughter him, a good jab to the thigh will do.

Perhaps the most touching passages in Jane Eyre are those after she discovers she loves Mr. Rochester and before she discovers he loves her in return. There is little unwieldy pretension and still less saccharine sentiment; she simply loves him, as I loved Mr. Thornfield, and is woeful because one cannot uproot love any easier than one can force it to flourish.

"Mr. Thornfield is a most... peculiar individual," I attempted, feigning interest in my teacup. "So often the way with individuals."

One memory at a time would be a welcome diversion; so many together are agonising.

Clarke and I were educated innocents, a condition resembling stupid clerks or intelligent kitchen slaveys, which is to say useless.

A word of advice: do not ever kill for love, or you will find yourself tethered, staked to the ground when your cleanest instincts require you to run for your life without a backwards glance. Killing for love is one of the most tangled acts you can commit, reader, in an already twisted world.

Watching her, I thought about secrets. One can grow accustomed to carrying unseeable scars, as if the tattoo one wears is inked in flesh tone over flesh tone; but nevertheless one is still covered in secret, painted with secret, stained by it.

If I must go to hell to find my mother again, so be it: I will be another embodied disaster. But I will be a beautiful disaster.

I bit the inside of my lip until I could taste all I had left of my mother, which was her blood.

"Nick, is life very hard at Lowan Bridge? I only want some warning, as Mr. Munt seemed... peculiar." Nick tapped his finger to the side of his ruddy nostril. "Peculiar! Aye, he is that. Ye`ll learn a plentiful heap o` facts, if all goes well." "And how if all goes ill?" "Then ye`ll not need to worry yerself--" he coughed "--as it`s prodigious difficult ot trouble a corpse."

There is no practice more vexing than that of authors describing coach travel for the edification of people who have already travelled in coaches. As I must adhere to form, however, I will simply list a series of phrases for the unlikely reader who has never gone anywhere: thin eggshell dawn-soaked curtains stained with materials unknown to science; rattling fit to grind bones to powder; the ripe stench of horse and driver and bog.