historical-fiction

For the space of many, many years, you were enough for me. You were my bliss, and my hallelujah.

A man should not glory in what he already knows but in what he has yet to learn.

Kevin looks at me and I know he isn__ seeing the little girl I use to be, all pigtails and gangly limbs. He isn__ seeing my mother__ daughter or even my mother anymore. As his eyes linger over me, stopping here and there in the most uncomfortable places, I know he isn__ really even seeing me as I am. The bloodshot eyes staring out of the alcohol-flushed face are seeing a girl, nearly of age, who owes him a tremendous debt of gratitude.--Rocky Evans

He watched the newly arrived commuters as they stepped into the carriage, pushed their way down the tube, the odours from their damp clothes mingling, giving off varying degrees of mustiness: London grime, or smoke from airless offices. A woman wearing a blue swing coat glanced along the carriage, casting around for an empty seat. Her pale skin, the searching green eyes, reminded him of Emma. Briefly, he felt his breath catch; he stood, clambered back over his neighbour and indicated for her to take his seat. And so his mind stayed with Emma when he knew he should be working out a strategy for telling Dorothy of his news. But Emma was never far away; like the glitter balls in dance halls, she would slowly rotate in his memory, different facets reappearing, as the hues changed in her auburn hair.

All things in Fiji are paid for in blood.

She turned her painted blue eyes toward the assistant and said something in French before she left.

Brick walls towered over her. Decrepit staircases crowded about her. Nothing had changed. The line there, the lessons there, the rape there. Shouldn't the place be crimson with blood and black with shame?

She raised her head and saw a squadron of fighter planes. She stretched her hand high as if she could grab hold and climb away from what she had done, from who she was.

True vice, my lady, would frighten us all, if it did not wear the mask of virtue. (p.56)

A warrior becomes experienced by being defeated; a scholar by making mistakes. Defeat and mistakes we have left in the past," he said.

Midnight Omen Deja vu" - Because everyone should experience love in the Caribbean...at least once in a lifetime.

{Summertime she speaks of winter, she eats ham, but speaks of beef, got a good man but, flirts with another. She might as well go to hell, cause she ain't gonna be happy in heaven either!}

I intend to marry Michael, and squander all his money and run his life, and make sure he never again consorts with wicked women or gambles with licentious men. I promise I will henpeck him until he has no life beyond what I allow him, and when we die, I will lie in his arms through all eternity.

She had wanted more than she could have.She had wanted him, and more... she had wanted him to want her.In the name of something bigger than tradition, bolder than reputation, more important than a silly title.

He spent the next hours watching her sleep, taking in every detail of her face, of her body. The way the soft glow of the bedside lamp cast shadows on her cheeks. The way her chest rose and fell with each breath. And when the first light of dawn finally showed through the gap in the curtains he quietly dressed and turned off the bedside lamp, and left the room, not daring to look back.

Long ago she'd clamped an iron shell around her heart and nothing and no one could pry it lose, but deep inside the tender flesh still beat.

He (her son) is just like his father, doesn't listen to a word I say!

I thought I was going to die. I wanted to die. And I thought if I was going to die I would die with you.Someone like you, young as I am, I saw so many dying near me in the last year. I didn__ feel scared. Icertainly wasn__ brave just now. I thought to myself, We have this villa this grass, we should have laindown together, you in my arms, before we died. I wanted to touch that bone at your neck, collarbone,it__ like a small hard wing under your skin. I wanted to place my fingers against it. I__e always liked fleshthe colour of rivers and rocks or like the brown eye of a Susan, do you know what that flower is? Haveyou seen them? I am so tired, Kip, I want to sleep. I want to sleep under this tree, put my eye againstyour collarbone I just want to close my eyes without thinking of others, want to find the crook of a treeand climb into it and sleep. What a careful mind! To know which wire to cut. How did you know? Youkept saying I don__ know I don__ know, but you did. Right? Don__ shake, you have to be a still bed forme, let me curl up as if you were a good grandfather I could hug, I love the word __url,_ such a slowword, you can__ rush it...