"Because of the power shortage and lack of replacement parts there was only one elevator running in the Empire State Building, and this one went only as high as the twenty-fifth floor. After that you walked."
— Harry Harrison (Make Room! Make Room!)

"So tomorrow we disappear into the unknown. This account I am transmitting down the river by canoe, and it may be our last word to those who are interested in our fate."
— Arthur Conan Doyle (The Lost World)

"I stepped into the road, moving away from the car, aware of Vaughan's uncertain arm reaching for me. I walked along the palisade to the weed-grown entrance of the breaker's yard. Above me, the cars on the motorway moved like motorized wrecks, paintwork worn and blunted. Their drivers sat stiffly behind their wheels, overtaking the airline coaches filled with mannequins dressed in meaningless clothing."
— J.G. Ballard (Crash: A Novel)

"He stood beneath the white tower, and looked up at it with that mournful expression which his face always carried in repose: for one moment he thought of climbing up its cracked and broken stone, and then from its summit screaming down at the silent city as a child might scream at a chained animal."
— Peter Ackroyd (Hawksmoor)

"They sat in a row on the couches and in wheelchairs listening to the radio, their faded eyes fixed on the fish or on nothing or something they saw a long time ago.
Francis would always remember the shuffle of feet on linoleum in the hot and buzzing day, and the smell of stewed tomatoes and cabbage from the kitchen, the smell of old people like meat wrappers dried in the sun, and always the radio."
— Thomas Harris (Red Dragon)

"It was tearing across the level ground in great leaps, heading right at me and seeming to shake and shiver in mid-air with every bound. It was coming at me like a bullet, head shaking, lips curled back, teeth long and yellow and by far the biggest I'd ever seen on a rabbit, live or dead. Its eyes looked like coiled slugs. Blobs of red arced from its left haunch with every pouncing leap; it was almost on me, and I was sat there staring."
— Iain M. Banks (The Wasp Factory)

"Los Angeles didn't get like this often. He hated it when it did. And this time it was holding on. It had been brutal at the cemetery three weeks ago. His father's nine widows had looked ready to drop. The savage light had leached the color from the flowers. The savage heat had got at the mound of earth from the grave even under its staring green blanket of fake grass. He'd stayed to watch the workmen fill the grave. The earth was dry. Even the sharp walls of the grave were dry. What the hell was he doing remembering that?"
— Joseph Hansen (Skinflick)

"Not today! No, never again would she sit by the window, her back turned so she would not see him walk down the flagstone path with Dr Danzer, the limp volume of her favourite Bach spread open to the first page of the text, the black notes swarming before her eyes, her fingers arching in elaborate dumb-show as they practised the first trill, her mind on the beats, the leaning upon the upper note, the precise apperception of the stopping point - not a moment to soon, not a moment too late - and in her ears once more the sound, the slow dignity, of Anna Magdalena's sarabande, a delicate ornament for her melancholy."
— John Franklin Bardin (Devil take the Blue-tail Fly)

"It would be fair to sum up, argued Charity Bentham, that Washington was eventually placed in such a position wherein its support of Saigon and belligerence toward Hanoi resulted in several units of pain. To remain in Vietnam was bad. To withdraw from Vietnam was bad. The wise statesman could see that to withdraw as Paris had was less bad than staying, or more Good."
— John Calvin Batchelor (The Birth of the People's Republic of Antarctica: A Novel)

"Horace was a nice little guy who looked like one of his own baboons; he turned me over to a Doctor Vargas who was a specialist in exotic biologies--the same Vargas who was on the Second Venus Expedition. He told me what had happened and I looked at the gibbons, meantime rearranging my prejudices."
— Robert A. Heinlein (The Puppet Masters)

"She lay down on her grave and promptly began to experience difficulty in disposing of her arms. She folded them on her breast, spread them out in the position of a crucifix, kept them to her sides, and finally crossed them on her stomach. She closed her eyes and almost immediately opened them again to look up at Michael.
"Now what? Do I just lie here, on top of the blankets, as it were, or can I get back into my coffin?""
— Peter S. Beagle (A Fine and Private Place)

"Becky walked to the sea late in the day, trod barefoot among the tumbled blocks of stone that lined the foreshore, smelling the old harsh smell of salt, hearing the water slap and chuckle while from high above came the endless sinister trickling of the cliffs. Into her consciousness stole, maybe for the first time, the sense of loneliness; an oppression born of the gentle miles of summer water, the tall blackness of the headlands, the fingers of the stone ledges pushing out into the sea."
— Keith Roberts (Pavane)

"Our hero's unreasoning rage was fed by a not unreasonable jealousy. It was clear to him that Zuleika had forgotten his existence. To-day, as soon as he had killed her love, she had shown him how much less to her was his love than the crowd's. And now again it was only the crowd she cared for. He followed with his eyes her long slender figure as she threaded her way in and out of the crowd, sinuously, confidingly, producing a penny from one lad's elbow, a threepenny-bit from between another's neck and collar, half a crown from another's hair, and always repeating in that flute-like voice of hers: "Well, this is rather queer!""
— Max Beerbohm (Zuleika Dobson: An Oxford Love Story)

"What with the excitement of the discovery, the walk home under the stars in wet shoes and draggled skirts, and getting upstairs and undressed without rousing Liddy, I was completely used up. What to do with my shoes was the greatest puzzle of all, there being no place in the house safe from Liddy, until I decided to slip upstairs the next morning and drop them into the hole the "ghost" had made in the trunk-room wall."
— Mary Roberts Rinehart (The Circular Staircase)

"'Shit, I forgot. This time of the afternoon the bar's probably shut. Half the staff has gone sick again. Mono, I think. Well, let's go look anyway; we might be lucky. We can't go up to my room--it's full of bugs.'
'Which kind?'
'Both.'"
— John Brunner (The Sheep Look Up)

""I do not understand exactly what you mean by fear," said Tarzan. "Like lions, fear is a different thing in different men, but to me the only pleasure in the hunt is the knowledge that the hunted thing has power to harm me as much as I have to harm him. If I went out with a couple of rifles and a gun bearer, and twenty or thirty beaters, to hunt a lion, I should not feel that the lion had much chance, and so the pleasure of the hunt would be lessened in proportion to the increased safety which I felt."

"Then I am to take it that Monsieur Tarzan would prefer to go naked into the jungle, armed only with a jackknife, to kill the king of beasts," laughed the other good naturedly, but with the merest touch of sarcasm in his tone.

"And a piece of rope," added Tarzan."
— Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan of the Apes)

"'Beyond the city...' That meant I would leave the city, venture as an apprentice into the very regions which had been forbidden me, and were even yet forbidden to most of those in the city. The creche was full of rumours about what lay outside the city, and already I had any number of wild imaginings about it. I was sensible enough to realize that the reality could never equal those rumours for inventiveness, but even so the prospect was one that dazzled and appalled me. The cloak of secrecy that the guildsmen placed around it seemed to imply that something dreadful was beyond the walls of the city; so dreadful that a penalty of death was the price paid for revealing its nature."
— Christopher Priest (Inverted World)

"He had passed too far beyond this world ever to touch it except in the ceremonies of the Golden Window. Man, demon, god, mutation into namelessness--whatever he had been, he had kept but one link to the Dark World which spawned him. A link enshrined in the Sword Called Llyr. By that talisman he could return for the sacrifices that fed him, return for the great ceremonies of the Sealing that had made me half his own. But only by that talisman."
— Henry Kuttner (The Dark World)

"She still said nothing and I purposely did not look at her because I did not wish either to press her or to embarrass her. I was in love with her, and my heart went out to her as she tried to fathom her own feelings. I felt like saying: Don't bother to explain, darling. I know it all.
Instead, the calculating side of my mind was at work: the side that plotted carefully, planned to get what it wanted and nearly always succeeded."
— John Bingham (Five Roundabouts to Heaven)

"'I see you have the advantage of me,' he said. 'Very well. I'll make it as brief as I can. I'll tell you the plain facts and I only hope you won't draw the wrong conclusions from them. George Rattery had been making advances to my wife for some time. She was amused, intrigued, gratified by it - any woman might be, you know; George was a handsome brute, in his way. She may even have carried on a harmless flirtation with him. I did not remonstrate with her: if one is afraid to trust one's own wife, one has no right to be married at all. That's my view, at any rate.'"
— Nicholas Blake (The Beast Must Die)

"'To the Sabbath! To the Sabbath!' they cried. 'On to the Witches' Sabbath!"
Up and down that narrow hall they danced, the women on each side of him, to the wildest measure he had ever imagined, yet which he dimly, dreadfully remembered, till the lamp on the wall flickered and went out, and they were left in total darkness. And the devil woke in his heart with a thousand vile suggestions and made him afraid."
— Algernon Blackwood (The Complete John Silence Stories)

"'That is called a hypo-eliminator,' said Trent, as Mr. Cupples uncorked and smelt at one of the bottles. "Very useful when you're in a hurry with a negative. I shouldn't drink it, though, all the same. It eliminates sodium hypophosphite, but I shouldn't wonder if it would eliminate human beings too.""
— E. C. Bentley (Trent's Last Case)

"Brownjohn began to laugh. He stopped and then started again upon a higher note. Amies brought his hand round in a semi-circle. There was a sharp crack as it struck Brownjohn's cheek. The laughter stopped. Brownjohn put a hand to his cheek, nursed it. His reproachful eyes went from one of them to the other.
'The Sergeant had to do that, he didn't want to,' Coverdale said gently."
— Julian Symons (The Man Who Killed Himself)

"None of the males had survived the battle; and a handful of females and children, along with the hapless Bears of Artemis and three Panisci, comprised the prisoners. I felt as I had when I saw my workers slaughtered before my eyes; if anything, worse, for Centaurs are higher beings, no less loyal and far more kind and intelligent. Chiron, the blameless king; Moschus, a bore but lovable; their faces came to haunt me, noble of mane, and the thunder of their hooves. But tears are a luxury not permitted to warriors on the threshold of battle. I stifled my grief into a far corner of my brain and let my anger flare like the fires in the forge of Hephaestus, the smithy god, when he works his bellows: anger which spurs the body to valor, the mind to craft."
— Thomas Burnett Swann (Day of the Minotaur)

"In the bedroom he turned on both lamps and adjusted the shades so that their light shone full upon Monsignor Breame's congested countenance. The fat priest looked as if he were scowling in the confessional. Opening the closet, Ralph flipped through the negligees hanging there until he came to one he especially liked, a see-through tangerine number with lace on the bodice, and arranged it at the foot of the bed along with a matching pair of panties he found in Lyla's dresser with WELCOME ABOARD U.S.S. JOYTRAIL embroidered in red above the crotch. Then he stepped back to survey the scene. It looked too contrived. He picked up the panties and hung them on the bedpost. "Perfect.""
— Loren D. Estleman (Peeper)

"The funeral was beautiful.
I didn't mind it, really. It wasn't exactly Pop's funeral, to me. When I'd been alone with him, there in the little room, well, that was it, as far as I was concerned. I'd said good-bye to him, sort, of, then.
This was just something you had to go through with, on account of other people and out of respect for Pop.
"
— Fredric Brown (The Fabulous Clipjoint)

""it was religion right enough." He was quiet for so long that Diana wondered if he were nodding off. Suddenly he said, "The druids made their last stand here at Moonwell. They did what they'd never dared to do--they called what they worshiped to come down from the moon and stay on the earth."

"I thought they worshiped the sun."

Needham thumped the arms of his chair. "They had a god of the moon all right. They just didn't dare give it a name. They sacrificed people to it, but the priests didn't stay to see it come for them. They used to throw people down shafts like the one your gospeling friend wants to tamper with. That way it had to go down out of the light to get its sacrifices.""
— Ramsey Campbell (The Hungry Moon)

"To pass the three-minute ride we fillied about with what they called the upholstery, doing some nice horrorshow tearing-out of the seats' guts and old Dim chaining the okno till the glass cracked and sparkled in the winter air, but we were all feeling that big shagged and fagged and fashed it having been an evening of some small energy expenditure, my brothers, only Dim, like the clowny animal he was, full of the joys-of, but looking all dirtied over and too much von of sweat on him, which was one thing I had against old Dim"
— Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange)

"Anthony took the pipe out of his mouth and smiled at her. "Sorry, dear! You know I don't mean to get like this, but I can't help it. What you want me to tell you is what I'm thinking, but I can't, because I don't know. Now, now, that's not clever, it's purely a statement of fact. We've been married quite long enough for you to know me by this tim, but you never seem to have understood properly what a tidy mind I've got. That, you know, is really why I'm always getting mixed up in this 'finding-out' business. When I see a thing all unreasonable and all at loose ends, I just have to see whether I can't straighten it out, and it's the same with my own thinking. When my own thinking's just a mess, it isn't tidy, and therefore I won't let it release its untidiness onto the world. I have to get it nicely rearranged and sorted before I can really talk.""
— Philip MacDonald (Polferry Riddle V711)

"Boys, we've got to produce. There is no way to kid that four-eyed little son-of-a-bitch in the City Building. Now I don't mean you got to go out and haul in Riemenschneider. Hardy's hipped on the subject. The Squarehead may be in New York, or San Francisco, or New Orleans. Who the hell knows? But we got to clear up those club robberies. Somebody's got to figure an angle."
— W.R. Burnett

"He could not tell her that he was angry because she did not love him. Even he could not utter such foolishness. Certainly, he did not love her. He did not love anyone except perhaps Isaac and a very few of his other children. Yet he wanted Anyanwu to be like his many other women and treat him like a god in human form, competing for his attention no matter how repugnant his latest body nor even whether he might be looking for a new body. They knew he took women almost as readily as he took men. Especially, he took women who had already given him what he wanted of them--usually several children. They served him and never thought they might be his next victims. Someone else. Not them."
— Octavia E. Butler (Wild Seed)

"O.K."
"Gee I'm glad."
"Me too. I'm so sick of hot dogs and beer and apple pie with cheese on the side I could heave it all in the river."
"You'll love it, Frank. We'll get a place up in the mountains, where it's cool, and then, after I get my act ready, we can go all over the world with it. Go as we please, do as we please, and have plenty of money to spend. Have you got a little bit of gypsy in you?"
"Gypsy? I had rings in my ears when I was born."
— James M. Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice)

"I mention this visit from the doctor because it brought me to my senses, so to speak. Although I had the prescription filled, the bottle of pills stands unopened by my bed table, I have reduced my drinking to one Scotch before lunch and two before going to sleep. I make it a point to answer my mail and to assist those scholars who are writing papers on various aspects of the Collection. I have again begun to read. At the moment, you might say, my life is devoted to improving my life. It is, I find, a full-time occupation."
— Brian Moore (The Great Victorian Collection)

"Hickock whistled and rolled his eyes. "Wow!" he said, and then, summoning his talent for something very like total recall, he began an account of the long ride--the approximately ten thousand miles he and Smith had covered in the past six weeks. He talked for an hour and twenty-five minutes--from two-fifty to four-fifteen--and told, while Nye attempted to list them, of highways and hotels, motels, rivers, towns, and cities, a chorus of entwining names: Apache, El Paso, Corpus Christi, Santillo, San Luis Potosi, Acapulco, San Diego, Dallas, Omaha, Sweetwater, Stillwater, Tenville Junction, Tallahassee, Needles, Miami, Hotel Nuevo Waldorf, Somerset Hotel, Hotel Simone, Arrowhead Motel, Cherokee Motel, and many, many more. He gave them the name of the man in Mexico to whom he'd sold his own 1940 Chevrolet, and confessed that he had stolen a newer model in Iowa."
— Truman Capote (In Cold Blood)

"Sir George Reedy dutifully looked off toward the sea. "Ah, I was going to ask about that. I saw it when we flew in. The great white mass--"
"The iceberg." I might have known, Stevens thought. Five hundred billion gallons of Antarctic iceberg had been towed into Santa Monica Bay. Los Angeles water had never tasted better; Arizona, San Francisco, and the sea gulls of Mono Lake had never been happier. The berg sat out there in a kind of tub. There were teams of climbers going up two faces, and a dozen Boy Scouts glissading down snow near the bottom."
— Larry Niven

"Whenever the horse stopped (which it did very often), he fell off in front; and, whenever it went on again (which it generally did rather suddenly), he fell off behind. Otherwise he kept on pretty well, except that he had a habit of now and then falling off sideways; and, as he generally did this on the side on which Alice was walking, she soon found that it was the best plan not to walk quite close to the horse."
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass)

"With that, the poignant charm vanished. Inside the fifth machine, all was rampant malignity. Deformed flowers thrust monstrous horned tusks and trumpets ending in blaring teeth through the crimson walls, rending them; the ravenous garden slavered over its prey and every brick was shown in the act of falling. Amid the violence of this transformation, the oblivion of the embrace went on. The awakened girl, in all her youthful loveliness, still clasped in the arms of a lover from whom all the flesh had fallen. He was a grinning skeleton."
— Angela Carter (The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman)

"My pipe had gone out. If I turned and got a match from the table, they would think I was watching. I bit on the cold stem. The whispering and muttering went on. I watched the minute hand creep around the dial of my watch. I thought of the night I had waited for Pinky Moran to come out of his sweetheart's house. It had been four above at ten o'clock and by midnight it was below zero. I had waited in the snow and thought about the gangster lying warm in the arms of his fat slut. I turned and saw Shelby's hands feeling, touching, moving along the tan material of Laura's dress."
— Vera Caspary (Laura)

"I did not try to keep her. I do not think I even wanted to. Between us, for the moment, there was nothing more to be said. I wanted above all to be alone and think things over. When she was ready to go, she said, "Better give me the gun. You won't want it on the journey, and if there is a check, I can manage it better than you can. But unloaded, please." I did not ask her how she would manage. I found I trusted her completely in things like that, and my own recent record did not inspire much confidence in the matter of keeping my weaponry out of enemy hands."
— P.M. Hubbard (Kill Claudio)

"But it must not be concluded from this that Mr. Cromartie indulged in any sort of hope. He did not even consider the possibility of escaping from the Zoo or of winning Josephine's love, because he had never had any ambition to do either. Such thoughts would have seemed to him not only ridiculous but dishonourable. He had taken his course with his eyes open, and the question whether he should abide by it or not was not even open to consideration. In this respect the Zoological Society were indeed fortunate in their selection of a man."
— David Garnett (A Man in the Zoo)

"But the chain gave way in that instant and two thousand pounds of lion sprang straight up at Zongri's hairy throat!

Zongri flung up his arms to meet the shock and staggered back. But Tiger was not at all idle. He went up over the beast's back like it was a ratline and before two roars had gone shatteringly down the hall he was astride the brute's head and twisting his tender ears until they creaked like cabbage leaves.

It was a mad tumble of Ifrit and human and jungle king and so ferocious were the bellows coming out of the melee that the other lion, seeing them all hurtle down toward him, did not attack at all but leaped back in terror."
— L. Ron Hubbard (Slaves of Sleep / Masters of Sleep)

"The rug was spread on the grass, and the hampers were unpacked. While Roger busied himself with carving the pheasants and uncorking the hock, the girls neatly set out rolls, pastries, fruit, etc., and Judge made himself generally useful. They lunched in full sunlight in the field, by the side of a rather romantic little stream. This brook separated them from the steeply-ascending wood beyond, and--though quite narrow, and only an inch or so in depth--was so beautifully transparent, and flowed over its clean bed of pebbles with so musical a gurgle, that Isbel's spirits imperceptibly became tranquillized. They were in the trough of the two hillsides, and the house was out of sight."
— David Lindsay

"Get it over with, he thought. Anything anybody could say would be bad, and laid the lid down carefully, and set it so the nail points were in the holes they'd started. Only then, when he stood up and looked down, and there was only the black, flat-sided shape of the coffin, did he feel how final the act was. The loss and the love came together strongly in him, making a real prayer, although he didn't bother with any words, only Arthur's name repeating itself in his mind. He looked up, and Joe Sam was holding out the hammer to him. He took it. Then he thought of Grace and the father still sleeping, and said, "Close the door, will you, Joe Sam?""
— Walter Van Tilburg Clark (The Track of the Cat: A Novel)

"'Doctor, I -'

'No, no, don't -'

'But you -'

'Just -'

They stopped, stared at one another for a long moment.

'I want you to have this,' said the Doctor.

He handed her the book.

'This is your 500 year diary,' said Ace.

'I'll be starting a new one,' he said.

They embraced, awkwardly. Ace closed her eyes, trying to imprint the memory of him into her brain, so she would never forget the fabric of his jacket, the soft, alien smell of his hair.

'Go and keep going,' she whispered. 'Don't stop for anything.'"
— Kate Orman (Set Piece)

"Thus had begun four months of preparing kosher food and washing two sets of dishes (an observance Carol still found exotic), of vacuuming the worn Persian carpets and dusting the soot from the Venetian blinds, of walking the old woman to the supermarket or the park or the toilet and remaining nearby while, through the winter and spring afternoons, she mumbled to herself or snored or squinted vaguely at the TV. The days had been monotonous."
— T.E.D. Klein

"'The first time...' the Doctor said, snapping Chris out of his reverie, 'I don't remember, I was unconscious. The second time...I don't want to talk about.'

'The third time?'

'Unconscious.'

'The fourth time?'

'Atypical. There were some strange time and energy effects involved.'

'But, you know, what does it feel like? Is it good or bad?'

'Good,' said the Doctor, 'in the same way that driving a vehicle very, very fast is a good feeling, until pow!' He slapped his hands together suddenly. 'Like being shoved through a window. That's what it was like the fifth time.'

'What about the sixth time?'

'Unconscious.'"
— Kate Orman (The Room With No Doors)

"All those scores of barren peaks that were being revealed in the light of the lake of fire below me, how could I know if any of them led up to the earth surface?...Scores and hundreds of peaks crowding in on me, like vast sums, great rows of figures in gigantic sums of addition or subtraction.

I tried to pull myself together. My mind was wandering. I had escaped from him and from the lassoers. I mustn't let myself die in the darkness."
— Joseph O'Neill (Land Under England)

"She spoke English with a strong French accent. Though approaching middle life she was still beautiful, having wild black eyes, and creamy-pale face. Her dress was tawdry, cheap, and loud, showing signs of wear; her hair was unkempt; her manners were not the manners of a lady. A certain vehemence, exasperation, unrepose distinguished all she said and did. The footman refused her admission; Lord Pharanx, he said, was invisible. She persisted violently, pushed past him, and had to be forcibly ejected; during all which the voice of the master was heard roaring from the passage red-eyed remonstrance at the unusual noise. She went away gesticulating wildly, and vowing vengeance on Lord Pharanx and all the world."
— Matthew Phipps Shiel (Prince Zaleski and Cumming's King Monk)

"The steps of the ladder creaked as an enormous head appeared on a level with the floor. The new-comer, who was more than six feet high, and gifted with herculean proportions, had been well-named Goliath. He was hideous. His squinting eyes were deep beneath a low and projecting forehead; his reddish hair and beard, thick and coarse as horse-hair, gave his features a stamp of bestial ferocity; between his broad jaws, armed with teeth which resembled fangs, he held by one corner a piece of raw beef weighing ten or twelve pounds, finding it, no doubt, easier to carry in that fashion, whilst he used his hands to ascend the ladder, which bent beneath his weight.

At length the whole of this tall and huge body issued from the aperture. Judging by his bull-neck, the astonishing breadth of his chest and shoulders, and the vast bulk of his arms and legs, this giant need not have feared to wrestle single-handed with a bear. He wore an old pair of blue trousers with red stripes, faced with tanned sheep's-skin, and a vest, or rather cuirass, of thick leather, which was here and there slashed by the sharp claws of animals.

When he was fairly on the floor, Goliath unclasped his fangs, opened his mouth, and let fall the great piece of beef, licking his blood-stained lips with greediness. "
— Eugene Sue (The Wandering Jew)

"But to tell even a tenth part of the marvels rich and beautiful that were in the house of Krothering: its cool courts and colonnades rich with gems and fragrant with costly spices and strange blooms: its bed-chambers where, caught like Aphrodite in her golden net, the spirit of sleep seemed ever to shake slumber from its plumes, and none might be waking long in those chambers but sweet sleep overcame their eyelids: the Chamber of the Sun and the Chamber of the Moon, and the great middle hall with its high gallery and ivory stair: to tell of all these were but to cloy imagination with picturing in one while of over-much glory and splendour."
— Eric Rücker Eddison