Leah (The Pretty Good Gatsby) > Books: england (19) ×

When I was little the doctors called me a hermaphrodite. It's got a lot of stigma, but as a word on its own I

When I was little the doctors called me a hermaphrodite. It's got a lot of stigma, but as a word on its own I like it better. It's a thing. It's not between things. It's an ancient Greek word. It makes me sound old, like we were always around. I like that.

You hear about things going wrong during a birth, but when you're pregnant and in labor, you never think it will happen to you. No one thinks theirs will be the baby with the problem. And then it was my baby, and it made me worry all the more acutely for the rest of his life, because I had been right to worry at the birth, because when it had been time to give birth, to do the most important thing I could do for Max, something had gone wrong.

"That's magic I admire, using something that exists anyway and turning it round into a curse."

Dead flesh and sharpened scalpels didn't bother me. I was my father's daughter, after all. My nightmares were

Dead flesh and sharpened scalpels didn't bother me. I was my father's daughter, after all. My nightmares were made of darker things.

An older gentleman came by once a week like clockwork, and Mother would send me out for chocolate biscuits in the cafe downstairs. He wore strong cologne that masked a pungent, stale smell, but Mother never said anything about it. That's how I knew he must be rich - no one ever says the rich stink.

Memories of my father flooded me. As a surgeon, blood had been his medium like ink to a writer. Our fortune had been built on blood, the acrid odor infused into the very bricks of our house, the clothes that we wore.

To me, blood smelled like home.

Maybe we weren't wicked, but there was something stained, something torn, in the fabric of our beings.

Prudence craned her neck and her heart sank. Slender Italianate spires seemed to reach for the sky, rising fro

Prudence craned her neck and her heart sank. Slender Italianate spires seemed to reach for the sky, rising from an imposing structure so massive it took up more than a London city block. The grounds around it were so immaculate and severe that Prudence couldn't imagine a leaf or stone daring to shift out of place. This was no comfortable home where little girls played hide-and-seek in cozy alcoves, or giggled while they devoured savory meat pies. Poets and artists wouldn't dare argue over their ale while lounging in front of the fire in this household. At this castle, for it was far more of a castle than a manor, everyone knew his place and stuck to it.

The servants' stairway had inconspicuous doors that opened up on each floor, so they could move about the house without their presence being known. It seemed odd to Prudence to have a small army of silent, invisible workers keeping the house running in tip-top shape and not even be aware of them.

"Our sainted mother could flirt with our dearly departed King, outwit Confucius, and make the pope cry, all before breakfast. A most formidable woman."

He reminded her of a man in a fairy tale - not the hero who won the princess, but the sidekick who made it all possible.

Lady Summerset could hire extra servants from town to serve dinner, but no one could take the places of those three. In fact, Lady Summerset was certain that if Cairns, Mrs. Harper, and Hortense had been in charge of the Boer War, it would ave come to a much speedier conclusion.

I who had never been haunted, who had been skeptical of visitations, suddenly accepted all possibilities. Or a

I who had never been haunted, who had been skeptical of visitations, suddenly accepted all possibilities. Or as a priest would say, in that moment, I allowed the devil into my life.
But the priest would be wrong. I did more than allow him in. I gave the devil a warm hearth and a hospitable place to rest for as long as he wanted one. I gave him access to my very soul.

They had triumphed over death this night. Sylvie wondered when death would seek his revenge.

They had triumphed over death this night. Sylvie wondered when death would seek his revenge.

It's time, she thought. A clock struck somewhere in sympathy. She thought of Teddy and Miss Woolf, of Roland and little Angela, of Nancy and Sylvie. She thought of Dr. Kellet and Pindar. Become such as you are, having learned what that is. She knew what that was now. She was Ursula Beresford Todd and she was a witness.

Teddy had faith in poetry. As if merely quoting from Shakespeare would mollify a situation.

One day, of course, all this would be consigned to that same history, even the mountains - sand, after all, was the future of rocks. Most people muddled through events and only in retrospect realized their significance. The Führer was different, he was consciously making history for the future. Only a true narcissist could do that. And Speer was designing buildings for Berlin so that they would look good when they were in ruins a thousand years from now, his gift to the Führer.

Curiosity might have killed the cat, but little girls usually fared much better.

Curiosity might have killed the cat, but little girls usually fared much better.

Fifty years ago, Laurel told a distant patch of stars, my mother killed a man. She called it self-defense, but I saw it. She raised the knife and brought it down and the man fell backwards onto the ground where the grass was worn and the violets were flowering. She knew him, she was frightened, and I've no idea why.

It was strange indeed, to find herself within this place of childhood memories and see her grown-up wrinkled face staring back at her. Like Alice falling through the rabbit hole; or else falling through it again, fifty years on, only to find herself the only thing changed.

Laurel found him on the Internet, though. Opposite problem there - one couldn't disentangle oneself from that net for all the love and money in England. Henry Jenkins was one of millions of ghosts who lived inside it, milling wraithlike until the right combination of letters was entered and they were briefly resurrected.

One of the things I have come to know most surely in my work is that the belief system acquired in childhood is never fully escaped; it may submerge itself for a while, but it always returns in times of need to lay claim to the soul it shaped.

They said it when they were wishing for crops not to fail and storms to pass, but she realized now she'd heard

They said it when they were wishing for crops not to fail and storms to pass, but she realized now she'd heard her mother say it when something happened to scare her, as if to reassure herself: The Lynburns are gone.

Sorry-in-the-Vale's records date back to the 1400s. Six hundred years do not go by without someone doing something nefarious.

"Put the jerk in the south wing, you won't see him for weeks at a time. Or lock him in the attic. The law will not be on your side, but literary precedent will."

The other families say, 'My way or the highway.' The Lynburns said, "I am unfamiliar with the concept of the highway, so that leaves you with only one choice.'

"Okay, I've decided to start simple and work back. So, I am, now formally telling you, as your mother, that I

"Okay, I've decided to start simple and work back. So, I am, now formally telling you, as your mother, that I want you never to become a smoker, never to own your own motorbike, never to get a chess board tattooed onto your face - and never ever to write to an imaginary friend in a parking meter again."

"I didn't have to become Byron," Jack added, "because I already am him, or anyway exactly like him. But without the poetry. Also, girls are not falling over themselves to have my children. As far as I know. If they are, they need to do it more loudly. Apart from all that, I'm just like Byron."

"Cut it out now," said her mother. "I'm trying to think. I need to get my thoughts in order and present them in an incisive, persuasive way. Because I'm the one with the answers today, which won't always be the case - for instance, if you were weeping about a mathematics problems, well, I'd be clueless and we'd both end up weeping. Not that you were weeping, of course."

My misery is a woman's misery, and it will speak - here, rather than nowhere; to my second self, in this book, if I have no one else to hear me.

Wilkie Collins; Armadale

'Dreaming all night of absent friends, romantic situations, and Mr. Lane,' ran another entry. 'Oh! Why are dreams more blest than waking life?'

Oh, thought I, each of these roofs conceals human life with all its mysterious joys and sorrows. Doubtless, many a sojourner in these dwellings has a private history, thrilling, exciting, strange.

George argued that in women, as in men, 'strong sexual appetites are a very great virtue...If chastity must continue to be regarded as the highest female virtue, it is impossible to give any woman real liberty.'

All the guests were encouraged to walk in the park. 'I strolled a little beyond the glade for an hour & half & enjoyed myself,' reported Charles Darwin in a letter to his wife, '-the fresh yet dark green of the grand Scotch firs, the brown of the catkins of the old Birches with their white stems & a fringe of distant green from the larches, made an excessively pretty view. At last I fell fast asleep on the grass & awoke with a chorus of birds singing around me, & squirrels running up the trees & some Woodpeckers laughing, & it was as pleasant a rural scene as ever I saw, & I did not care one penny how any of the beasts or birds has been formed.'

'All day,' she wrote, 'this dream haunted my brain. "I never loved any one as I did thee, both mind and body," I had said in my dream, and in my waking moments the same idea was breathed still in my ear.'

'We can colonise the remotest ends of the Earth...we can spread our name, and our fame, and our fructifying wealth to every part of the world, but we cannot clean the River Thames.'

Though the journal contained elements of melodrama and sentimental fiction, the judges considered that as a whole it told a nuanced story, rendered credible by its self-recrimination, disappointment and doubt. Its exaggerations and excesses were those familiar to any diarist, to any desperately unhappy person or to anyone in love. It was ultimately not a work of madness, but of realism, an account of the limits of romantic dreams.

It was just a single word that was completely unknown to Nick: Erebos.

It was just a single word that was completely unknown to Nick: Erebos.

Nick took advantage of his friend's change of mood and asked one last question. "Has the game ever actually crashed on you?"
Now Colin laughed. "Crashed? No. But I know what you mean." He lowered his voice, as though he feared someone might be listening in. "Sometimes...it just doesn't want to work. It waits. It tests you. Know what, Nick? Sometimes I think it's alive."

His software learned, it could read, and it could make use of what it had read. It analyzed the computer user and gave him what he really wanted, deep down inside. Amazing. No wonder none of them had been able to drag themselves away from Erebos.

This is a bawdy tale. Herein you will find gratuitous shagging, murder, spanking, maiming, treason, and hereto

This is a bawdy tale. Herein you will find gratuitous shagging, murder, spanking, maiming, treason, and heretofore unexplored heights of vulgarity and profanity, as well as nontraditional grammar, split infinitives, and the odd wank . . . If that’s the sort of thing you think you might enjoy, then you have happened upon the perfect story!

"For heaven's sake, boy, put your mask on," Mr. Socrates snapped. "No one should see your face."

Modo undid the knots and removed the mask, setting it on a table. He felt naked. This was not a face for the world to see, Mr. Socrates had told him so.

Modo only nodded, but smiled idiotically under his handkerchief.

Mr. Socrates gathered up the paper. "As a rule, I prefer no descriptions of my agents to appear in print."
"It won't happen again, sir," Modo said. "Next time I'll just let myself burn up in the blaze."

"Marvelously boring. Though there is a good sword fight at the end."