Dannii Elle > Recent Status Updates

"Peter was just that brilliant, arrogant, and absent-minded all at once; a combination of traits that only talented men like him could be, for the world forgave them any number of transgressions as long as they dazzled. For Peter, probably, making a date was the same thing as making small talk; it smoothed things over, and didn't signify commitment."

The Perfect Murder - 3/5 stars

Crossed Lines - 2/5 stars

Santa Drops In - 2/5 stars

You'll Never Forget My Face - 1.5/5 stars

Sun Over the Yard Arm - 2/5 stars

A Dead Simple Plan - 4/5 stars

Dream Wife - 3/5 stars

Art Class - 3/5 stars

"We canna grieve for those who've gone. Not before we've fought to change the world that took them."

"London does not forgive a traitor... It will suck you down, O my lovely. Into the tunnels and the plague pits. Into its dark heart, where all the traitors bodies sink."

You can't get in,' Eleanor said wildly, and again there was a silence, as though the house listened with attention to her words, understanding, cynically agreeing, content to wait.

"The evil is in the house itself, I think. It has enchained and destroyed its people and their lives, it is a place of contained ill will."

"No Human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house, and yet somehow a maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair, more frightening because the face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice.”

"Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

"Hearts are frivolous things, good for nothing but pickling."

"Everything here is dying. Even your fuels are made if decomposed matter. Humans use death as a means of sustaining life."

"Every revolution begins with breakfast, darling."

"We like to think we're brave, but in the end, we're only human."

"I thought I would burst: into tears, into laughter, into song."

'Knowledge is power,' Julian said. 'They have it. We don't.'
'You're wrong, brother. Knowledge is dangerous... Once you know something, you can't get rid of it. You have to carry it. Always.'

"A den like ours was no place for ethics. It happens when you force a minority underground. It happens when the world is cruel."

"How strange to feel something so close to mercy, whatever that was, and stranger still that it should be found here of all places, at the end of a road of ruined houses by a toxic river. That among a pile of salvaged trash, he would come closer to all he ever wanted to be: a consciousness sitting under a lightbulb reading his days away, warm and alone, alone and yet, somehow, still somebody's son."

"I used to want to be a writer. My dream was to write a novel that held everything I loved, including unlovable things. Like a little cabinet."
...
"You wanna be a writer and you want to jump off a bridge? That's pretty much the same thing, no? A writer just takes longer to hit the water "

"At the British parties in Jaipur, gossip swirled wild on eddies of whiskeyed breath. The old bitch was a popular topic of it. It was generally agreed that she had been in India too long. It had ‘gotten to her.’ She spoke the native tongue... It suggested to the British a grubby intimacy with the place, as if she took India into her very mouth and tasted it, like a lover’s fingers. It was indecent."

"At the British parties in Jaipur, gossip swirled wild on eddies of whiskeyed breath. The old bitch was a popular topic of it. It was generally agreed that she had been in India too long. It had ‘gotten to her.’ She spoke the native tongue... It suggested to the British a grubby intimacy with the place, as if she took India into her very mouth and tasted it, like a lover’s fingers. It was indecent."

she realized he was pulling her little by little closer to him, the stroking deepening into rubbing... She could smell boy spice beneath the thrift-store aroma of his jacket, and the rubbing and the smell began to work to soften her – like butter before you add sugar, in the first step of making something sweet. It was her first experience of how bodies could meld together, how breath could slip naturally into rhythm

"The goblins want girls who dream so hard about being pretty their yearning leaves a palpable trail, a scent goblins can follow like sharks on a soft bloom of blood. The girls with hungry eyes who pray each night to wake up as someone else. Urgent, unkissed, wishful girls."

Timing is Everything - 3/5 stars

"When did he die, your husband?"
"When does anybody die?" She shrugged. "When God says Well done."