Dannii Elle > Recent Status Updates

"Our conversations stay in that safe removed middle ground, and we talk to each other like someone is listening. They ask about the weather, I tell them about the cold. They mention they’ve bought a new car, and I enquire about make, model, and colour. There’s comfort in the banality of the conversation. Like the ticking of a clock, metered and unchanged by the mayhem into which it sounds."

"“A scream is the most human and primal of things, a siren call which binds all those in hearing to help..."
Her need to link us all by a greater power and cause, to somehow believe that our coming together was more than mere coincidence. I am the writer, but it is she that seeks theme and motif in life, and I am captivated by the earnestness with which she regards the world."

"The mystery writers, the historical novelists, the political thriller writers, the science fiction writers... everybody but the people who write instruction manuals, is writing romance. We dress our stories up with murders, and discussions about morality and society, but really we just care about relationships.”

"To the bombardiers, the walled city on its granite headland, drawing ever closer, looks like an unholy tooth, something black and dangerous, a final abscess to be lanced away."

"I’ve never been inked myself, but I’m fascinated. The story of her life etched on her skin… She’s like a walking book. Patterns and portraits and words. Mantras of love and power. I wonder how much of it is fiction. What story would I tell if I had to wear it on my body?"

"It was what accidental deaths did to people, made everybody's sea floor irregular and uneven, causing tidal currents to collide, surge upwards, thereby resulting in small yet volatile eddies churning at everybody's surface."

"Sometimes knowledge is damaging- not enlightenment but enleadenment."

"Always live your life with your biography in mind," Dad was fond of saying. "Naturally it won't be published unless you have a Magnificent Reason, but at the very least you will be living grandly."

"she was as fragile as her own butterflies, an artist who feels things deeply. To be sensitive is fine, but it makes day-to-day living - life - rather painful.

"No utopia can ever give satisfaction to everyone all the time. As their material conditions improve, men raise their sights and become disconnected with powers and possessions that once would have seemed beyond their wildest dreams. And even when the external world has granted all it can, there still remains the searching of the mind and the longing of the heart."

"There were some things that only time could cure. Evil men could be destroyed, but nothing could be done with good men who were deluded."

"This was the moment when history held its breath, and the present sheared asunder from the past as an iceberg splits from its parent cliffs, and goes sailing out to sea in lonely pride. All that the past ages had achieved was as nothing now; only one thought echoed and re-echoed through Mohan's brain:

The human race was no longer alone."

"But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe a love story is barely a love story at all when its machinery lies so exposed."

"It wasn’t so much a personal silence. It was an external stillness that served to balance an internal cacophony. It was a hyperawareness, a heightened alertness. I saw how knotted-up she was, how much the struggle to maintain her own personal order cost her. I wondered if her secret was simply that she never slept at all."

"The world has always been bigger than us as a species, and it’s only our own limited viewpoint that makes us think we’ll ever be in a position to destroy it so decisively. Coming out of Ironside, I felt oddly confident that something of the natural world would endure, something would make a paradise of the shithole state our species seemed destined to leave the environment in."

"Isn’t it beautiful how stories can work like that? The subtle way they help the teller, the subversive way they reach the listener, how they creep inside you like waking dreams."

"She once told me when you say you’re going to tell people a horror story, they sit up in their chairs defensively, waiting to see you fail. When you tell them it’s a love story, they relax, they open themselves wide. Macey used to write horror stories she sold as love stories. She took a certain pleasure in seeing her audience find themselves out of their depth."

"Tell me,
which stars were my ancestors looking at?
And which ones burnt the black of searching irises
and reflected something genuine back?"

"He ran his tongue over her bruised knees and she was immediately overwhelmed by the intimacy between skin and bone, by the feeling of his wet front teeth, by the wetness of her purple and yellow trauma swelling just beneath the surface... Sometimes her body was a swimming pool full of dead bees and foliage, and sometimes she liked that better. It kept the delicate boys away."

"Sensations so visceral that she cried out from her chest but when the sun lit up and the train started pulling away, with every salute, march and funeral-wave farewell, she felt the world changing. The lump in her throat swelled like a sea that threatened to take him from her, and she had to swallow hard. But she promised that every day she would be the first to check the mail and that was the only vow she took."

"What is it with holidays, Millie? Something about the break in routine, the sunshine, makes everything seem possible. Even mad ideas. Things you wouldn't normally consider."

Everyone and every conversation is starting to sound sinister, at this point.

"Sometimes people don’t find justice. Sometimes they have to take it."

Okay, perhaps I should have actually read the synopsis beforehand, because DAMN! I was not anticipating that scene!

Influenced by the hype.

"It's funny how someone's absence can fill a room."

I really hope that dropped hint was a red herring because if a big reveal has happened on page 23 of this book I will be furious!

We NEED a book with Yardley as the MC!

There's always one scene that breaks me in Lockhart's books and I think I just found this one's.

"Sometimes things are fragile... That's why they're valuable."

Unsure if this was supposed to be a shocking reveal or not as it was already pretty heavily hinted at? Regardless, I'm enjoying the drama!