Somewhere Beneath Those Waves Quotes

“It is said in those districts that not all the trains which run on the city’s tracks are listed in Metropolitan Transit’s compendious schedule. The residents will tell you that after midnight, on some nights, there will be other trains, trains whose cry is different, the bellow of some great beast fighting for its life. And if you watch those trains go past, behind those bright flickering windows you will see passengers unlike any passengers you have seen when riding the trains yourself: men with wings, women with horns, beast-headed children, fauns and dryads and green-skinned people more beautiful than words can describe. In 1893, a schoolteacher swore that she saw a unicorn; in 1934, a murderer turned himself into the police, weeping, saying that he saw his victims staring at him from a train as it howled past the station platform on which he stood.
These are the seraphic trains. The stories say they run to Heaven, Hell, and Faërie. They are omens, but no one can agree on what they portend. And although you will never meet anyone who has seen or experienced it, there are persistent rumors, unkillable rumors, that sometimes, maybe once a century, maybe twice, a seraphic train will stop in its baying progress and open its doors for a mortal.
Those who know the story of Thomas the Rhymer—and even some who don’t—insist that all these people, blest or damned as they may be, must be poets.”
― Sarah Monette, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves

“It is one thing to suspect yourself of going mad; it is another thing entirely to discover your suspicions are correct.”
― Sarah Monette, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves

“The river runs through the heart of the city, and braiding around and over and under the river, the city’s rail system is a welter of tarnished silver ribbons.”
― Sarah Monette, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves

“Beyond the window, snow fell like frozen drops of poison.”
― Sarah Monette, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves

“I have followed Hamlet for so long, so blindly. Now that he is gone, I do not remember how to walk on my own.”
― Sarah Monette, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves

“There’s not supposed to be anything left after the end of the world, even if the end of the world doesn’t quite happen.”
― Sarah Monette, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves

“The hero wasn’t me, any more than the villain was Harry McLauglin, forty-year-old forest ranger and father of two. We were just the matrices that held the pattern, the straw and clay from which myth was built. And now that we are only straw and clay again, the world does not know what to do with us.”
― Sarah Monette, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves

“The bad days were when the world wouldn’t stay out of his head, when everyone he looked at wore a swirling crown of color, and everything he touched carried the charge of someone else’s life.”
― Sarah Monette, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves

“The man wore black velvet, and on every branch of his wide-spreading antlers a tiny white candle burned serenely, anchored in its own wax. The man’s dark, lambent eyes met Sean’s, and Sean knew, then and ever after, that the stag-headed man understood him and loved him as no one in his life would.”
― Sarah Monette, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves

“In the January that I turned thirty-five, sleep became a foreign and hostile country. I had never been more than what one might call a refugee in the country of sleep;”
― Sarah Monette, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves

“She pours a libation-not to the dragon, for the dragon is destruction and death and needs no homage-but to the Earth who heals herself if given half a chance, and then proceeds to get royally hammered.”
― Sarah Monette, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves

“There was something terribly stark in the way she said it, an acknowledgment of the hopelessness of the vampires’ love for the demi-angels, and at the same time a resolute dignity that rejected pity.”
― Sarah Monette, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves

“His hands are hard with calluses; Hamlet’s were soft, narrow, the hands of a scholar. Hamlet liked to discuss philosophy in bed, the light rambling voice like a counterpoint to the explorations of those soft, clever hands. Fortinbras does not waste his breath.”
― Sarah Monette, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves

“He did not want empathy with her, but he could help understanding. Blame the government at first, but the government is faceless, far away. It’s the people who walk by you every day and don’t make eye-contact, who call you names and talk about needing to “clean up” the subway stations; they’re right there, and it must be their fault. They’re the ones with lives they don’t deserve; they’re the ones who have stolen your life. They’re the imposters, because under their clothes and makeup, their cellphones and iPods and the hard shell of security, they’re just like you.”
― Sarah Monette, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves

“My roses still bloom, for I will not let them fade, but the weeping willows have choked out the cherry trees, and all the chrysanthemums and snapdragons have become love-lies-bleeding and anemones and hydrangeas of the deepest indigo blue. You are missed, my only violet.”
― Sarah Monette, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves

“The tourmaline eyes were both grave and wicked, and Violet felt herself blushing.”
― Sarah Monette, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves

“He had come to believe in the fullness and flowering of his love for her, that he knew Violet’s every mood, every thought; but now he seemed to be losing her, and this sense that she was drifting away, borne on a current he could not feel, made him angry because it made him afraid.”
― Sarah Monette, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves

“His poetry was a bouquet of dead, rotting roses, a sickness, a canker, a stupid, self-indulgent delusion.”
― Sarah Monette, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves

“Its voice was the voice of clockwork mechanism, full of rust and oil, dust and dead spiders and fragments of macerated time.”
― Sarah Monette, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves

“Tonight she understood what the song was trying to say, that the truth was still beautiful, even if it came out of something painful and ugly and heart-breaking.”
― Sarah Monette, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves

“The first time he had seen her, the first time he had looked into her eyes, he had thought he saw his Stag of Candles reflected there. He had been trying to find that reflection again ever since, but all he ever saw was himself.”
― Sarah Monette, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves

“A river flows through the city’s heart, sullen and sluggish, but brown and hungry and strong. And the city itself is a snarl, a brawl, a festered wound. It seethes and rails and bides its time.”
― Sarah Monette, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves

“Somewhere beneath those waves was her home. The rich strangeness, the terrible sadness of the dream returned to me, and I realized I was crying, hot silent tears sliding down my cheeks; I licked one off my upper lip, but could not distinguish its taste from the salt miasma of the sea. I stared at the water until my eyes felt as sea-blasted and blind as the figureheads; and then I began to walk; aimlessly, blindly, my mind in the air with the gulls, in the deep water with the seals, in the dusty prison with the waiting women.”
― Sarah Monette, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves

“His smile was unpleasant, the teeth prominent and yellow and wolflike. His smell was musty and sweaty at once, and I gave in and backed up a step.”
― Sarah Monette, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves

“For Lilah, the light made everything worse. It was harder than the dark uglier, and anything it showed her would be true beyond any hope of redemption.”
― Sarah Monette, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves

“Visitors come on two legs, on four, on the sweeping sinuosity of scaled legless bodies. There are perches in front of every exhibit for those who come by wing, whethered feathered or mebranous, and the Museum does its best to accomodate those whose habitual method of locomotion is aquatic.”
― Sarah Monette, Somewhere Beneath Those Waves