The Bone Key Quotes

“The ritual worked. That is the most ghastly thing. I hold no particular brief for the rationality of the world, but that this vile obscenity should actually have the power to bring back the dead seems to me not merely a sign that the world is not rational, but that it is in fact entirely insane, a murderous lunatic gibbering in the corner of a padded cell.”
― Sarah Monette, The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth

“I want to make love to you. Will you let me?”
― Sarah Monette, The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth

“Ivo sat and listened, the look in his blue eyes enrapt and I knew, though I could hardly believe it, that he was not bored or uninterested, that to him I mattered as I had never mattered to anyone in my life.”
― Sarah Monette, The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth

“The museum may lose things,” I said, “but it never throws them away.”
― Sarah Monette, The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth

“People never have the right to be cruel, but I can’t say as how that ever stops them.”
― Sarah Monette, The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth

“I did not know how to help her; I was not the hero for whom she waited, the man whose touch could dissolve the wall around her and set her free.”
― Sarah Monette, The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth

“A room more clearly meant to delight the heart of a bibliophile I could not imagine.”
― Sarah Monette, The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth

“I heard the clicking of hells, like the tapping of tiny hooves, and there appeared in front of me two, tiny withered crones. I thought I had to be dreaming still, for they were identical, dressed in the same dark red, with small, black, cunning eyes in their pale, wrinkled faces. They looked as if they put up their silvery-white hair in its coiled braids using each other as a mirror, and there were long, dangling earrings of marcasite and jet.”
― Sarah Monette, The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth

“At home, it was part of my life that Ivo was always watching me, unblinking, the slits of his pupils expanding and contracting as a cat’s do when it considers whether or not to pounce on its prey.”
― Sarah Monette, The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth

“He touched my face; I could feel the heat of his fingers, and this time I did not flinch away, although I was trembling.”
― Sarah Monette, The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth

“He walked like a conqueror, like a lion. He could not have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three. His eyes were not merely vivid blue; they were intense, blazing, as if they were lit from within, as if this young man was bringing a flame that no one else could feel. His mouth was twisted in a mocking smile. He had known I would look.”
― Sarah Monette, The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth

“I had neither proof nor explanation, only that mad inner surety that I suspect is characteristic of all those who hear voices in an empty room, whether those voices be spectral or merely delusional.”
― Sarah Monette, The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth

“Like many predators, boys hunt in packs.”
― Sarah Monette, The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth

“This was merely the malignant hand of coincidence.”
― Sarah Monette, The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth

“Amelia Stapleton had frozen herself in a kind artificial girlhood which apparently resonated with the ghost of Georgiana Truelove. In fact, I saw a dreadful symmetry between the two: both of them unable to grow up, both of them preserved like insects in amber at this point of trauma, where their lives ended-Miss Stapleton’s only metaphorically, but Georgiana Truelove’s with a most dreadful literality.”
― Sarah Monette, The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth

“The picture that emerged from Mildred’s entries was of a pretty, charming, willful child who was accustomed to get her own way with the confidence of an empress.”
― Sarah Monette, The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth

“As she became more honest with herself, her writing matured, so that one could catch glimpses of what would emerge from its chrysalis as a poet’s genius.”
― Sarah Monette, The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth

“The hotel was a blazing citadel, a palace of electricity in the city’s cold gloom.”
― Sarah Monette, The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth

“Asking why the creature had chosen to give me its bone was pointless. My foolish and unwilling foray into necromancy had made me attractive to such things, as a magnetic is attractive to iron.”
― Sarah Monette, The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth

“I do not like children. I do not know how to speak to them. They frightened and confused me when I was a child myself, and they frighten and confuse me now that I am an adult.”
― Sarah Monette, The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth

“I could see her blush, even through her tan, but her eyes were steady and unapologetic.”
― Sarah Monette, The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth

“I suppose she was pretty-at least everyone seemed to think so-but her mouth was small and ungenerous, and her eyes was hard. Her voice was high-pitched and always rather breathless, and she lisped slightly. The quality of her voice was childlike, innocent, and that was a deception worthy of the Serpent in Eden.”
― Sarah Monette, The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth

“He rolled the syllables of my name out of his mouth as if they were at once contemptible and marvelous.”
― Sarah Monette, The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth

“Gentle reader, allow me to introduce Kyle Murchison Booth. You will forgive him if he does not shake hands.”
― Sarah Monette, The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth

“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ ” is one of the scariest stories I have ever read,”
― Sarah Monette, The Bone Key

“Some things demand that you search for them, even though you will not find them.”
― Sarah Monette, The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth

“At dinner, Mr. Marten produced his elegant place cards and assigned us places with the arbitrary ruthlessness of a dictator.”
― Sarah Monette, The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth

“My voice was deeper than his, husky and rasping, like the caw of a crow.”
― Sarah Monette, The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth

“Dinner was surprisingly pleasant. Ratcliffe’s friends did not know what to make of his sponsorship of me, but he said something about archaeology and museums, and they fell over themselves in their anxiety not to hear anything more. When none of them were watching, Ratcliffe winked at me.”
― Sarah Monette, The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth

“Where I remembered a weedy, sniffling rat of a boy, here was a small, spare dry man with fierce bright eyes like those of a hunting hawk.”
― Sarah Monette, The Bone Key: The Necromantic Mysteries of Kyle Murchison Booth