Lyndsay Faye Quotes

#1. In retrospect, I am very nearly as sharp as I pretend to be.

Lyndsay Faye

#2. Tell Mrs. Hudson there will be five for supper. If I am not back by eight, I will have no doubt been arrested. In that case, of course, there will be four.

Lyndsay Faye

#3. His eyes flew back at me and I could see whole civilizations, cities that he'd built and cherished and planned for, like the model of an entire world, all crumbling.

Lyndsay Faye

#4. Fourth, a telegram from brother Mycroft: 'Will visit at earliest possible convenience - great uproar in Whitehall. Mend quickly; your death would be most inconvenient at this time.

Lyndsay Faye

#5. I relate to this story almost as I would a friend or a lover - at times I want to breathe its entire alphabet into my lungs, and at others I should prefer to throw it across the room.

Lyndsay Faye

#6. But I will be a beautiful disaster.

Lyndsay Faye

#7. If I must go to hell to find my mother again, so be it: I will be another embodied disaster. But I will be a beautiful disaster.

Lyndsay Faye

#8. And in a way I have always thought that words are alive a little, for they can whisper sweet nothings and roar dragon flame with equal efficiency.

Lyndsay Faye

#9. Tim, press your teeth together and keep them that way,' he growled.

Lyndsay Faye

#10. My earlier metaphor had been wrong, I discovered. The splash of ink from the pen dropping onto the page looked nothing like a spray of blood at all.

Lyndsay Faye

#11. I bit the inside of my lip until I could taste all I had left of my mother, which was her blood.

Lyndsay Faye

#12. I believe it is the sole business of government to invent elaborate impediments to swift action,

Lyndsay Faye

#13. Knowing even as I craved permanence in New York City, that would never come to pass. The pair of us would live for as long as we could. As well as well could. That was all. Then we'd blow away like wishes made on dandelion heads.

Lyndsay Faye

#14. There is no practice more vexing than that of authors describing coach travel for the edification of people who have already travelled in coaches. As I must adhere to form, however, I will simply list a series of phrases for the unlikely reader who has never gone anywhere:

Lyndsay Faye

#15. I do not know whether the casual readers of novels is acquainted with an anatomical curiosity known as the femoral artery; without too much medical meandering, although you might suppose that cutting a man's throat would be the fastest way to slaughter him, a good jab to the thigh will do.

Lyndsay Faye

#16. Knowing that home was hateful to us both, I imagined that her calling me by the word meant I was expedient, or sturdy; but if I could only keep her hand in mine, I knew I would give my four limbs and my heart for the privilege, becoming instead four walls and a roof.

Lyndsay Faye

#17. Some tragedies bind us, as lies do; they are ropes braided of hurt and bitterness, and you cannot ever fully understand how pinioned you are until the ties are loosened.

Lyndsay Faye

#18. Come now, my dear fellow. Expertise is none the less admirable for being of an unsavoury variety.

Lyndsay Faye

#19. Though I no longer presumed to have a conscience, I have never once lacked feelings.

Lyndsay Faye

#20. Nothing is as bad as it seems,' I thought with the last remnants of my dense optimism. It couldn't be. I'd already lost everything once, I'd been ten, and so had countless other people I knew, and they all picked up and kept going. Or they picked up and went in a slightly different direction.

Lyndsay Faye

#21. In the broad light of day, I could not give his tale nearly so much credence as I had granted it when sitting rapt before a midnight fireplace whilst the tempest without erased the natural world.

Lyndsay Faye

#22. Besides, Watson," he added, with a glint of humour in his grey eyes, "you, after all, are a man of the world. We must put your skills to use, for there is no greater tragedy on God's green earth than that of untapped talent.

Lyndsay Faye

#23. We are all of us daily decaying, after all; the speed is our only variant.

Lyndsay Faye

#24. Some cities bustle, some meander, I have read; London blazes and it incinerates. London is the wolf's maw. From the instant I arrived there, I loved every smoldering inch of it

Lyndsay Faye

#25. An argument could be made that the ultimate desecration of the human body is to end its earthly usefulness, which would imply that all murderers share equally that specific charge.

Lyndsay Faye

#26. I know formidable women, dozens of them, women who fight and who win... Noble women. Heroic ones.

Lyndsay Faye

#27. There was Fiona Fiddick's faculties for both humour and sewing, which enabled her to hide the words FEED ME in an embroidered nosegay of coral peonies which Miss Sheffleton proudly hung upon the classroom wall.

Lyndsay Faye

#28. The things my brother and I don't say could pave over the Atlantic Ocean.

Lyndsay Faye

#29. Children are remarkable creatures, hurtling through savage landscapes of sudden laughter and sharp heartbreaks.

Lyndsay Faye

#30. Elections decide which horde of rats gets to gnaw at the bones.

Lyndsay Faye

#31. And here you are, another practical sort - neither Catholic nor Protestant, nor wicked, I think. Let us pray that you are not one of a kind, as in my experience your type tend to be o' tremendous use to God.

Lyndsay Faye

#32. Mr. Grange is interested in grimoires and their efficacy. I

Lyndsay Faye

#33. Three hundred pages of cotton-soft parchment, bound up with a green ribbon. Her writing gushed in watery ripples over the pages, penmanship that called to mind the maddest intricate Belgian lace. Wrought on a pin's head but stretching for miles if unraveled.

Lyndsay Faye

#34. What if," replied Inspector Fry in the same maddeningly curteous tone, "we were all to construct daisy chains and drape them so as to shield the words from public view?

Lyndsay Faye

#35. No, no, Watson, it is all wrong. These certainly are my ts, ys, and ms, and the capital A is very good, but what on earth induced you to obey a note with such a manifestly inaccurate q?

Lyndsay Faye

#36. Jeers and obscenities trailed after us like optimistic pickpockets.

Lyndsay Faye

#37. Watson, if the newspapers could be punished for speculation, every publication in England would soon enough be bankrupted.

Lyndsay Faye

#38. Both citizens and noncitizens bribed by the Party by means of jobs and liquor cast as many illegal ballots as they can in a single day, after which said votes will be either tossed in the river or purposefully miscounted.

Lyndsay Faye

#39. Hope, I've discovered, is a sad nuisance. Hope is a horse with a broken leg.

Lyndsay Faye

#40. Grace had called Ellen a dry little prune who'd be lucky to give it away for free disguised as a hat, let alone sell it or marry it off.

Lyndsay Faye

#41. The language spoken by New Yorkers was changing almost daily. Phrases culled from British thieves' cant intermingled with German, Dutch, Yiddish, and other immigrant languages to form "flash," a

Lyndsay Faye

#42. Being brave and being alone aren't the same thing.

Lyndsay Faye

#43. Time is a tyrant, words our last and only weapons.

Lyndsay Faye

#44. One can grow accustomed to carrying unseeable scars, as if the tattoo one wears is inked in flesh tone over flesh tone; but nevertheless one is still covered in secret, painted with secret, stained by it.

Lyndsay Faye

#45. People tell me things they shouldn't. Things they ought to be powdering over, shoveling underground, facts they ought to be stuffing into a carpetbag before dropping into the river and quietly drowning.

Lyndsay Faye

#46. Still I caught glimpses of another creature there in the tress, one with round eyes and a predator's hungry stare; but by the time I understood that I was the prey, my fate had already been sealed.

Lyndsay Faye

#47. Nobody chased her. But that was nobody's fault, really, not in a city of this size. It was only the callousness of four hundred thousand people, blending into a single blue-black pool of unconcern. That's what we copper stars are for, I think... to be the few who stop and look.

Lyndsay Faye

#48. I am pleased beyond words you aren't lying dead in a ditch somewhere.

Lyndsay Faye

#49. I looked up in curiosity. Behind us stood the Brown and Eagle Wool Warehouse and Schneider's Cap Factory, both constructed with that wholehearted devotion to industry that sullied the word architecture.

Lyndsay Faye

#50. I wanted to inflict exquisite agonies upon Aunt Patience; and had I been informed that a few weeks later, I would serve her the deepest cut imaginable, I am not certain that I would not have smiled. Morbidity

Lyndsay Faye

#51. Because I'm still here. I got a brick, a leather strap, and a rock from a slingshot too, all on a shelf. But look at me. I'm right here.

Lyndsay Faye

#52. If Mercy Underhill were any more perfect, it would take a long day's work to fall in love with her. But she has exactly enough faults to make it ridiculously easy.

Lyndsay Faye

#53. And I maintain, Detective Halse," said Inspector Fry doggedly, "that the civil unrest which allowing this message to remain in view would foment is against the principles of conscience and of British decency. Are you against the principles of British decency, Detective?

Lyndsay Faye

#54. There was someplace urgent he needed to be, and he wasn't going to make it there on time. It was a gorgeous calamity in scale, I thought. A lovely misfortune. Immediate and irreversible and very soon forgotten. We needed more troubles like that.

Lyndsay Faye

#55. You owe your attacker no debt, Miss Steele. It is, as I have proven, a logical impossibility? Promise to try?

Lyndsay Faye

#56. I am not callow enough to suppose that books are not powerful
on the contrary, a book is the most delicious of paradoxes, an inert collection of symbols which are capable of changing the universe when once the cover is opened.

Lyndsay Faye