Descriptive Quotes

“In their poor imitation of French fashion, they look like pastries in a bakery window at the end of the day, trying a bit too hard to be beautiful as they wilt.”
― Mackenzi Lee, The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue

“Oliver came up to me and asked me to play something on the piano.

'What would you like?' I asked.

'Anything.'

This would be my thanks for the most beautiful evening of my life. I took a sip from my second martini, feeling as decadent as one of those jazz piano players who smoke a lot and drink a lot and are found dead in a gutter at the end of every film.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“The hounds snap fierce at your heels. Turn toward Athens. I hear them pelting hard on you, I see black flesh and snake-hands coiling round a fruit of agonizing pain.”
― Euripides, Electra

“On our way we passed a shop where my mother always ordered flowers. As a child I liked to watch the large storefront window awash in a perpetual curtain of water which came sliding down ever so gently, giving the shop an enchanted, mysterious aura that reminded me of how in many films the screen would blur to announce that a flashback was about to occur.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“His undergraduate years, each time he spoke of them, acquired a limelit, incandescent magic, as if they belonged to another life, a life to which I had no access since it already belonged to the past. Proof of its existence trickled, as it did now, in his ability to mix drinks, or to tell arcane grappas apart, or to speak to all women, or in the mysterious square envelopes addressed to him that arrived at our house from all over the world.

I had never envied him the past, nor felt threatened by it. All these facets of his life had the mysterious character of incidents that had occurred in my father's life long before my birth but which continued to resonate into the present. I didn't envy life before me, nor did I ache to travel back to the time when he had been my age.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“Apollo, your voice hymned a justice I could not see clear, but all too clear the anguish you caused, the bloodhaunted, homeless future you've doled out.”
― Euripides, Electra

“No pity for these things, there is no pity but mine, oh father, for the pity of your butchering rawblood death.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“Never since that time has this house got itself clear of rawblood butchery.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“As I lay, a pink, dreamlike glow seeped into the room, gradually turning a bright, chemical red. The light inched towards the bed, slowly picking out our two bodies—developing us, I thought, the way photographs used to be made—until it was daylight and everything had its normal definition.”
― Olivia Sudjic, Sympathy

“It was long past midnight. Laura's music played on. It was composed in the language of stars, tinkling in a crystal pool suspended from constellations. She used chimes now and then, the chimes that characterized every patio in Arizona, the piano, the trees combed by wind. A prelude to a storm. It was like discovering the secret room in a dream of your house that holds all the magic. It was music I wished I lived inside. Around us, cactus, hills filled with jumping cholla, the heat of August like another animal heaving over us.”
― Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora

“A fighter, muses Rachel, is a fighter through and through, consistently irregular, a fighting man on every scale. Fractal, fractious, with a rough complexity! Nothing she can do. A fractal, Papa once told her, is a way of seeing infinity.

In Zachariah, she sees infinity.

Mandelbrot famously wrote a paper called 'How Long Is the Coast of Britain?,' the answer to which, of course, is that it depends how you look at it. The closer one looks, the larger it is. And more and more intricate, on an infinite scale.

There is a template for all things.”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“A restaurant overlooking a starlit night sprang to my imagination like something out of an illuminated manuscript from the late Middle Ages.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“I like Carson. I really like Carson. I can hand an idea to him that's still a little rough, and he can turn it over and tumble it and hand it back to me shining. And I can do the same for him.”
― Dexter Palmer, Version Control

“There was a hazy damp film in his eyes that I recognized from emotions in old movies, projected large on darkened screens.”
― Alexandra Kleeman, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

“I turn my head and stare out the casement window at the royal gardens instead, wet and slippery and dark as the center of a body, where the roses twitch an extinguished red.”
― Alexandra Kleeman, Intimations: Stories

“She was truly happy for the first time in her life, and it felt just like living in a small room painted all white, with windows looking out onto impenetrable forest.”
― Alexandra Kleeman, Intimations: Stories

“Though it had been over a year, she staggered through the world like one freshly bludgeoned by love.”
― Alexandra Kleeman, Intimations: Stories

“There are times when any amount of being within the world is like rubbing bare skin against sandpaper, when any form of motion is a kind of abrasion, leaving you raw and pink and vulnerable to the next thing. At these times I prefer to close my eyes and be still, still like the cups or candles or crackers on the table, nerveless and open. I closed my eyes and tried to think of the thing furthest from my situation.”
― Alexandra Kleeman, Intimations: Stories

“Rachel believes in it, the laws of of pattern formation and how they are universal: whatever she sees, crystallizing, a landscape of fractals, of emergence and symmetry, her world falling happily into shape where he must forge it, a pioneer of industry, sooty and scarred. For Rachel Wolff, quite simply, there are patterns everywhere, she can't help it; she is an illustrator, naturalist, cartographer—and her eye, a kaleidoscope.”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“I love your loins, that's all,' Rachel says quietly. 'And now I love the word itself, and how words change, I love that too. And all the parts of you, I love them. That's all. And I'm not sad,' she whispers, gasping a little at the shock of her own tears, hot and extravagant, tears that catch the light in her lashes before they drop and roll across Zach's thighs, sparkling capsules, kaleidoscopic, the flow dynamic.”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“It is perfectly scientific,' Lev protests, rising to draw the heavy dining room curtains against the streetlamp light, reducing it to a glow that bleeds amber round the edges and between the panels of plum brocade. Lev turns back into the room but stays by the window a moment to observe the new play of light, the chandelier casting shards of glitter upon mahogany and bold shadows across the high brow and long sharp plains of Katya's timeless face. Oh my wife.”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“Hell! His beard grows fast as blazes, like a damp wicket in springtime sun, green, and Rachel's skin is so fine, his bristles can score her red the way a new ball marks a bat, English alum on English unbleached willow, finest quality, special selection, Rachel-grade. Zach, my man, you have cricket on the brain! Thomas has asked him to play on Sunday. Bring Rachel, he said. Thomas 'All Souls' Aubry, gentleman, corinthian at heart, and half French yet more English than a true-born.”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“For Aaron, looking like a skeleton was very much for life, not just for Halloween”
― Kestral M. Gaian, Hidden Lives

“And he'd said nothing or something that amounted to nothing, and I tongued this memory like a burn in my mouth until the bathwater cooled and shook me back into my body where my fingerprints were ruffled.”
― Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

“As she expanded the room grew smaller around her. (27)”
― F Scott Fitzgerald

“Zach's eyes flash with light, caught by the peculiar greenness of early summer grass and the strobe effect of sun through wrought-iron fencing and trees. He kicks at dust and gravel with his unlaced desert boots, cricket spikes slung around his neck by the laces, his tread lazy and ostentatious, full of close-of-play sensuality.”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“Her cut finger has begun to bleed slightly and she licks the blood away. Salt, metal, black earth. Blood has such a tenebrous taste.”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“Here at the dining table in Chelsea, nearly two years after Katya's death, Rachel fingers a path through a film of sparkling dust around Mama's plate and breakfast cup and linen napkin, orbiting twice.”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“In Aleksei's fanciful dream of two Katherines by Caucasian blue waters, his sister and his English love, there is a child also, a fairy-tale girl, he fancies, with flyaway hair at the nape. She chirps gaily as a bird and is rosier than a red rose and whiter than white snow.”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff

“Rachel slips off the bed and stands before him to rearrange his collar, aware that in this small gesture there is a quality acutely other than motherly, sisterly, companionable, and that, in this moment, everything ever intended for her, for them, has begun, that the beginning is in the rearrangement of his collar and not the first kiss they share now, Zach recovering his wind as quickly as he lost it, a Great Northern Diver resurfacing. Zach clasps his hands round her ears, steps into her body and breathes the very air from her lungs. His teeth scrape against hers and he rests his open mouth against her face, gasping for air, his eyes squeezed shut as in great pain. And Rachel and Zachariah are born. Now truly they are born.

'Zachariah, Zachariah,' whispers Rachel. 'My fighting man.”
― Emma Richler, Be My Wolff