Lyndsay Faye Quotes & Sayings

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

I believe it is the sole business of government to invent elaborate impediments to swift action, — Lyndsay Faye

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

I am pleased beyond words you aren't lying dead in a ditch somewhere. — Lyndsay Faye

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

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

Though I no longer presumed to have a conscience, I have never once lacked feelings. — Lyndsay Faye

Hope, I've discovered, is a sad nuisance. Hope is a horse with a broken leg. — Lyndsay Faye

Never have I seen a deadlier-looking collection of firemen, street brawlers, Party thugs, and fighting entrepreneurs in my life, and they made Chief Matsell's hiring practices pretty clear. If you were loyal to the Party or maybe even a good watchman, you could wear a copper star. If you looked like you've killed a man with your bare hands and aren't shy about doing it again, you could be a captain. — Lyndsay Faye

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

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

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

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

I don't think I can do this anymore," I told my landlady ...
"Can anyone else, then?" she asked, voice rough.
"I don't think so," I acknowledged.
"And the this you mean - must this be done?"
"Yes."
"Then you will keep going." ...
"Keeping going is terrible."
"It is, she agreed. "That is why I admire you, Mr. Wilde. It is much easier to stop. — Lyndsay Faye

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

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

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

Charles says that he does not care what sort of Jane I am so long as I am his Jane; Sardar says that he does not care what sort of Jane I am so long as I am my own Jane; Sahjara says that she does not care what sort of Jane I am so long as she is my Sahjara. Thus I am daily three Janes, and so the luckiest of all. — Lyndsay Faye

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

Watson, if the newspapers could be punished for speculation, every publication in England would soon enough be bankrupted. — Lyndsay Faye

My friend opened a small box which Lestrade had produced. Inside lay a beautiful silver cigarette case monogrammed with Holmes's initials, underneath which ran the words, "With the Respects of Scotland Yard, November 1888."
Sherlock Holmes sat with his lips parted, but no sound emerged.
"Thank you," he managed at length. — Lyndsay Faye

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

Tim, press your teeth together and keep them that way,' he growled. — Lyndsay Faye

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

Children are remarkable creatures, hurtling through savage landscapes of sudden laughter and sharp heartbreaks. — Lyndsay Faye

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

I know formidable women, dozens of them, women who fight and who win... Noble women. Heroic ones. — Lyndsay Faye

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

Being brave and being alone aren't the same thing. — Lyndsay Faye

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

By day I taught Sahjara, who brought me unceasing small presents ranging from orange flower cakes to bouquets of jolly red berries; by night, I imagined my employer making the sort of inappropriate advances which would have made most governesses flee the estate forthwith, and in graphic detail, complete with bare thighs and calloused fingers and the diagonal notches which rest so sweetly above the hipbones when a gentleman is in training, as I had no doubt whatsoever Mr. Thornfield was. — Lyndsay Faye

More accurately, on the bed and on the table lay various pieces of what had once been a body.
Holmes was leaning with his back against the wall, his countenance deathly white. "The door was open," he said incongruously. "I was passing by, and the door was open."
"Holmes," I whispered in horror.
"The door was open," he said once more, and then buried his face in his hands. — Lyndsay Faye

I hope that the epitaph of the human race when the world ends will be: Here perished a species which lived to tell stories.
We tell stories to strangers to ingratiate ourselves, stories to lovers to better adhere us skin to skin, stories in our heads to banish the demons. When we tell truth, often we are callous; when we tell lies, often we are kind. Through it all, we tell stories, and we own an uncanny knack for the task. — Lyndsay Faye

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

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

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

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

The spread of flash talk to the general population would prove to be a permanent shift in the English language. When you say "so long" to your "pal" in parting, you are participating in a subversive cultural phenomenon dating back to 1530 and the Derbyshire scoundrels who first developed a secret language all their own. — Lyndsay Faye

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

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

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

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

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

Come now, my dear fellow. Expertise is none the less admirable for being of an unsavoury variety. — Lyndsay Faye

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

Look at it,' he said, gesturing. 'This window looks down upon hundreds more panes of glass, and behind those panes live thousands upon thousands of lost souls. When I feel cast down and helpless, scores of other men do as well, and when I am bitterly angry at feeling cast down and helpless, countless other people languish in concert with me. When I'm happy, it's the same. It's a bit like ... I used to play chamber music. It's like a vast orchestra. And so I shan't ever be alone. — Lyndsay Faye

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

The things my brother and I don't say could pave over the Atlantic Ocean. — Lyndsay Faye

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

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

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

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

Elections decide which horde of rats gets to gnaw at the bones. — Lyndsay Faye

We are all of us daily decaying, after all; the speed is our only variant. — Lyndsay Faye

Jeers and obscenities trailed after us like optimistic pickpockets. — Lyndsay Faye

The door flew open, revealing a wrinkled, forward-thrusting face wreathed with a nimbus of wispy white hair, a face resembling nothing so much as a mole emerging from its burrow. Her spectacles were so dirty that I could hardly see the use of them. She peered at us as if at two scabrous street dogs and tightened her grasp on her cane.
"What do you want? I don't let rooms, and if you've business with my sons or my husband, they work for a living. — Lyndsay Faye

Here is another query: is it the duty of Society to burden itself permanently with every vicious woman who becomes a mother? And is it possible to make such an establishment of male and female loafers, even with the best management, anything useful to them or the world? - NEW-YORK DAILY TRIBUNE, AUGUST 11, 1847 — Lyndsay Faye

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

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

I always knew my grip upon the thread of time was tenuous, and the harder I clutched, the sooner it would break. Therefore, do not weep for me, my tender sweet love-- we must all resign ourselves to the final snapping of that bond between soul and death, and though it is a present unworthy of your grace and beauty, you must know that I gift my soul to you. — Lyndsay Faye

Mr. Grange is interested in grimoires and their efficacy. I — Lyndsay Faye

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

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. Ones like burning supper or coming down with a head cold at an awkward time. I desperately wanted to pass through countless small, endurable problems with the girl sitting next to me. I didn't need much else. — Lyndsay Faye

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

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

Time is a tyrant, words our last and only weapons. — Lyndsay Faye

But I will be a beautiful disaster. — Lyndsay Faye

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

As he passed a hand over his eyes, I recalled the he could not have slept more than twenty hours in the last seven days. For the first time since I had known him, Sherlock Holmes appeared to be exhausted by work rather than inaction.
"Because if I am right," he murmured, "I haven't the first idea what to do. — Lyndsay Faye

Why didn't you say something?"
Flushing beet red, I replied, "Your inheritance was unexpected. I wanted to live there again, thought that it may have been . . . mine."
"And so it is!" he crowed. "Every brick, every weapon, every bloody blade of grass is as much yours as I am, darling, supposing you'll give me a pallet in the stables and a crust from time to time. Are you quite mad?"
"I don't want you to live on a pallet." My tears spilled, and he painted his fingertips over my jaw. "I want you to live in my bones. — Lyndsay Faye

In retrospect, I am very nearly as sharp as I pretend to be. — Lyndsay Faye

Confident I remain, however, and I find myself hopeful as well -- if the world is wide enough for me to find someone, who knows what miracles lurk behind each and every closed door? Charles Thornefield and I are far from perfect; but we are perfect for each other, and perhaps in the end, our chains bind us more closely than anyone who has never been a prisoner can imagine. — Lyndsay Faye