Arcana Quotes & Sayings

At her easiest, she was hard, because her brain was always working, working, working - I had to exert myself just to keep pace with her. I'd spend an hour crafting a casual e-mail to her, I became a student of arcana so I could keep her interested: the Lake poets, the code duello, the French Revolution. Her mind was both wide and deep, and I got smarter being with her. And more considerate, and more active, and more alive, and almost electric, because for Amy, love was like drugs or booze or porn: There was no plateau. Each exposure needed to be more intense than the last to achieve the same result.
Amy made me believe I was exceptional, that I was up to her level of play. That was both our making and undoing. Because I couldn't handle the demands of greatness. I began craving ease and averageness, and I hated myself for it, and ultimately, I realized, I punished her for it. I turned her into the brittle, prickly thing she became. — Gillian Flynn

I'd fallen in love with Amy because I was the ultimate Nick with her. Loving her made me superhuman, it made me feel alive. At her easiest, she was hard, because her brain was always working, working, working - I had to exert myself just to keep pace with her. I'd spend an hour crafting a casual e-mail to her, I became a student of arcana so I could keep her interested: the Lake poets, the code duello, the French Revolution. Her mind was both wide and deep, and I got smarter being with her. And more considerate, and more — Gillian Flynn

I was on the verge of something numinous and profound and in one more second the universe was going to crack open and arcana would rain down on my head like grace and all the cosmic mysteries were going to be revealed. — Kate Atkinson

When Matthew merely stared at him, Jackson reached into the weapon box and pulled out a sheathed machete, handing it to the boy.
Matthew laughed and dropped it. — Kresley Cole

If you spend any time in Washington you'll find nerds. What happens is most of them sublimate their fixations with comics, or baseball cards, or 1960s British comedies to policy minutiae and political arcana. But, like Christians in ancient Rome, you can still spot them if you know the signals. — Jonah Goldberg

So much for you to learn, Empress. Beware the inactivated card." One Arcana's powers lay dormant - until he or she killed another player. "Who is it?" "Don't ask, if you ever want to know. — Kresley Cole

I felt like the Empress Theodora. Can I get more orifices? I thought. Is that what she meant in the Historia Arcana - not that three isn't enough, but that the three on offer aren't enough to sustain a marriage? — Nell Zink

The plastic-covered notebooks were candy-colored and palm-size, brimming with the characters and arcana of a prosperous and long-standing children's entertainment combine. The creation myth of the product line concerned the adventures of a clever, effeminate armadillo and his cohort of resourceful desert critters. — Colson Whitehead

For it is in the arcana of dreams that existences merge and renew themselves, change and yet keep the same. — Bram Stoker

Goody Two-shoes Evie Greene got herself pickled, for true. If I'd known you were such a juvenile delinquent, I might've asked for a new history podna."
"Juvenile delinquent? Hmm. Aren't your initials J.D.? If the shoe fits ... — Kresley Cole

This game is a hell we've all been damned into. It's designed to madden us. The most intelligent Arcana ever to play is called the Fool. The one who least wanted to kill was named Death. And you, Empress, rule over nothing! — Kresley Cole

I doubt she'll welcome you if I tell her you undressed me."
"Maybe she'll only partially welcome me."
Smart-ass. — Kresley Cole

She said that no system based on arcana or esoteric knowledge would survive this age. No new revealed religion could take hold in it. — Anne Rice

I'm sorry you want him," Matthew began in a careful tone, as if he was trying very hard to say the exact right thing to me. "I feel your heart - it actually aches. I wish it didn't, Evie. You cannot have him."
I glared down at him. "Why would you say that?"
"You don't want to be Arcana. But you are." He gazed up at me with those soulful eyes. "Jack's not."
"So what are you, like, a card purist or something? — Kresley Cole

I appear to be embarked on the turbid waters of poetry and scholarship. And a career in poetry and knowledge is as hard to guide as Plato's horses. On the one hand I must range about discovering the fundamentals of knowledge, dipping into science, politics and other arcana, forever seeking an education that is both profound and practical; on the other, I must keep spiritually alive and brilliantly alive, for poetry is, as the moral Milton conceded in practice and precept, a sensuous, passionate, brutal thing. I put in the last adjective because I am modern and angry and puritanical ... The relevance of such schedule to poetry is obvious. I cannot think it a pedantry that a man desiring to speak (or sing) something important should also desire to speak with certainty. Also if he lack scope, such as an acquaintance with science and an acquaintance with other languages, he will be romantic and an anachronism. — Robert Lowell

I GOT BOURBON-FACED ON SHIT STREET! — Kresley Cole

I woan let you go back to that boy
not until you give me one bec doux." A sweet kiss. Then he reached forward, unlacing the ribbon from my hair.
"What are you doing?" I murmured.
"Souvenir." He put it in his pocket, and for some reason that struck me as the sexiest thing I'd ever seen. — Kresley Cole

Jackson asked, "Where'd the water come from in your house?"
"A pipe." Then he explained to Jackson, "Water travels in pipes. — Kresley Cole

Hey, you've still got your endangered hymen. Which means you'll make it to closing credits - I'm s.o.l. — Kresley Cole

Mel exhaled. Why are you forcing me into the voice-of-reason role? You know that never works out for us. — Kresley Cole

Truly, there are terrible primal arcana of earth which had better be left unknown and unevoked; dread secrets which have nothing to do with man, and which man may learn only in exchange for peace and sanity; cryptic truths which make the knower evermore an alien among his kind, and cause him to walk alone on earth. — H.P. Lovecraft

Remember my titles? I don't get poisoned, I do the poisoning. I'm the Princess of it — Kresley Cole

And all he wants is to throw a rager in your sugar mill?" Then she frowned. "Wow. That sounded raunchy. — Kresley Cole

TEN THINGS THAT PEOPLE WHO DIDN'T READ THE FIRST BOOK REALLY OUGHT TO KNOW.

I. One day, your father and mother were hugging, and they began to have special feelings. Warm feelings that tingled in their private places. It is likely they weren't wearing any clothes. At any rate, they began to rub against each other like two sticks trying to start a fire, and nine months later, you were born. If this is news to you, please put this book down now. There may well be big bad wolves and evil witches and fairies in the pages that follow, but I promise you, this isn't a children's story. — Elliott James

You wish to hear the origin story?" "Uh, yes." I passed him the bottle. "Very well." He drank, handing it to Jack, starting another round. "A goddess of magic devised a contest to the death for select mortals. She invited deities of other realms to send a representative from their most prestigious house, all youths. Each one bore their god's emblem upon his or her right hand." My heart raced . . . I had been one of those youths. "These players would fight inside Tar Ro, a sacred realm as large as a thousand kingdoms, harvesting their victims' emblems; only the player who'd collected them all would leave Tar Ro alive. Naturally, the gods cheated, gifting their own representative with superhuman abilities, making them more than mortal. Secret abilities. That's why we're called Arcana." "Hail Tar Ro," I murmured. "The High Priestess told me that." "An old-fashioned greeting. She's quite knowledgeable about the games. Very respectful of the old ways. — Kresley Cole

Just because I am increasingly bored by sabermetric arcana doesn't mean anyone else has to be; it remains good for people who like that sort of thing. — John Thorn

Aristotle says in the book of secrets that communicating too many arcana of nature and art breaks a celestial seal and many evils can ensue. Which does not mean that secrets must not be revealed, but that the learned must decide when and how. — Umberto Eco

In the seeker-church movement the emphasis away from the use and explication of creedal confession is obvious, since the whole point is to focus on the 'felt-needs' of the person in the pew - especially the felt-needs of nonbelievers. The rationale is that the church and its main service are evangelistic in nature. Because nonbelievers simply cannot penetrate the arcana of historic Christianity, the felt-needs of people become the point of entry into conversation with them. — James Davison Hunter

Occasionally, he left the compound. I'd figured he must be out hunting, at least some of the time, but he hadn't returned with a new icon, and I'd heard nothing on Arcana Radio. Plus, Lark's laminated player list - the little twit actually did keep it on the fridge door - had had no updates since the Star.

Well, other than her scratching my title out and scribbling in "The Unclean One." Har. — Kresley Cole

The white hands of the tenebrous belle deal the hand of destiny. Her fingernails are longer than those of the mandarins of ancient China and each is pared to a fine point. These and teeth as fine and white as spikes of spun sugar are the visible signs of the destiny she wistfully attempts to evade via the arcana; her claws and teeth have been sharpened on centuries of corpses, she is the last bud of the poison tree that sprang from the loins of Vlad the Impaler who picnicked on corpses in the forests of Transylvania.
The walls of her bedroom are hung with black satin, embroidered with tears of pearl. At the rooms four corners are funerary urns and bowls which emit slumbrous, pungent fumes of incense. In the centre is an elaborate catafalque, in ebony, surrounded by long candles in enormous silver candlesticks. In a white lace negligee stained a little with blood, the Countess climbs up on her catafalque at dawn each morning and lies down in an open coffin. — Angela Carter

At a time when the respectable bourgeois youngsters of my generation were college freshmen, oppressed by simian sophomores and affronted with balderdash daily and hourly by chalky pedagogues, I was at large in a wicked seaport of half a million people, with a front seat at every public show, as free of the night as of day, and getting earfuls of instruction in a hundred giddy arcana, none of them taught in schools ... [But] if I neglected the humanities, I was meanwhile laying in all the worldly wisdom of a police lieutenant, a bartender, a shyster lawyer, or a midwife. — H.L. Mencken

The adult members of society adverted to the Bible unreasonably often. What arcana! Why did they spread this scandalous document before our eyes? If they had read it, I thought, they would have hid it. They didn't recognize the vivid danger that we would, through repeated exposure, catch a case of its wild opposition to their world. — Annie Dillard