The Woman In Red Quotes & Sayings

Eight-and-twenty years,' said I, 'I have lived, and never a ghost have I seen as yet.'
The old woman sat staring hard into the fire, her pale eyes wide open.
'Ay,' she broke in; 'and eight-and-twenty years you have lived and never seen the likes of this house, I reckon. There's a many things to see, when one's still but eight-and-twenty.' She swayed her head slowly from side to side. 'A many things to see and sorrow for.' ("The Red Room") — H.G.Wells

The wine was red wine, and had stained the ground of the narrow street in the suburb of Saint Antoine, in Paris, where it was spilled. It had stained many hands, too, and many faces, and many naked feet, and many wooden shoes. The hands of the man who sawed the wood, left red marks on the billets; and the forehead of the woman who nursed her baby, was stained with the stain of the old rag she wound about her head again. Those who had been greedy with the staves of the cask, had acquired a tigerish smear about the mouth; and one tall joker so besmirched, his head more out of a long squalid bag of a nightcap than in it, scrawled upon a wall with his finger dipped in muddy wine-lees - BLOOD. — Charles Dickens

Oooo, what is that?" Red yelled when she saw the palace. "That's Buckingham Palace," Alex said. "It's where the monarchy resides." Red was mesmerized. "What a stylish and tasteful place! Look at that beautiful statue out front of it in the middle of the street! That looks exactly like the statue I wanted to build in celebration of Charlie's and my wedding!" Red left the others and flew down to the gate. She peered through the bars at the palace in delight. She had to hang on to the bars tightly because the fairy dust was making her drift back to the sky. One of the palace guards on duty saw Red and stared at her in disbelief. It wasn't every day he saw a floating woman at the gate. "Yoo-hoo!" Red called to him. "I just love your hat! Please tell the current monarch that Queen Red of the Center Kingdom says hello - " Conner flew to the gate and pulled Red's hands off the bars. "Red, come on. You're gonna get left behind! — Chris Colfer

She was crouched in the corner of the room, eating something off the floor. It was the old woman dressed in endless black. When she looked up this time there was no question she was there for me. She had the face of my mother but much older, her ancient decayed mouth coming closer for her good-night kiss. I steeled myself against her putrid smell, the mouthful of bitter dust, but as her lips touched mine it was like biting into a purple black plum whose fruit was brilliant red, like an explosion of intense joy. Its childhood smell wrinkled my nose with pleasure, its sweet juices ran down my chin, turning into a beautiful black ocean where I floated safely, not lost as I had imagined, but securely tucked away deep in space. — Mary Woronov

Woman and children behind the lines!' he yelled, and all the girls jumped. Henry froze with his mouth open. 'Bang the drum slowly and ask not for whom the bell's ringing, for the answer's unfriendly!' He threw a fist in the air. 'Two years have my black ships sat before Troy, and today its gate shall open before the strength of my arm.' Dotty was laughing from the kitchen. Frank looked at his nephew. 'Henry, we play baseball tomorrow. Today we sack cities. Dots! Fetch me my tools! Down with the French! Once more into the breach, and fill the wall with our coward dead! Half a league! Half a league! Hey, batter, batter!'
Frank brought his fist down onto the table, spilling Anastasia's milk, and then he struck a pose with both arms above his head and his chin on his chest. The girls cheered and applauded. Aunt Dotty stepped back into the dining room carrying a red metal toolbox. — N.D. Wilson

It's hot enough to make a woman want to go skinny-dippin' in the Red River. You want to join me to cool off? — Carolyn Brown

Valentine had wanted to crush the world as Magnus knew it. But this woman had helped crush him instead, and now she was looking at her daughter as if she would make another world, shining and brand new, just for Clary, so Clary would never be touched by any of the darkness of the past. Magnus knew what it was to want to forget as badly as Jocelyn did, knew the passionate urge to protect that came with love.

Perhaps none of the children of the new generation- not this small stubborn red headed scrap, or half-faerie Helen and Mark Blackthorn at the Los Angeles Institute, or even Maryse Lightwood's children growing up in New York far from the Glass City- would ever have to learn the full truth about the ugliness of the past. — Cassandra Clare

The soldiers in their full dress uniforms were already miserable, some from the heat, others from envy. "We've got the bloody ugliest uniforms in the Empire," one of the Rifles muttered, casting a glance at the infinitely more splendid dress of the nearby Hussars. "I hate this gloomy dark green."
"Pretty target you'd make, crawling forward of the front lines in bright red and gold," another Rifle replied in a scornful undertone. "You'd have your arse shot off."
"I don't care. Women like red coats."
"You'd choose a woman over not having your arse shot off?"
"Wouldn't you?"
The other man's silence conceded the point. — Lisa Kleypas

Wait. Like an art museum, or are we talking a history museum? I could tolerate the dinosaur bones and war relics, but modern art will just give me a headache. A red dot on a white canvas isn't 'a representation of a woman's struggle in a male dominated society;' it's a red freakin' circle!" Michael and Ryan nodded their heads in agreement with Jack's artistic tirade. — Victoria Michaels

Your favourite virtue ... Simplicity
Your favourite virtue in man ... Strength
Your favourite virtue in woman ... Weakness
Your chief characteristic ... Singleness of purpose
Your idea of happiness ... To fight
Your idea of misery ... Submission
The vice you excuse most ... Gullibility
The vice you detest most ... Servility
Your aversion ... Martin Tupper
Favourite occupation ... Book-worming
Favourite poet ... Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Goethe
Favourite prose-writer ... Diderot
Favourite hero ... Spartacus, Kepler
Favourite heroine ... Gretchen [Heroine of Goethe's Faust]
Favourite flower ... Daphne
Favourite colour ... Red
Favourite name ... Laura, Jenny
Favourite dish ... Fish
Favourite maxim ... Nihil humani a me alienum puto [Nothing human is alien to me]
Favourite motto ... De omnibus dubitandum [Everything must be doubted]. — Karl Marx

Jiminy," says the old woman. The mothballs gleam with excitement and she claps her hands. "A wolf!"
"Gram!" Siobhan glares across the room. She turns to me. "You'll have to excuse her. She's real old. Wasn't a lot integrating between the species back in her day."
I pad over and put out a paw. "Pleased to meet you, madam."
She blushes, the varicose veins in her cheeks swelling with blood. Instead of taking my paw to shake, however, she turns it over as if it's a piece of bruised fruit in a market. "Hmmm ... " She pores over my palm, nodding like a fortune-teller. Her spectacles slide comically down the bridge of her nose, and when she looks up at me, her face is full of mock astonishment. "Oh, my! What big teeth you have!" She giggles and kicks her slippered feet.
"Gram!!
The old elf claps her tiny hands. "I always wanted to say that! — Robert Paul Weston

Mrs. Breedlove considered herself an upright and Christian woman, burdened with a no-count man, whom God wanted her to punish. (Cholly was beyond redemption, of course, and redemption was hardly the point - Mrs. Breedlove was not interested in Christ the Redeemer, but rather Christ the Judge.) Often she could be heard discoursing with Jesus about Cholly, pleading with Him to help her "strike the bastard down from his pea-knuckle of pride." And once when a drunken gesture catapulted Cholly into the red-hot stove, she screamed, "Get him, Jesus! Get him!" If Cholly had stopped drinking, she would have never forgiven Jesus. — Toni Morrison

Many of us vote under the assumption that if only the right man/woman/party/ideology could get seated in the White House, the Court House, or the School House then the Kingdom of God would come. That is an illusion. We do not look for the church to assist in or endorse the building of a made-in-America utopia which is only a Babylon with red, white, and blue curtains. We look for a city whose builder and maker is God. To him, and only him, we must pledge our primary allegiance. — Ronnie McBrayer

Then the woman in the bed sat up and looked about her with wild eyes; and the oldest of the old men said: 'Lady, we have come to write down the names of the immortals,' and at his words a look of great joy came into her face. Presently she, began to speak slowly, and yet eagerly, as though she knew she had but a little while to live, and, in English, with the accent of their own country; and she told them the secret names of the immortals of many lands, and of the colours, and odours, and weapons, and instruments of music and instruments of handicraft they held dearest; but most about the immortals of Ireland and of their love for the cauldron, and the whetstone, and the sword, and the spear, and the hills of the Shee, and the horns of the moon, and the Grey Wind, and the Yellow Wind, and the Black Wind, and the Red Wind. ("The Adoration of the Magi") — W.B.Yeats

She was yawning, and he saw the red interior of her mouth as if it had been a snake's. She had stretched one arm so high above her coiled-up cable of hair that he could see its satin delicacy above the sunburn; her face was flushed with sleep, and her eyelids hung heavy over their pupils.The brim-fulness of her nature breathed from her.It was a moment when a woman's soul is more incarnate than at any other time; when the most spiritual beauty bespeaks itself flesh; and sex takes the outside place in the presentation. — Thomas Hardy

Movement at the door of the cabin, and a small figure that I recognized as Amy Higgins appeared. The tall woman pulled off her hat and waved it, her long red hair streaming out like a banner in the wind. "Hello, the house!" she called, laughing. Then I was flying down the hill, with Jamie just before me, arms flung wide, the two of us flying together on that same wind. — Diana Gabaldon

The French painter Rousseau was once asked why he put a naked woman on a red sofa in the middle of his jungle pictures. He answered, 'I needed a bit of red there.' — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Jack lifts his mug. Me an Ike do the same.
To Molly Pratt, says Jack.
Ike scowls at him. Watch yer mouth, he says.
Jeez, Ike, says Jack. All I'm sayin is ... to Molly Pratt.
Ike looks sly. Leans in an waggles his eyebrows. To Molly Pratt, he says, an her frilly red bloomers.
One helluva woman, says Jack.
One helluva pair of undies, says Ike.
Then they throw their drinks down their necks. — Moira Young

The only thing I'll never have is what I have lost for ever and ever ... As long as I live, until I draw my last breath, I shall remember Asel and all those beautiful things that were ours. The day I was to leave I went to the lake and stood on the rise above it. I was saying good-bye to the Tien Shan mountains, to Issyk-Kul. Good-bye, Issyk-Kul, my unfinished song! How I wish I could take you with me, your blue waters and your yellow shores, but I can't, just as I can't take the woman I love with me. Goodbye, Asel. Good-bye, my pretty poplar in a red kerchief! Good-bye, my love, I want you to be happy ... — Chingiz Aitmatov

Her mouth he had seen nothing to equal on the face of the earth. To a young man with the least fire in him that little upward lift in the middle of her red top lip was distracting, infatuating, maddening. He had never before seen a woman's lips and teeth which forced upon his mind with such persistent iteration the old Elizabethan simile of roses filled with snow. — Thomas Hardy

I drove to the doctor's office as if I was starring in a movie Phillip was watching
windows down, hair blowing, just one hand on the wheel. When I stopped at red lights, I kept my eyes mysteriously forward. Who is she? people might have been wondering. Who is that middle-aged woman in the blue Honda? — Miranda July

Part of our tradition as black women is that we are universalists. Black children, yellow children, red children, brown children, that is the black woman's normal, day-to-day relationship. In my family alone, we are about four different colors. — Alice Walker

' Bout time you married someone and stopped tempting every man from here to the Blue Sea," Padera said, slurring the words through toothless gums. "You know, wars have started over women like you."
Moya scoffed. "You're so full of crap, old woman."
"Brin?" Padera called.
Brin tore her eyes away from the doorway. "Augusta of Melen, daughter of Chieftain Eisol, started the Battle of the Red River when she refused to marry Theo of Warric. When Theo's father was killed in the fight, Theo vowed vengeance and summoned all of Clan Warric to his banner. This resulted in what became known as the Ten Year War, which claimed the lives of a thousand men and instigated a famine that lasted two years. — Michael J. Sullivan

I always tell this story: When I started, the woman went to the store to buy a dress. She saw it in pink and red, and then she remembered that the husband, who is probably going to pay for the dress, loves it in pink. So she buys the pink. Today, the same woman goes to the store and remembers the husband likes pink, and she buys the red. — Oscar De La Renta

I remember the rules, rules that were never spelled out but every woman knew: Don't open your door to a stranger, even if he says he is the police. Make him slide his ID under the door. Don't stop on the road to help a motorist pretending to be in trouble. Keep the locks on and keep going. If anyone whistles, don't turn to look. Don't go into a laundromat, by yourself, at night.
I think about laundromats. What I wore to them: shorts, jeans, jogging pants. What I put into them: my own clothes, my own soap, my own money, money I had earned myself. I think about having such control.
Now we walk along the same street, in red pairs, and not man shouts obscenities at us, speaks to us, touches us. No one whistles.
There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. — Margaret Atwood

Yugi's eyebrow is black and sparse. From the marks on the woman's skin, Yugi can see all the places he has been. His fingerprints blur the white column of her throat with red. His right hand trembles. He clutches his wrist to still the shakes. It's not nerves. It's adrenalin. Still, he needs a moment. The women here were far less savvy, much more grotesque in a warped sort of way. And yet they were somehow innocent. It was almost crueller. — Sarah Dobbs

When the personal soul life is burnt to ashes, a woman loses the vital treasure and begins to get dry boned as Death. In her unconscious, the desire for the red shoes, a wild joy, not only continues, it swells and floods, and eventually staggers to its feet and takes over, ferocious and famished. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

His breath halted as he stared at her. Why hadn't he seen it before? The woman in his carriage, the one who'd emerged from his carriage like a Botticelli Venus, was beautiful.
Not in the way Cassandra had been beautiful, with glittering eyes and full, red lips. Cassandra's blond beauty might have faded in time, become handsomeness instead.
This woman's beauty was simple; well-defined cheekbones, a high forehead, slender nose, and stubborn chin. As the years passed she might grow even more attractive.
He suspected that her laugh would captivate, just as her tears would act like a razor to whomever brought them forth. Her smile had already charmed him, and now her silence incited his curiosity. Not about who she was and why she was here, but about more.
Who was the woman behind the smile? — Karen Ranney

A dingy emblem on the door depicted a little boy peeing into a pot. The rest of the bar was equally drab and tasteless. Dim bulbs behind red-tasseled lamp shades barely illuminated each of a dozen maroon vinyl booths, which marched along one wall toward the murky front windows. Chipped Formica tables anchored the booths in place. Opposite the row of booths was a long, scarred wooden bar with uncomfortable-looking stools. Behind the bar, sitting on glass shelves in front of a cloudy mirror, were endless rows of bottles, each looking as forlorn as the folks for whom they waited.
He caught the strong odors of liquor and tobacco smoke, and the weaker scents of cleaning chemicals and vomit. In one of the booths , two heads bobbed with the movement of mug-clenching fists. A scrawny bartender with droopy eyelids picked his teeth with a swizzle stick and chatted quietly with a woman seated at the bar. Otherwise the bar was empty. — Robert Liparulo

Hurtling back to town, in a red Porsche driven by a beautiful woman, with the song playing, I had the sense of standing on the brink of another world. — Graeme Simsion

Although some people think women are inferior to men, I think it's a privilege to be a woman. There are so many fun things afforded to the female gender such as adornment of self, the freedom to communicate with gestures, and the freedom to express one's emotions.
I don't know what I'd do without my red backpack purse, and I am attached to my PDA with the pink monogrammed leather case. I've developed favorites among the many items in my wardrobe, and I like experimenting with accessories like hats, scarves, watches and belts.
I've become fairly proficient at applying make-up, and I now know the importance of a good facial cleanser and moisturizer. — Jessica Angelina Birch

How very lovable her face was to him. Yet there was nothing ethereal about it; all was real vitality, real warmth, real incarnation. And it was in her mouth that this culminated. Eyes almost as deep and speaking he had seen before, and cheeks perhaps as fair; brows as arched, a chin and throat almost as shapely; her mouth he had seen nothing to equal on the face of the earth. To a young man with the least fire in him that little upward lift in the middle of her red top lip was distracting, infatuating, maddening. He had never before seen a woman's lips and teeth which forced upon his mind with such persistent iteration the old Elizabethan simile of roses filled with snow.
Perfect, he, as a lover, might have called them off-hand. But no - they were not perfect. And it was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity. — Thomas Hardy

You'd have looked perfect to me if you'd walked into the room wearing a clown outfit, with a big red nose and huge shoes,' said Rob, giving her a smile that would have made every woman in a three-mile radius melt a little inside. 'Even if you'd sprayed my face with water from a fake flower. — Debbie Johnson

Lot's Wife

And the just man trailed God's messenger,
his huge, light shape devoured the black hill.
But uneasiness shadowed is wife and spoke to her:
'It's not too late, you can look back still

At the red towers of Sodom, the place that bore you,
the square in which you sang, the spinning-shed,
at the empty windows of that upper storey
where children blessed your happy marriage-bed.'

Her eyes that were still turning when a bolt
of pain shot through them, were instantly blind;
her body turned into transparent salt,
and her swift legs were rooted to the ground.

Who mourns one woman in a holocaust?
Surely her death has no significance?
Yet in my heart she never will be lost,
she who gave up her life to steal one glance.

1922-24 — Anna Akhmatova

The picture of Mother Teresa that I remember from my childhood is of a short, sari-wearing woman scurrying down a red gravel path between manicured lawns. She would have in tow one or two slower-footed, sari-clad young Indian nuns. We thought her a freak. Probably we'd picked up on unvoiced opinions of our Loreto nuns. — Bharati Mukherjee

He watched her for several minutes. Something was stirred in him, something not accounted for by the warm smell of the afternoon or the triumphant vividness of red. He felt persistently that the girl was beautiful - then of a sudden he understood: it was her distance, not a rare and precious distance of soul but still distance, if only in terrestrial yards. The autumn air was between them, and the roofs and the blurred voices. Yet for a not altogether explained second, posing perversely in time, his emotion had been nearer to adoration than in the deepest kiss he had ever known. — F Scott Fitzgerald

I'm the most unromantic lump of Northern suet. Yes, a woman did accost me once in South Shields, but she had a face like Red Rum. — Les Dawson

Tracy pulled the pillow away from her face and stared up at the ceiling of her huge bedroom. Was that it, she wondered. Was Ross not satisfying his demanding wife in the one place where it really counted for a woman like her mother? In bed. Two weeks ago, in the middle of one of their pointless arguments Faye had shouted at Ross that he wasn't a man. They'd been in the kitchen and Tracy remembered how she'd frozen at the counter, hardly daring to breathe. Her Daddy's cheeks had turned white and then a furious shade of red. He'd taken a step toward Faye whose own face blanched as her eyes widened in fear. Even she had realized she'd gone too far. Ross had looked as if he was on the verge of punching his wife in the mouth but then, without another word, he'd turned and strode out of the house. It had been his turn to slam the door that time. He'd done it so hard Tracy could have sworn the whole house shook. — Katie Ayres

An elderly diner from a neighboring table had been dying for an excuse to stare at the exotic woman with rubies around her neck, and now Laksha had provided her one by laughing so loudly. She noticed the woman's stare and waggled her finger between us and explained, "We were just talking about goatfucking." The woman's eyes bulged in shock - and so did those of her dinner companions - but rather than scold Laksha for being so rude, they hastily returned to attacking their enchiladas with their dentures, eyes studiously contemplating plates of melted cheese and red sauce. — Kevin Hearne

Cate, I cant say what you want to hear. Not yet. I want you to know that
when I do, I'll mean it. Completely. Irrevocably."
"When?" I ask, voice small but hopeful. "Not if?"
"When." He takes my cold hand in his. "I'm falling in love with you more every day. I don't know if they were the same things I loved about you before, but now
the bit of red in your hair. The way you tilt your chin when you get angry, like you're charging into battle. How fiercely protective you are of the people you care about. How big your capacity for forgiveness is. You are an amazing woman, Cate Cahill. — Jessica Spotswood

Perceptions are always profound, associations deceiving. No watermelon tastes red. Apropos: while waiting for a bus once, I saw open down the arm of a midfat, midlife, freckled woman, suitcase tugging at her hand like a small boy needing to pee, a deep blue crack as wide as any in a Roquefort. Split like paper tearing. She said nothing. Stood. Blue bubbled up in the opening like tar. One thing is certain: a cool flute blue tastes like deep well water drunk from a cup. — William H Gass

He touched her arm. "Frau Steadman, how old are you?" "I am twenty-nine." She looked up at him, puzzled by the question. "Why?" He removed his hand and slid it into his trouser pocket. "You were a young bride, then." She tipped her head. "Yes, I suppose I was. No one seemed to think I was too young, however. My sister-in-law was very eager to see me wed. She could be rid of me then, you see." She offered a weak smile. "You are still a young woman. Do you - " his ears turned bright red - "do you ever wish to have another family?" Immediately she turned her attention to the pot of bubbling cornmeal mush. "I don't know." Why was he asking this? — Kim Vogel Sawyer

Nothing had warned him that he might be overwhelmed by the swaying, shining vision of a girl he hadn't seen in years, a girl whose every glance and gesture could make his throat fill up with longing ("Wouldn't you like to be loved by me?"), and that then before his very eyes she would dissolve and change into the graceless, suffering creature whose existence he tried every day of his life to deny but whom he knew as well and as painfully as he knew himself, a gaunt constricted woman whose red eyes flashed reproach, whose false smile in the curtain call was as homely as his own sore feet, his own damp climbing underwear and his own sour smell. — Richard Yates

Two of the actors, Sean Bean and Orlando Bloom, have been caught between two landslides and are now trapped in a tiny town in the middle of the South Island. They have been taken in by a kindly woman who has offered them food and a bed. They were last reported to be cooking spaghetti and cracking into a bottle of red wine. — Peter Jackson

That woman in there with her mountain of Kleenex would be happy without peonies in August, Red. This is about him growin' a pair, mannin' up and tellin' her he can't hand her the world. She didn't want the world. She wanted him. He didn't have enough confidence in himself to believe that a woman like her would want a man like him and in the end, he took away the only thing she really ever wanted. — Kristen Ashley

She hoped he was running to his red deer woman, and that when he tapped on the door of her heart, she'd open it wide and let him in. — Charles De Lint

I He did not wear his scarlet coat, For blood and wine are red, And blood and wine were on his hands When they found him with the dead, The poor dead woman whom he loved, And murdered in her bed. He walked amongst the Trial — Oscar Wilde

Tell me about yourself."
"Myself?" He looks confused.
"Yes," I say, patting the mattress.
"You know all there is to know," he says, sitting beside me.
"Not true," I say. "Where were you born? What's your favourite season? Anything."
"Here. Florida," he says. "I remember a woman in a red dress with curly brown hair. Maybe she was my mother, I'm not sure. And summer. What about you?" The last part is said with a smile. He smiles so infrequently that I consider each one a trophy. — Lauren DeStefano

Henry's face went red in anger as he blustered at her audacity. It wasn't often anyone got the better of him, and Sin knew no woman had ever flummoxed him before. Not even Eleanor.
"You are willing to declare war for him ?" Henry asked indignantly.
She didn't hesitate with her response. "I am. Are you?"
Sin closed his eyes as he heard the most precious words of his life. She who believed in nothing but peace was willing to fight for him. He could die happily knowing that.
Still, he couldn't let her do this. Henry would not rest until he buried her and her clan. A king's reputation was all he had, and if Henry lost face ...
"Callie," Sin said, waiting until her gaze met his. "Thank you, but you can't do this. You can't start a war over me. I'm not worth the cost."
"You are worth everything to me. — Kinley MacGregor

I feel like I'm playing more of a role walking down the red carpet than when I'm playing an ordinary woman covered in sweat. — Kate Winslet

I decided to become an actor at five. I saw the most gorgeous woman that I had ever seen in my five years of living on television. She had on a long, red dress and her eyelashes looked like butterflies and I said, "Grandmamma, who is that?" She said, "Baby, that's Lola Falana." I said, "That's it right there. I want to be black, fabulous, and on TV." — Niecy Nash

Amelia was instantly distracted when she heard one of her favorite songs: What a Wonderful World made famous by Louis Armstrong. The woman singing did the song justice as she sang:
I see trees of gree, red roses, too.
I see them bloom, for me and you.
And I think to myself.
What a wonderful world!
Before she could blink an eye, Rick pulled her into his arms in a waltz position.
He gave her a wink and said flirtatiously, "May I have this dance, my love?"
As they danced to the rhythm of the music, Amelia said, "Don't ever stop flirting with me, no matter how old we get."
"Never! — Linda Weaver Clarke

You have a sixty-seven GTO convertible, in factory red." He stood in reverent silence for ten full seconds. "I think you have to marry me now. You're the first woman besides Loo who's seen her and known what she is. I'm pretty sure we're engaged. — Nora Roberts

Finally, still kneeling, he looked up at the woman.
Sturm caught his breath as the woman removed the hood of her cloak and drew the veil from her face. For the first time,human eyes looked upon the face of Alhana Starbreeze.
Muralasa, the elves called her-Princess of the Night. Her hair, black and soft as the night wind, was held in place by a net as fine as cobweb, twinkling with tiny jewels like stars. Her skin was the pale hue of the silver moon, her eyes the deep, dark purple of the night sky and her lips the color of the red moon's shadows.
The knight's first thought was to give thanks to Paladine that he was already on his knees. His second was that death would be a paltry price to pay to serve her, and his third that he musk say something, but he seemed to have forgotten the words of any known language. — Margaret Weis

It was a woman's voice, high and sweet, with a strange music in it like none that he had ever heard and a sadness that he thought might break his heart. Bran squinted, to see her better. It was a girl, but smaller than Arya, her skin dappled like a doe's beneath a cloak of leaves. Her eyes were queer
large and liquid, gold and green, slitted like a cat's eyes. No one has eyes like that. Her hair was a tangle of brown and red and gold, autumn colors, with vines and twigs and withered flowers woven through it.
"Who are you?" Meera Reed was asking.
Bran knew. "She's a child. A child of the forest. — George R R Martin

They gathered around the living room TV and the media woman plugged a thumb drive into the digital port and brought the advertisement up: Smalls was dressed in a gray pin-striped suit, bankerish, but with a pale blue shirt open at the collar. He was in his Minnesota Senate office, with a hint of the American flag to his right, a couple of red and white stripes - not enough of a flag display to invite sarcasm, but it was there. — John Sandford

Women are objectified in our culture. And more and more, it takes a great deal of confidence, especially as a woman, to break the mold. You know, you're afraid that you're going to covered in a magazine as a "fashion don't." That's why you see all these girls on the red carpet looking the same. — Tom Ford

It's natural to feel jittery around new people. But sometimes you can get over your jitters if you make a joke. So when the Swedish housekeeper brought her breakfast on a tray, Charity said something cheeky about eating Lady Margaret out of house and home. But the big red-faced woman took no notice at all. So then Charity had to look totally relaxed and unconcerned as she enjoyed her breakfast in bed, which was easy enough after the first bite. The spooky Swedish housekeeper really was a fabulous cook. And Charity believed believed in looking for the best in people. — Elizabeth Jane Howard

While walking back to the highway I stop, choke back a sob, my throat tightens. "I just want to..." Facing the skyline, through all the baby talk, I murmur, "keep the game going." As I stand, frozen in position, an old woman emerges behind a Threepenny Opera poster at a deserted bus stop and she's homeless and begging, hobbling over, her face covered with sores that look like bugs, holding out a shaking red hand. "Oh will you please go away?" I sigh. She tells me to get a haircut. — Bret Easton Ellis

Got a job for you, Seven."
"Yeah?"
"I need you to find someone."
"Who?"
"A woman," I say. "About five and a half feet tall. Brown hair. Brown eyes."
"That describes half the women in New York."
"Yeah, well, the one I'm looking for is twenty-one or so," I say. "She's good-looking, kind of curvy for being so petite... got a red 'S' tattooed on her wrist..."
He stares at me, like he expects more information. "What else?"
I shrug, glancing at the high heels, flipping them over to look at the red soles. "She wears a size thirty-nine shoe."
"That's it?"
"That's it."
"Shouldn't be too hard," he says, blinking a few times as he looks at the ground. "Only a couple million people in the city."
"That's the spirit," I say, slapping him on the back. — J.M. Darhower

Rising, the woman who had carried the jar began to dance to the music of the rebab, fevered music that was like to the flashing of the recurved blade she flourished aloft. Ever the chimings of the red-gold finger cymbals slipped through, around, and over the exigent strains, and in a minute or three (though it had grown dark) the fluting notes of a syrinx joined them, an eerie piping, more distant far in time than space, that railed against death and the desert, and like a child forlorn sobbed of wildflowers. "Flitting — Gene Wolfe

Mat gaped at them as they reined in before him and the others. "Is this...? Is this all of you?" they were little more than a hundred. Red saw and realized that somehow he had know that they would be.
"It takes more than bravery to bind a man to the Horn." Arthur Hawkwing's voice was deep and carrying, a voice used to giving commands.
"Or a woman," Birgitte said sharply.
"Or a woman," Hawkwing agreed. "Only a few are bound to the Wheel, spun out again and again to work the will of the Wheel in the Pattern of the Ages. You could tell him, Lews Therin, could you but remember when you wore flesh. — Robert Jordan

who wants to make it grand or fortify it for the coitus, must rub it before copulation with tepid water, until it gets red and extended by the blood flowing into it, in consequence of the heat; he must then anoint it with a mixture of honey and ginger, rubbing it in sedulously. Then let him join the woman; he will procure for her such pleasure that she objects to him getting off her again. — Nigel Cliff

You lie, madam, for you do not love me and you have never loved me! What a poor fellow I must be to let you mock and flout me as you have done! Why did you give me every reason for hope, at Perros... for honest hope, madam, for I am an honest man and I believed you to be an honest woman, when your only intention was to deceive me! Alas, you have deceived us all! You have taken a shameful advantage of the candid affection of your benefactress herself, who continues to believe in your sincerity while you go about the Opera ball with Red Death!...I despise you!... — Gaston Leroux

I considered quitting graduate school. I paid my ticket, I rode the ride. Right? Half the people I started with quit. I did not have to continue toward scholar. But something wouldn't let me. Some deep wrestling match going on inside my rib house and gray matter. Some woman in me I'd never met. You know who she was? My intellect. When I opened the door and there she stood, with her sassy red reading glasses and fitted skirt and leather bookbag, I thought, who the hell are you? Crouching into a defensive posture and looking at her warily out of the corner of my eye. Watch out, woman. To which she replied, I'm Lidia. I have a desire toward language and knowledge that will blow your mind. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts
Nor the woman in the ambulance
Whore red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly
...
Oh my God, what am I
That these late mouths should cry open
In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers — Sylvia Plath

My horizon lightened, I see an old woman. Who is she? Where is she from? Bent over, the ends of her boubou tied behind her, she empties into a plastic bag the left-overs of red rice. Her smiling face tells of the pleasant day she has just had. She wants to take back proof of this to her family, living perhaps in Ouakam, Thiaroye or Pikine.
Standing upright, her eyes meeting my disapproving look, she mutters between teeth reddened by cola nuts: 'Lady, death is just as beautiful as life has been. — Mariama Ba

He reaches forward slowly, to lift the pen from my lax grip. Wearily I regard the faltering trail of ink it has tracked down my page. I have seen that shape before, I think, but it was not ink then. A trickle of drying blood on the deck of a Red-Ship, and mine the hand that spilled it? Or was it a tendril of smoke rising black against a blue sky as I rode too late to warn a village of a Red-Ship raid? Or poison swirling and unfurling yellowly in a simple glass of water, poison I had handed someone, smiling all the while? The artless curl of a strand of woman's hair left upon my pillow? Or the trail of a man's heels left in the sand as we dragged the bodies from the smoldering tower at Sealbay? The track of a tear down a mother's cheek as she clutched her Forged infant to her despite his angry cries? Like Red-Ships, the memories come without warning, without mercy. — Robin Hobb

Like what? Like he's the big bad wolf and you're Little Red Riding Hood? Like he wants to put your chubby ass in a hole, starve you to death and skin you to make a woman suit? — Gisele Walko

I have a lot of anxiety about the red carpet. As a woman, it's uncomfortable to be in a position in which people are judging you, looking at what you're wearing, and criticizing you - not necessarily in a negative way. — Fiona Gubelmann

As a woman, and as somebody in the public eye, we always have to be ready for the red carpet and have the nicest outfit, work with the best makeup artist. While all that's nice, we're also human beings. — Sasha Grey

Mary stood beside Wilbur, waiting as he sewed Henrietta's abdomen closed. She wanted to run out of the morgue and back to the lab, but instead, she stared at Henrietta's arms and legs - anything to avoid looking into her lifeless eyes. Then Mary's gaze fell on Henrietta's feet, and she gasped: Henrietta's toenails were covered in chipped bright red polish. "When I saw those toenails," Mary told me years later, "I nearly fainted. I thought, Oh jeez, she's a real person. I started imagining her sitting in her bathroom painting those toenails, and it hit me for the first time that those cells we'd been working with all this time and sending all over the world, they came from a live woman. I'd never thought of it that way." — Rebecca Skloot

I remember my wife in white. I remember her walking toward me on our wedding day, a bouquet of red flowers in her hand, and I remember her turning away from me in anger, her body stiff as a stone. I remember the sound of her breath as she slept. I remember the way her body felt in my arms. I remember, always I remember, that she brought solace to my life as well as grief. That for every dark moment we shared between us, there was a moment of such brightness I almost could not bear to look at it head-on. I try to remember the woman she was and not the woman I have built out of spare parts to comfort me in my mourning. And I find, more and more, as the days go by and the balm of my forgiveness washes over the cracked and parched surface of my heart, I find that remembering her as she was is a gift I can give us both. — Carolyn Parkhurst

Beware," the woman in the red lacquer mask said. "Of whom?" "Of all. They shall come day and night to see the wonder that has been born again into the world, and when they see they shall lust. For dragons are fire made flesh, and fire is power. — George R R Martin

The brunette was conducting tests on the collected blood when the older woman came into her laboratory to get the child's photo. The old woman took the picture to a pale-skinned woman with red hair, who in turn fixed it with a morbidly curious look before handing it back. — R.G. Richards

Music began playing and a woman walked into the room and stood beside a small band. She was dressed in a red Irish costume that hung to her ankles and it was laced at the bodice with a black cord. After giving a nod to the band, she sang a few Irish songs. But one song seemed to stand out to Rick and he stopped eating and listened.
Sure a little bit of Heaven fell from out the sky one day and it nestled on the ocean in a spot so far away. When the angels found it, sure it looked so sweet and fair, they said, "Suppose we leave it for it looks so peaceful there."
So they sprinkled it with stardust just to make the shamrocks grow. 'Tis the only place you'll find them no matter where you go. Then they dotted it with silver to make its lakes so grand and when they had it finished, sure they called it Ireland. — Linda Weaver Clarke

I let my hands fall to the bed. Her mouth crafts a warm path to mine. There we share the taste of my tears as her top lip slides between my own and her tongue warms the inside of my mouth. Her hand slides up my neck, nails grazing the skin, till she finds purchase in my hair, tugging slightly at the tangle. Shivers lance my body.
Gone is any semblance of resistance. All the guilt that kept me from betraying Eo with Mustang is swept away in the chaos inside me. All the guilt I have for knowing she is a Gold and I am a Red vanishes. I'm a man, and she's the woman I want. — Pierce Brown

The door of the jail being flung open, the young woman stood fully revealed before the crowd. It seemed to be her first impulse to clasp the infant closely to her bosom that she might conceal a certain token which was wrought or fastened to her dress. In a moment, however, wisely judging that one token of her shame would but poorly serve to hide another, she took the baby on her arm, and, with a burning blush and yet a haughty smile, looked around at her townspeople and neighbors. On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

I wonder," said Mr. Lorry, pausing in his looking about, "that he keeps that reminder of his sufferings about him!" "And why wonder at that?" was the abrupt inquiry that made him start. It proceeded from Miss Pross, the wild red woman, strong of hand, whose acquaintance he had first made at the Royal George Hotel at Dover, and had since improved. — Charles Dickens

She was a thin woman in a mustard-yellow suit, with a yellowish complexion, short-cropped rusty red hair, and a stiff posture. She reminded Reynie of a giant walking pencil. — Trenton Lee Stewart

The battered woman
for she wore a skirt
with her right hand exposed, her left clutching at her side, stood singing of love
love which has lasted a million years, she sang, love which prevails, and millions of years ago, her lover, who had been dead these centuries, had walked, she crooned, with her in May; but in the course of ages, long as summer days, and flaming, she remembered, with nothing but red asters, he had gone; death's enormous sickle had swept those tremendous hills, and when at last she laid her hoary and immensely aged head on the earth, now become a mere cinder of ice, she implored the Gods to lay by her side a bunch of purple heather, there on her high burial place which the last rays of the last sun caressed; for then the pageant of the universe would be over. — Virginia Woolf

In all nature there seemed to be a feeling of hopelessness and pain. The earth, like a ruined woman sitting alone in a dark room and trying not to think of the past, was brooding over memories of spring and summer and apathetically waiting for the inevitable winter. Wherever one looked, on all sides, nature seemed like a dark, infinitely deep, cold pit from which neither Kirilov nor Abogin nor the red half-moon could escape ... — Anton Chekhov

To be white, or straight, or male, or middle class is to be simultaneously ubiquitious and invisible. You're everywhere you look, you're the standard against which everyone else is measured. You're like water, like air. People will tell you they went to see a "woman doctor" or they will say they went to see "the doctor." People will tell you they have a "gay colleague" or they'll tell you about a colleague. A white person will be happy to tell you about a "Black friend," but when that same person simply mentions a "friend," everyone will assume the person is white. Any college course that doesn't have the word "woman" or "gay" or "minority" in its title is a course about men, heterosexuals, and white people. But we call those courses "literature," "history" or "political science."
This invisibility is political. — Michael S. Kimmel

Three eternities passed before she ran a hand under her red nose and nodded. "Fine. I'll go." Alex's lungs expanded as he let the air back in. "But the first woman who makes a crack about my hair
"
"I'll punch her lights out." Alex pulled her to her feet.
"You're supposed to love me, so it needs to be more severe than that."
"I'll yank out her heart with ice tongs."
"Aw." Lucy patted his chest. "You would do that for me?"
He captured her hand, felt its warmth all the way through his shirt. "No amount of carnage is too much for my girl. — Jenny B. Jones

I think I like you just fine, Red. Half the men in this city would be god-awful horrified at the thought of a woman working alongside 'em, much less a woman of my years. But you didn't even think twice about it - just assumed I was along for the working. I like that." Huey sighed. "He's not noble. He's lazy." "Lazy, noble, I don't care. — Cherie Priest

So," dark Susurre said quietly, "if you follow the curve ... in a way your Damon did die to save Fell's Church from another massacre like the one on that Japanease island. He kept saying that was what he'd come to the Nether World to do. Do you not think he would be satisfied? At peace?"
"At PEACE?!" Stefan spat bitterly, and Sage growled.
"Woman," you obviously have never met Damon Salvatore before." The tone in his voice
more resonant, more threatening somehow
made Elena finally break off her staredown with the red-haired Idola. She turned and looked
and saw the enormous room filled with Sage's outspread wings. — L.J.Smith

And in 'Frisco Kid' and in 'The Woman in Red' I had to ride badly. Then you have to really ride well in order to ride badly. — Gene Wilder

Remaining relaxed in his seat, he murmured, "Take down your hood."
A slender white hand reached up, and she complied. The hood slipped away from hair so vividly red that it eclipsed the embers in the fireplace.
Sebastian shook his head in bemusement as he recognized the young woman. The ridiculous creature from the house party at Stony Cross Park. A shy, stammering twit, whose red hair and voluptuous figure might make her tolerable company as long as she kept her mouth shut. They had never actually spoken. Miss Evangeline Jenner, he recalled. She had the largest, roundest eyes he had ever seen, rather like the eyes of a wax doll... or a young child. — Lisa Kleypas

At the Uffizi, I experienced a moment that was touching, painful, and almost embarrassing. We stopped in front of the famous Botticelli painting, The Birth of Venus. I gazed wistfully at her incomparably lovely, yet, as Vasari described, oddly distorted form emerging from the waves in a seashell, her long red-golden tresses blown by Zephyrs. No woman ever had so elongated a neck or such sinuous limbs. Botticelli contorted, and some might say deformed, the human shape to give us a glimpse of the sublime. — Gary Inbinder

If I'd had a mirror I'd have looked at the whole of myself, though, as a matter of fact, I knew what I looked like already. A fat man of forty-five, in a grey herring-bone suit a bit the worse for wear and a bowler hat. Wife, two kids, and a house in the suburbs written all over me. Red face and boiled blue eyes. I know, you don't have to tell me. But the thing that struck me, as I gave my dental plate the once-over before slipping it back into my mouth, was that it doesn't matter. Even false teeth don't matter. I'm fat - yes. I look like a bookie's unsuccessful brother - yes. No woman will ever go to bed with me again unless she's paid to. I know all that. But I tell you I don't care. I don't want the women, I don't even want to be young again. I only want to be alive. And I was alive that moment when I stood looking at the primroses and the red embers under the hedge. It's a feeling inside you, a kind of peaceful feeling, and yet it's like a flame. — George Orwell

I don't ask for a miracle," Helmar resumed, "but I do need speed, boldness, and sagacity." He was in the red leather chair beyond the end of Wolfe's desk, with his briefcase on the little table at his elbow. His voice was a raspy oratorical baritone, hard and bony like him. He was going on. "And discretion - that is essential. You have it, I know. As for me, I am a senior partner in a law firm of the highest repute, with offices at Forty Wall Street. A young woman for whom I am responsible has disappeared, and there is reason to fear that she is doing something foolish and may even be in jeopardy. She must be found as quickly as possible. — Rex Stout

Serving others also requires a talent for observation," Hawke murmurs in my ear. "She'll approach the table to her right next, ask the woman in the red shirt if she'd like her bill." My mom does exactly that, her lips moving as she gathers the dirty dishes. The customer nods and pulls her wallet out of her no-name vinyl purse. "How did you know she'd do that?" I ask. "I look for threats. You look for fashions." He splays his fingers over me, his grip thrillingly secure. "Your mom looks for needs her customers might have." "Everyone sees what they want to see," I conclude. "The average person sees very little." Hawke pushes me toward the counter. "Very few of us pay attention. — Cynthia Sax

For some she came in a dream. For others in words as clear as a bell: it is time, I am here. She may come in a whisper so loud she can deafen you or a shout so quiet you strain to hear. She may appear in the waves or the face of the moon, in a red goddess or a crow. — Lucy H. Pearce

The guy in the Red Sox hat came in with an astonishingly beautiful blond woman at his side. He stood
close to her, and though they weren't touching, it was clear that they were a couple. They just belonged
together. — J.R. Ward

This is the most beautiful place on earth.
There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary. A houseboat in Kashmir, a view down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, a gray gothic farmhouse two stories high at the end of a red dog road in the Allegheny Mountains, a cabin on the shore of a blue lake in spruce and fir country, a greasy alley near the Hoboken waterfront, or even, possibly, for those of a less demanding sensibility, the world to be seen from a comfortable apartment high in the tender, velvety smog of Manhattan, Chicago, Paris, Tokyo, Rio, or Rome - there's no limit to the human capacity for the homing sentiment. — Edward Abbey

It is night in your Seven Kingdoms now,' the red woman went on, 'but soon the sun will rise again. The war continues, Davos Seaworth, and some will soon learn that even an ember in the ashes can still ignite a great blaze. The old maester looked at Stannis and saw only a man. You see a king. You are both wrong. He is the Lord's chosen, the warrior of fire. I have seen him leading the fight against the dark, I have seen it in the flames. The flames do not lie, else you would not be here. It is written in prophecy as well. When the red star bleeds and the darkness gathers, Azor Ahai shall be born again amidst smoke and salt to wake dragons out of stone. — George R R Martin

His lessons were chock-full of analogies for a variety of musical situations. Those little things were my favorites. 'No ... that's too much vibrato. It's like putting bright red lipstick on a beautiful woman.' I always thought it was funny that when you broke a musical rule-like accenting a weak beat-he would turn his head away from you sharply, almost as though he were in pain. It's like you just slapped him in the face by being unmusical. — Manny Laureano

From her very flesh and blood and from the constant cycles of filling and emptying the red vase in her belly, a woman understands physically, emotionally, and spiritually that zeniths fade and expire, and what is left is reborn in unexpected ways and by inspired means, only to fall back to nothing, and yet be reconceived again in full glory. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The other red-haired woman stepped forward with a regal grace that was impressive. "I'm Kiara Quiakides and the fiercely stern blond on my right is my husband Nykyrian. And we have other kids, but this," she rubbed her hand over her distended belly, "is the only one with us right now. The others are at home, hopefully not making their nannies too crazy." Nykyrian let out an intimidating grunt. "If Adron sets fire to his room one more time, I vote we make him live outside in a tent." Everyone laughed. Except Kiara who appeared to actually consider it. Ryn — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Everything was red, the air, the sun, whatever I looked at. Except for him. I fell in love with someone who was human. I watched him walk through the hills and come back in the evening when his work was through. I saw things no woman would see: that he knew how to cry, that he was alone. I cast myself at him, like a fool, but he didn't see me. And then one day he noticed I was beautiful and he wanted me. He broke me off and took me with him, in his hands, and I didn't care that I was dying until I actually was. — Alice Hoffman