Romance

"Humans, so easily electrified by the snap, crackle, pop of blood, brutality, and butchery."

"Do you see the labyrinth out there" She waved a graceful hand toward the garden. "Life is like that labyrinth, full of pathways that seem like the right way, but end up being detours. We go one way and then another until we find our true path."

"There in the garden I stand amongst the trees and the flowers. Bare back as laid out upon the grassy knoll she awaits there for me now. Atop a bed of lotus blossoms, within a wall of roses and violets held she waits. A light breeze settles in against the angle of my naked continuity, and I am whole as one inside. So she rolls her body round, like some delicate feather blown on the wind, to conceal the gentle back contour and reveal a frontal nudity that would make beauty itself ache with the need, thick within the throes of jealously for having to so unwillingly surrender over the crown. It is in there that you find paradise, and it seems she too knows me by name of a gaze gaping, and notwithstanding but a single care towards the awareness of my steady on-looking fixation. It is the stare sewing in the seeds of an awestruck wonder for what the mystics deemed necessary, and the melody of majesty aligned in plenary ordinance; a precious passing moment of collective cornucopia & blessed union of soul where all planetary constellation come together to marvel around the bringing of such a fair existence about. And what combination was that of the raw material splendour used to create this mould casting gone asunder beyond its one successful flight attempt to seize hold the sky and bottle it, never to be used again? Beholding it is to clasp the all consuming essence of longing in your pass, to wield command over the power of the cosmos with the skilled hands of lovers’ chaste holding. It is that which instills a life, a capture of Elysia off the edge of insanity refined, and that’s brilliance bled out by any design. For only by taking nature in kind and boiling her down to her purest, basic, most sincere level will you be able to build her up, and by a metamorphosis see her change, transform into something off the wings of a butterfly; sign of the worthwhile creature and form of the eternal everlasting entity. To spring forth out the sublime incarnation, a shine of glory set down for all the world to see. She is pure blissful serenity. Plant a seed to watch it grow; nurture it and it will give rise to a field of flowers full. Still none of any other would have compared as saccharine as when I first laid eyes upon the woman found stirring within the perfumed tendrils of Summer’s bloom, beneath the Stars shinning bright. Her beauty is so that I come alive. Consumed by loveliness I am completely at the lady’s mercy, and unable to turn a look away. That is to say, I would not want to."

"Why did everyone like that story so much when it wasn't true? Why was everyone so eager to believe it? Was it because, in real life, ever after's generally stink?"

"I realized that I sat in an empty bar in filthy, wet clothes with a drippy nose, probably red-rimmed eyes, and the most I could say I’d accomplished was that I was now congested. Oh, and one of the handsomest, nicest men I’d ever met cradled my face in warm, caressing hands with soft, sympathy in his brown eyes."

"Take some advice from an old farmer. You’re in business now. Take the money. You’d be amazed at how many don’t want to pay."

"Ours was not one of those nice, quaintly old-fashioned mobile homes that senior citizens putter around in. We lived in the beat-up tin can of clichéd poverty."

"It was easy to imagine he’d just rolled out of bed and then it was easy to imagine him in bed and I wasn’t going there."

"Nothing good can come from a crack of dawn meeting on a Monday morning."

"It's terrific, Clare," Henry says, and we stare at each other, and I think, "Don't leave me."

"That was one tiny trailer when both girls wanted to watch TV or use the computer or the bathroom at the same time."

"Now, where had I heard drinking and brawling before? Oh right, Ashley’s father. Well, I wasn’t doing that again."

"The older lady smiled a friendly welcome that rivaled her preserves for sweet appeal. She could have been someone’s grandmother complete with close-cropped white hair if she wasn’t wearing a worn Grateful Dead T-shirt over a long-sleeved thermal. The 1987 Summer Tour."

"Everyone helping out was supposed to make me feel better, but it actually made me feel more like a screw up."

"Murphy didn’t appear to notice my chagrin, but instead pulled up the hem of his long-sleeved tee to wipe at his face. Since he flashed his sculpted abdominals right at me, I grew hot and flushed. I mean, you could see every dip and curve, including the ones on either hip that made a V to lead the eye to the fly of his jeans."

"That’s not Eire. Everyone always thinks that, but we’re not shamrocks and wee men. You should know the difference."

"Mr. Jennings is the one who trapped the fairies here to begin with. If they’re back and wandering around, if they’re loose, then, well, it’s not good."

"You can’t have it both ways. Either I’m Irish and can talk, or I’m a man and I can’t."

"A country road, a gravel road, is a sign of civilization, sure, but it’s just a farm, an easy conquest. Iron means a stronghold, people who can defend what’s theirs."

"You could have agreed to disagree,” Megan argued. “Then you could kiss and make up. That could be fun."