• @blakestacey@awful.systems
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    216 hours ago

    Perhaps the Mysteries’ secrets could be learned, and their powers could be thwarted.

    Bill Watterson and John Kascht, The Mysteries

    The girl and her companion obediently fell silent then, realizing they had been heard through the microphones embedded in the walls of the dining room.

    Lois Lowry, Son

    • @blakestacey@awful.systems
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      216 hours ago

      Only a few of them had been wounded; here and there you saw one stepping gingerly, leaning on a crutch or two canes, but so far on toward recovery that his face had color.

      Dorothy Parker, “Soldiers Of The Republic”

      Suppose they never get counted—what’s the worst that can happen? If the number of imaginary sheep in this world remains a matter of guesswork, who is richer or poorer for it?

      “The Little Hours”

      In her twenties, after the deferred death of a hazy widowed mother, she had been employed as a model in a wholesale dress establishment—it was still the day of the big woman, and she was then prettily colored and high-breasted.

      “Big Blonde”

      • @blakestacey@awful.systems
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        216 hours ago

        The crowd would have engulfed the platform and the open space as well if it had not been held back by the triple row of Sebastian soldiers on Pilate’s left and the soldiers of the Ituraean auxiliary cohort on his right.

        Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita (translated by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor)

        • @blakestacey@awful.systems
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          215 hours ago

          The plodding pace she was forced to set—for the road was too narrow and winding to pass safely—allowed time for meditation.

          Elizabeth Peters, Naked Once More

          Outside the window the cry of gulls could faintly be distinguished as they swirled about aimlessly in the gloom.

          Nicholas Meyer, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution

          The device had been constructed by a master craftsman, and the riddle was this—that though he’d been told the box contained wonders, there simply seemed to be no way into it, no clue on any of its six black lacquered faces as to the whereabouts of the pressure points that would disengage one piece of this three-dimensional jigsaw from another.

          Clive Barker, Hellbound Heart (second sentence of first paragraph)

          Skimmed by the savage Seneca from the waters of Pennsylvania’s great Oil Creek, mister.

          William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine

          Only those with unshakable psych profiles were assigned to the outlying agronomy posts; the screening was almost as rigid as that for deep space.

          Margaret Wander Bonanno, Strangers from the Sky

          One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came from from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.

          Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (opening line)