Floralegia

There are many grand and awe-inspiring sights [in war]. Guns firing at night are beautiful--if they were not so terrible. They have the grandeur of thunderstorms."

It has become unfashionable to give credit to Oxford and Cambridge, and to social elites in general; but it remains true that the Great War cut a deeper swathe through Tolkien's peers than among any other social group in Britain. Contemporaries spoke of the Lost Generation. 'By 1918,' Tolkien wrote half a century later in his preface to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, 'all but one of my close friends were dead.'"

She expects him to be stiff, unyielding, but Luc moves with the fluid grace of wind rushing through fields of wheat, of storms rolling through the summer skies."

For those six days her life was a midnight thing, a hair's breadth from the witching hour.

...having used the phrase 'a real Philly guy,' the history of which I speculate has to do with Rocky, but might also reference the infamous pelting of Santa with snowballs at Veterans Stadium, and means something like don't fight him because even if you win you will have bite marks and a limp for the rest of your life.

'It is sad to suppose that places may ever be more important than people...' 'Why, Meg? They're so much nicer generally.'

Not out of them are the shows of history erected: the world would be a grey, bloodless place were it entirely composed of Miss Schlegels. But the world being what it is, perhaps they shine out in it like stars.

It is so easy to talk of 'passing emotion,' and to forget how vivid the emotion was ere it passed...We do not admit that by collisions of this trivial sort the doors of heaven may be shaken open.

'I'm fairly sure you're trying to frighten me,' said Nikolai...'I'm not sure why, but may I suggest a spider wearing a suit?' 'Why a suit?...Why not just a spider?' 'Where did he get the suit? How did he fasten the buttons? Why does he feel the need to dress for the occasion?'

'We should send him to Ketterdam to preach to Kaz Brekker and the rest of those reprobates,' suggested Zoya. Nikolai winced. 'He'd certainly get his martyrdom'.

The familiar rooms echo differently, somehow, and time turns to honey.

[Tragedy's] the whole course of a character's life...The actions he takes, decisions, the choices that bring him right up to the present moment. Having to choose...That's what I want to say. You're surrounded by evils, a banquet of evils, and you have to choose. You have to fill your plate and eat it.

Every student is both a challenge and a laurel leaf.

Summer had come and the advanced grade and the glowing, incalculable and unlimned vista of the school vacation--...For him the mere passing of time was a joy. The body was aware of a lyric indolence, a golden lolling within itself.

But now her decks were empty, quiet, spreading out under the sunlight almost as if the warm boards were relaxing from the strain and pressure of the myriads of feet.