67 Quotes by Lyndsay Faye

I have given up attempting to plumb the depths of the female psyche, Watson. It is not unlike contemplating infinity – a worthy, even a spiritual meditation, destined from the beginning to fail entirely.

You cannot know what it means, reader, to have thought yourself despised for your unworthiness for a period of years – to have supposed your very nature poison, and your friend right to have thus abandoned you – and to learn thereafter that you were loved not too little but too well.

Tell Mrs. Hudson there will be five for supper. If I am not back by eight, I will have no doubt been arrested. In that case, of course, there will be four.

My earlier metaphor had been wrong, I discovered. The splash of ink from the pen dropping onto the page looked nothing like a spray of blood at all.

There is no practice more vexing than that of authors describing coach travel for the edification of people who have already travelled in coaches. As I must adhere to form, however, I will simply list a series of phrases for the unlikely reader who has never gone anywhere: thin eggshell dawn-soaked curtains stained with materials unknown to science; rattling fit to grind bones to powder; the ripe stench of horse and driver and bog. Now.

I looked up in curiosity. Behind us stood the Brown and Eagle Wool Warehouse and Schneider’s Cap Factory, both constructed with that wholehearted devotion to industry that sullied the word architecture.

We are all of us daily decaying, after all; the speed is our only variant.

I bit the inside of my lip until I could taste all I had left of my mother, which was her blood.

By day I taught Sahjara, who brought me unceasing small presents ranging from orange flower cakes to bouquets of jolly red berries; by night, I imagined my employer making the sort of inappropriate advances which would have made most governesses flee the estate forthwith, and in graphic detail, complete with bare thighs and calloused fingers and the diagonal notches which rest so sweetly above the hipbones when a gentleman is in training, as I had no doubt whatsoever Mr. Thornfield was.