205 Quotes by Sarah Monette

Dinner was surprisingly pleasant. Ratcliffe’s friends did not know what to make of his sponsorship of me, but he said something about archaeology and museums, and they fell over themselves in their anxiety not to hear anything more. When none of them were watching, Ratcliffe winked at me.

He walked like a conqueror, like a lion. He could not have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three. His eyes were not merely vivid blue; they were intense, blazing, as if they were lit from within, as if this young man was bringing a flame that no one else could feel. His mouth was twisted in a mocking smile. He had known I would look.

My voice was deeper than his, husky and rasping, like the caw of a crow.

Ivo sat and listened, the look in his blue eyes enrapt and I knew, though I could hardly believe it, that he was not bored or uninterested, that to him I mattered as I had never mattered to anyone in my life.

He touched my face; I could feel the heat of his fingers, and this time I did not flinch away, although I was trembling.

I want to make love to you. Will you let me?

At home, it was part of my life that Ivo was always watching me, unblinking, the slits of his pupils expanding and contracting as a cat’s do when it considers whether or not to pounce on its prey.

I heard the clicking of hells, like the tapping of tiny hooves, and there appeared in front of me two, tiny withered crones. I thought I had to be dreaming still, for they were identical, dressed in the same dark red, with small, black, cunning eyes in their pale, wrinkled faces. They looked as if they put up their silvery-white hair in its coiled braids using each other as a mirror, and there were long, dangling earrings of marcasite and jet.

At dinner, Mr. Marten produced his elegant place cards and assigned us places with the arbitrary ruthlessness of a dictator.