“He wanted all to lie in an ecstasy of peace; I wanted all to sparkle and dance in a glorious jubilee. I said his heaven would be only half alive; and he said mine would be drunk: I said I should fall asleep in his; and he said he could not breathe in mine.”
― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
(The one-star reviews of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre on Goodreads are always absolute gold:
"I actively hate it. I want all the damnable characters to get a terrible influenza that is so painful and horrific that they suffer terribly, losing their voices so they can't whine about every little thing they love to whine about, and then they die, alone, far from the windowpanes where they've scratched all their nonsense, far from the moors that contain weather matching their moods and space to match the emptiness in their souls, far from the moneybags they have hidden under floorboards or in vaults or wherever they keep all their ill-gotten gains (ill-gotten because I hate this story and want to defame it) I want them all to be lonesome, forgotten ghosts. All of them." )
From Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle:
“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead.”
“I was pretending that I did not speak their language; on the moon we spoke a soft, liquid tongue, and sang in the starlight, looking down on the dead dried world.”
“I shall weave a suit of leaves. At once. With acorns for buttons.”
“It was as though the people needed the ugliness of the village, and fed on it. The houses and the stores seemed to have been set up in contemptuous haste to provide shelter for the drab and the unpleasant.”
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