“Empty space eventually fills up with something. A void, cultivated in the aftermath of misfortune, begins to attract the wrong kind of attention. Marco knew it was time to leave when disagreeable spirits started roaming freely through the house, as if they owned the place.”
―
Rahma Krambo,
Guardian Cats and the Lost Books of Alexandria
“You know how it is when some great king enters a large city and dwells in one of its houses; because of his dwelling in that single house, the whole city is honored, and enemies and robbers cease to molest it. Even so is it with the King of all; He has come into our country and dwelt in one body amidst the many, and in consequence the designs of the enemy against mankind have been foiled and the corruption of death, which formerly held them in its power, has simply ceased to be. For the human race would have perished utterly had not the Lord and Savior of all the Son of God, come among us to put an end to death.” ― Athanasius of Alexandria, On The Incarnation
“Oh my god. Don’t tell me you don’t know your Hogwarts house. Pottermore? The Sorting Hat Quiz?"When Darcy stared, Elle groaned and covered her face." You don’t do social media, you don’t believe in astrology, and now you don’t like Harry Potter. On behalf of our generation, I am offended, you rock dweller.” ― Alexandria Bellefleur, Written in the Stars
“With his eyes clamped shut, he released a groan as he slid out and back inside me. I lay there and watched him, tears spilling from my eyes as I wondered what the hell was happening and how on this earth anything, and I mean anything, could feel like this. Because I’d be damned if his dick wasn’t made of pixie dust, blood diamonds, that delicious Olive Garden unlimited salad, and childhood dreams or some shit.” ― Alexandria House, Let Me Hold You
“I ain’t one of them niggas who talks black and fucks white, because that shit is backwards as hell to me. Them niggas are breeding themselves out and ain’t got sense enough to see it. And all they can say is black women are too difficult to be with. What kinda weak beta male shit is that?” ― Alexandria House, Let Me Free You
“He entered the house quickly, pushed past the detectives, and clasped both of Alexandria’s hands in his.Something deep within Aidan coiled dangerously at the sight of her hands in Thomas Ivan’s. His breath stopped. His heart ceased to beat. The demon within stirred and roared for release, fangs exploded into his mouth, and the red haze of the beasts flamed in his eyes. As Thomas leaned in close, intending to kiss her cheek, Aidan fought for control so that he could casually wave a hand, directing a flurry of dust spores to whirl and dance beneath Ivan’s nose. As Ivan inhaled, he began to sneeze violently, the spasms wracking his entire body.” ― Christine Feehan, Dark Gold
“At a friend’s house in Greenwich Village I remember talking of the frustration of trying to find the precise word for one’s thoughts, saying that the ordinary dictionary was inadequate. ‘Surely a system could be devised,’ I said, ‘of lexicographically charting ideas, from abstract words to concrete ones, and by deductive and inductive processes arriving at the right word for one’s thought.’ ‘There is such a book,’ said a Negro truck-driver: ‘Roget’s Thesaurus’ A waiter working at the Alexandria Hotel used to quote his Karl Marx and William Blake with every course he served me. A comedy acrobat with a Brooklyn ‘dis’, ‘dem’ and ‘dose’ accent recommended Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, saying that Shakespeare was influenced by him and so was Sam Johnson. ‘But you can skip the Latin.’ With the rest of them I was intellectually a fellow-traveller.” ― Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography
“Only then would it hit me, this truth about her ears, that she would always be deaf, never hear music, never hear laughter, never hear my voice. Only then did I realize what it meant to be alone in the world, and I would run to find her in this large house that became so quiet, so empty and so very dark at night because nighttime in our part of Alexandria was always somber and murky, especially with my father out so late every evening. We would turn the lights on everywhere in the house, not to ward off imaginary thieves, but to look out the window and see our reflected faces on the windowpane.” ― André Aciman, Out of Egypt: A Memoir
“In Amsterdam, I took a room in a small hotel located in the Jordann District and after lunch in a café went for a walk in the western parts of the city. In Flaubert’s Alexandria, the exotic had collected around camels, Arabs peacefully fishing and guttural cries. Modern Amsterdam provided different but analogous examples: buildings with elongated pale-pink bricks stuck together with curiously white mortar, long rows of narrow apartment blocks from the early twentieth century, with large ground-floor windows, bicycles parked outside every house, street furniture displaying a certain demographic scruffiness, an absence of ostentatious buildings, straight streets interspersed with small parks…..In one street lines with uniform apartment buildings, I stopped by a red front door and felt an intense longing to spend the rest of my life there. Above me, on the second floor, I could see an apartment with three large windows and no curtains. The walls were painted white and decorated with a single large painting covered with small blue and red dots. There was an oaken desk against a wall, a large bookshelf and an armchair. I wanted the life that this space implied. I wanted a bicycle; I wanted to put my key in that red front door every evening.Why be seduced by something as small as a front door in another country? Why fall in love with a place because it has trams and its people seldom have curtains in their homes? However absurd the intense reactions provoked by such small (and mute) foreign elements my seem, the pattern is at least familiar from our personal lives. My love for the apartment building was based on what I perceived to be its modesty. The building was comfortable but not grand. It suggested a society attracted to the financial mean. There was an honesty in its design. Whereas front doorways in London are prone to ape the look of classical temples, in Amsterdam they accept their status, avoiding pillars and plaster in favor of neat, undecorated brick. The building was modern in the best sense, speaking of order, cleanliness, and light.In the more fugitive, trivial associations of the word exotic, the charm of a foreign place arises from the simple idea of novelty and change-from finding camels where at home there are horses, for example, or unadorned apartment buildings where at home there are pillared ones. But there may be a more profound pleasure as well: we may value foreign elements not only because they are new but because they seem to accord more faithfully with our identity and commitments than anything our homeland can provide.And so it was with my enthusiasms in Amsterdam, which were connected to my dissatisfactions with my own country, including its lack of modernity and aesthetic simplicity, its resistance to urban life and its net-curtained mentality.What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.” ― Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel
“You know how it is when some great king enters a large city and dwells in one of its houses; because of his dwelling in that single house, the whole city is honored, and enemies and robbers cease to molest it. Even so is it with the King of all; He has come into our country and dwelt in one body amidst the many, and in consequence the designs of the enemy against mankind have been foiled and the corruption of death, which formerly held them in its power, has simply ceased to be. For the human race would have perished utterly had not the Lord and Savior of all, the Son of God, come among us to put an end to death.” ― Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation
“Omar is my father. I…he made us call him Omar most of the time. He used to fight me, snatch me out of my sleep and just go to waling on my ass from the time I was like eight. Said he was making me into a man. He kept doing that shit until I was old enough to kick his ass.” ― Alexandria House, Set
“Slowly the bluish spring moon climbs the houses, sliding up the minarets into the clicking palm-trees, and with it the city seems to uncurl like some hibernating animal dug out of its winter earth, to stretch and begin to drink in the music of the three-day festival.” ― Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet
“He threatened to, and I quote, ‘Beat my ass until it roped like okra.’ Never heard that shit before.” ― Alexandria House, Let Me Please You
“I’m an old-fashioned sort of guy. I try not to break into someone’s house unless I plan on killing them. That’s just good manners.” ― Ella Summers, Magic Edge
“My eyes popped open in the darkness of the hotel room,” ― Alexandria House, Set
“Why would I want to be related to a bunch of slaveowners?” I ask. “Would you?” “Of course not. But if you are related to Joshua Ward, you can’t erase that history,” she says. “You can’t ignore your family’s role in slavery or systematic oppression. No European descendant can.” ― Alexandria Clarke, The Haunting of Bluefield Plantation
“Not at all,” she says. “Opinions aren’t heritable, Lou. Just because some random guy way up your family tree owned slaves doesn’t mean you support slavery, right?” ― Alexandria Clarke, The Haunting of Bluefield Plantation
“What is complicated about my relationship to my parents’ house is that it has never been uncomplicated. It’s always had pain. It’s always had love.” ― Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir
“Up until that night at the club, my pelvic region had been hibernating. Big South had awakened it, and now, everything down there was acutely alive and active like molecules colliding in the atmosphere. It felt as if someone was throwing a damn rave in my yoni.” ― Alexandria House, Let Me Love You
“You know how it is when some great king enters a large city and dwells in one of its houses; because of his dwelling in that single house, the whole city is honored, and enemies and robbers cease to molest it. Even so is it with the King of all; He has come into our country and dwelt in one body amidst the many, and in consequence the designs of the enemy against mankind have been foiled and the corruption of death, which formerly held them in its power, has simply ceased to be. For the human race would have perished utterly had not the Lord and Savior of all the Son of God, come among us to put an end to death.” ― Athanasius of Alexandria, On The Incarnation
“Oh my god. Don’t tell me you don’t know your Hogwarts house. Pottermore? The Sorting Hat Quiz?"When Darcy stared, Elle groaned and covered her face." You don’t do social media, you don’t believe in astrology, and now you don’t like Harry Potter. On behalf of our generation, I am offended, you rock dweller.” ― Alexandria Bellefleur, Written in the Stars
“With his eyes clamped shut, he released a groan as he slid out and back inside me. I lay there and watched him, tears spilling from my eyes as I wondered what the hell was happening and how on this earth anything, and I mean anything, could feel like this. Because I’d be damned if his dick wasn’t made of pixie dust, blood diamonds, that delicious Olive Garden unlimited salad, and childhood dreams or some shit.” ― Alexandria House, Let Me Hold You
“I ain’t one of them niggas who talks black and fucks white, because that shit is backwards as hell to me. Them niggas are breeding themselves out and ain’t got sense enough to see it. And all they can say is black women are too difficult to be with. What kinda weak beta male shit is that?” ― Alexandria House, Let Me Free You
“He entered the house quickly, pushed past the detectives, and clasped both of Alexandria’s hands in his.Something deep within Aidan coiled dangerously at the sight of her hands in Thomas Ivan’s. His breath stopped. His heart ceased to beat. The demon within stirred and roared for release, fangs exploded into his mouth, and the red haze of the beasts flamed in his eyes. As Thomas leaned in close, intending to kiss her cheek, Aidan fought for control so that he could casually wave a hand, directing a flurry of dust spores to whirl and dance beneath Ivan’s nose. As Ivan inhaled, he began to sneeze violently, the spasms wracking his entire body.” ― Christine Feehan, Dark Gold
“At a friend’s house in Greenwich Village I remember talking of the frustration of trying to find the precise word for one’s thoughts, saying that the ordinary dictionary was inadequate. ‘Surely a system could be devised,’ I said, ‘of lexicographically charting ideas, from abstract words to concrete ones, and by deductive and inductive processes arriving at the right word for one’s thought.’ ‘There is such a book,’ said a Negro truck-driver: ‘Roget’s Thesaurus’ A waiter working at the Alexandria Hotel used to quote his Karl Marx and William Blake with every course he served me. A comedy acrobat with a Brooklyn ‘dis’, ‘dem’ and ‘dose’ accent recommended Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, saying that Shakespeare was influenced by him and so was Sam Johnson. ‘But you can skip the Latin.’ With the rest of them I was intellectually a fellow-traveller.” ― Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography
“Only then would it hit me, this truth about her ears, that she would always be deaf, never hear music, never hear laughter, never hear my voice. Only then did I realize what it meant to be alone in the world, and I would run to find her in this large house that became so quiet, so empty and so very dark at night because nighttime in our part of Alexandria was always somber and murky, especially with my father out so late every evening. We would turn the lights on everywhere in the house, not to ward off imaginary thieves, but to look out the window and see our reflected faces on the windowpane.” ― André Aciman, Out of Egypt: A Memoir
“In Amsterdam, I took a room in a small hotel located in the Jordann District and after lunch in a café went for a walk in the western parts of the city. In Flaubert’s Alexandria, the exotic had collected around camels, Arabs peacefully fishing and guttural cries. Modern Amsterdam provided different but analogous examples: buildings with elongated pale-pink bricks stuck together with curiously white mortar, long rows of narrow apartment blocks from the early twentieth century, with large ground-floor windows, bicycles parked outside every house, street furniture displaying a certain demographic scruffiness, an absence of ostentatious buildings, straight streets interspersed with small parks…..In one street lines with uniform apartment buildings, I stopped by a red front door and felt an intense longing to spend the rest of my life there. Above me, on the second floor, I could see an apartment with three large windows and no curtains. The walls were painted white and decorated with a single large painting covered with small blue and red dots. There was an oaken desk against a wall, a large bookshelf and an armchair. I wanted the life that this space implied. I wanted a bicycle; I wanted to put my key in that red front door every evening.Why be seduced by something as small as a front door in another country? Why fall in love with a place because it has trams and its people seldom have curtains in their homes? However absurd the intense reactions provoked by such small (and mute) foreign elements my seem, the pattern is at least familiar from our personal lives. My love for the apartment building was based on what I perceived to be its modesty. The building was comfortable but not grand. It suggested a society attracted to the financial mean. There was an honesty in its design. Whereas front doorways in London are prone to ape the look of classical temples, in Amsterdam they accept their status, avoiding pillars and plaster in favor of neat, undecorated brick. The building was modern in the best sense, speaking of order, cleanliness, and light.In the more fugitive, trivial associations of the word exotic, the charm of a foreign place arises from the simple idea of novelty and change-from finding camels where at home there are horses, for example, or unadorned apartment buildings where at home there are pillared ones. But there may be a more profound pleasure as well: we may value foreign elements not only because they are new but because they seem to accord more faithfully with our identity and commitments than anything our homeland can provide.And so it was with my enthusiasms in Amsterdam, which were connected to my dissatisfactions with my own country, including its lack of modernity and aesthetic simplicity, its resistance to urban life and its net-curtained mentality.What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.” ― Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel
“You know how it is when some great king enters a large city and dwells in one of its houses; because of his dwelling in that single house, the whole city is honored, and enemies and robbers cease to molest it. Even so is it with the King of all; He has come into our country and dwelt in one body amidst the many, and in consequence the designs of the enemy against mankind have been foiled and the corruption of death, which formerly held them in its power, has simply ceased to be. For the human race would have perished utterly had not the Lord and Savior of all, the Son of God, come among us to put an end to death.” ― Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation
“Omar is my father. I…he made us call him Omar most of the time. He used to fight me, snatch me out of my sleep and just go to waling on my ass from the time I was like eight. Said he was making me into a man. He kept doing that shit until I was old enough to kick his ass.” ― Alexandria House, Set
“Slowly the bluish spring moon climbs the houses, sliding up the minarets into the clicking palm-trees, and with it the city seems to uncurl like some hibernating animal dug out of its winter earth, to stretch and begin to drink in the music of the three-day festival.” ― Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet
“He threatened to, and I quote, ‘Beat my ass until it roped like okra.’ Never heard that shit before.” ― Alexandria House, Let Me Please You
“I’m an old-fashioned sort of guy. I try not to break into someone’s house unless I plan on killing them. That’s just good manners.” ― Ella Summers, Magic Edge
“My eyes popped open in the darkness of the hotel room,” ― Alexandria House, Set
“Why would I want to be related to a bunch of slaveowners?” I ask. “Would you?” “Of course not. But if you are related to Joshua Ward, you can’t erase that history,” she says. “You can’t ignore your family’s role in slavery or systematic oppression. No European descendant can.” ― Alexandria Clarke, The Haunting of Bluefield Plantation
“Not at all,” she says. “Opinions aren’t heritable, Lou. Just because some random guy way up your family tree owned slaves doesn’t mean you support slavery, right?” ― Alexandria Clarke, The Haunting of Bluefield Plantation
“What is complicated about my relationship to my parents’ house is that it has never been uncomplicated. It’s always had pain. It’s always had love.” ― Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir
“Up until that night at the club, my pelvic region had been hibernating. Big South had awakened it, and now, everything down there was acutely alive and active like molecules colliding in the atmosphere. It felt as if someone was throwing a damn rave in my yoni.” ― Alexandria House, Let Me Love You
