#pen

She did not date. She did not have time for men. Men were never, ever worth a great amount of energy. She was the kind of woman that looked down on what she called ‘settlers’, women who chose love and fleeting passion that turned to dull, lifeless marriages over a career and independence. ↗

— Mandy Nachampassack-Maloney

#love #womanhood #dating

...no girl can permanently bolster up a lame-duck visitor, because these day it's every girl for herself. ↗

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

#confidence #dating #fitzgerald #gatsby #girl-power

Some women like to treat a man like a piece of bubble gum. The poor sap thinks everything’s fine. And it is—until the taste runs out. Then she’ll just spit him out the car window of her life and never look back. ↗

— Robert Burton Robinson

#love #romance #romantic-suspense #dating

Now, a month later, I sit, foggy, a similar state of mind, in a different seafood restaurant with a locals-know-every-secret bar, two happy hour martinis downed, fidgeting with my napkin below the lip of the table, and I barely hear Wendy ask me another question. She brought a bag of them tonight. ↗

— Justin Bog

#psychological-suspense #relationships #stalkers #suspense #dating

My name is Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered. ↗

— Alice Sebold

#inspirational #life-and-death #opening-lines #death

But he was sick of this charade. Sick of watching people lose a little more of their humanity each day, and sick to death of seeing people tortured in the name of God. What had happened to these people? ↗

— Brom

#seeing #sick #torture #what-had-happened #death

ABNORMAL, adj. Not conforming to standards in matters of thought and conduct. To be independent is to be abnormal, to be abnormal is to be detested. A striving toward the straiter [sic] resemblance of the Average Man than he hath to himself, whoso attaineth thereto shall have peace, the prospect of death and the hope of Hell. ↗

— Ambrose Bierce

#bierce #detested #independant #thought #death

It is cold at six-forty in the morning on a March day in Paris, and seems even colder when a man is about to be executed by firing squad. ↗

— Frederick Forsyth

#execution #first-line #first-lines #first-sentence #frederick-forsyth

And then Jonah heard God’s voice. “Jonah, do you know what the difference is between you and the trees?” He was confident it was God because God usually asked questions but gave no answers. Jonah didn’t need a divine answer to this question, he knew it. “Yes,” he said. “The difference between me and the trees is that the trees let go of their leaves. I keep holding onto mine. The trees make room for new life. I don’t. ↗

— David W. Jones

#death #death-of-a-loved-one #god-s-grace #grief #letting-go

It's one of the things that makes us different than they are, Harry. The blood on their hands does not make it right to bloody my own. My choices are measured against my own soul. Not against the stains on theirs. ↗

— Jim Butcher

#harry-dresden #michael-carpenter #death