At the edge of the still, dark pool that was the sea, at the brimming edge of freedom where no boat was to be seen, she spoke the first words of the few they were to exchange. ‘I cannot swim. You know it?” In the dark she saw the flash of his smile. ‘Trust me.’ And he drew her with a strong hand until the green phosphorescence beaded her ankles, and deeper, and deeper, until the thick milk-warm water, almost unfelt, was up to her waist. She heard him swear feelingly to himself as the salt water searched out, discovered his burns. Then with a rustle she saw his pale head sink back into the quiet sea and at the same moment she was gripped and drawn after him, her face to the stars, drawn through the tides with the sea lapping like her lost hair at her cheeks, the drive of his body beneath her pulling them both from the shore. They were launched on the long journey towards the slim shape, black against glossy black, which was the brigantine, with Thompson on board. . Dorothy Dunnett
... there was no need for him to hasten towards the attainment of a happiness already captured and held in a safe place, which would not escape his grasp again.
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Marcel Proust
A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one.
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Anonymous
Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story. Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It's not just a question of how-to, you see; it's...
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Stephen King
There is little more I can add short of dissecting the man, or going into intimate details such as the modest proportions and slight southeasterly curvature of his manhood.
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Anonymous
I was shown into a room. A red room. Red wallpaper, red curtains, red carpet. They said it was a sitting-room, but I don’t know why they’d decided to confine its purpose just to sitting. <span style="margin:15px; display:block"></span>Obviously, sitting was one of the things you...
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Hugh Laurie
More Quotes By Dorothy Dunnett
Only eight months had gone since Henry VIII of England had been suspended in death, there to lie like Mohammed’s coffin, hardly in the Church nor out of it, attended by his martyrs and the acidulous fivefold ghosts of his wives. King Francis of France,...
Words is but wind but dunts is the devil
And habits are hell's own substitute for good intentions. Habits are the ruin of ambition, of initiative , of imagination. They're the curse of marriage and the after-bane of death.
For an hour, blended with all she could offer, something noble had been created which had nothing to do with the physical world. And from the turn of his throat, the warmth of his hair, the strong, slender sinews of his hands, something further; which...
But I despised men who accepted their fate. I shaped mine twenty times and had it broken twenty times in my hands.
