Kevin's Watch

Dragonlily wrote:I thought you gave that book back to its owner, Khaliban. Did you buy one for yourself?

Lucimay wrote:my favorite opening paragraph of all time....

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bircks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

The Haunting of Hill House
Shirley Jackson

In The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran wrote:Almustafa, the chosen and the beloved, who was a dawn onto his own day, had waited twelve years in the city of Orphalese for his ship that was to return and bear him back to the isle of his birth.

And in the twelfth year, on the seventh day of Ielool, the month of reaping, he climbed the hill without the city walls and looked seaward; and he beheld the ship coming with the mist.

Then the gates of his heart were flung open, and his joy flew far over the sea. And he closed his eyes and prayed in the silences of his soul.

There were prodigies and portents enough, One-Eye says.
We must blame ourselves for misinterpreting them. One-
Eye's handicap in no way impairs his marvelous hindsight.

Lightning from a clear sky smote the Necropolitan Hill.
One bolt struck the bronze plaque sealing the tomb of the
forvalaka, obliterating half the spell of confinement. It
rained stones, statues bled. Priests at several temples
reported sacrificial victims without hearts or livers. One
victim escaped after its bowels were opened and was not
recaptured. At the Fork Barracks, where the Urban
Cohorts were billeted, the image of Teux turned completely
around. For nine evening running, ten black vultures
circled the Bastion. Then one evicted the eagle which lived
atop the Paper Tower.

Astrologers refused readings, fearing for their lives. A
mad soothsayer wandered the streets proclaiming the
imminent end of the world. At the Bastion, the eagle not only
departed, the ivy on the outer ramparts withered and gave
way to a creeper which appeared black in all but the most
intense sunlight.

But that happens every year. Fools can make an omen
of anything in retrospect.

-Glen Cook, The Black Company

There was once a young man who wished to gain his
Heart's Desire.

And while that is, as beginnings go, not entirely novel (for
every tale about every young man there ever was or will be
could start in a similar manner) there was much about this
young man and what happened to him that was unusual,
although even he never knew the whole of it.

Red Dorakeen was on a quiet section of the Road,
straight and still as death and faintly sparkling. A pair
of futuristic vehicles had passed him several hours
earlier, moving at fantastic speeds, and he had later
overtaken a coach-and-four and then a solitary horse-
man. He kept his blue Dodge pickup in the right-hand
lane and maintained a steady 65 mph. He chewed his
cigar and hummed.

Some two hundred miles to the north and east of
Adrilankha there lies a mountain, shaped as if by the hand of
a megalomaniacal sculptor into the form of a crouching grey
dzur.

You've seen it, I'm sure, in thousands of paintings and
psiprints from hundreds of angles, so you know as well as
I that the illusion of the great cat is as perfect as artifice or
nature could make it. What is most interesting is the left
ear. It is as fully feline as the other, but is known to have
been fabricated. We have our suspicions about the whole
place, but never mind that; we're sure about the left ear.