Elegy Quotes

“There has not been a day since his sudden and mysterious vanishing that I have not been searching for him, looking in the most unlikely places. Everything and everyone, existence itself, has become an evocation, a possibility for resemblance. Perhaps this is what is meant by that brief and now almost archaic word: elegy”

“It's really over." He put his arms around her, pulling her to him. "Now just as long as you don't get tangled up with a pack of vampires or deranged witches while you're at college, everything will be wonderful.”

“Every angel is terrifying.”

“On the morning of what should have been Amelia Ashley's birthday, the river valley that had once housed High Bridge changed for Joshua Mayhew. For the first time in many years, it seemed beautiful to him. For the first time in many years, it was beautiful.”

“A word is elegy to what it signifies.”

“We have an obligation to feel guilty." The words came out of her lips as if she were reciting an elegy. "Guilty. Because we kill the ones we love.”

“She's shed her skinsand plasma jeans, gets around in 2Kretro gear like the frock she wears today;a loose, white elegy to what's been lost.Already she's flowing back into herselfthe way a river flows to fill a creek bed.But some hard layer has washed awayand left her softer, more interested.”

“Massive changes may have occurred in libraries in recent years, with new digital resources and services supplementing the old traditional resources and services, the dog-eared card catalogues ripped up and destroyed, workstations suddenly everywhere, but one essential aspect of “libraryness” has not changed: libraries remain places dedicated to storage. Books continue to be published in greater and greater numbers – so great in fact that there are no accurate figures as to exactly how many are published: some say one every thirty seconds, others four thousand per day, others a million per year – and somehow, whether through the off-site storage of the physical books themselves, or microfilm copying, or digital scanning, we remain obliged to keep up with or afloat in this vast deluge of paper. Even the new, high-tech rebranded libraries opened to great fanfare in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets in the 1990s could not get away from this essential fact of paper hoarding: they were called “Idea Stores.” - p.56”

“The heretic is the one who speaks against the community from a place within its territory. He is the enemy within. The heathen, by contrast, is safely behind the walls, excluded by his own invincible arrogance.”