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Another silence. He was standing very still now. Was it a trick of the mist or was he really a very long way away from me, a lonely figure in the queerly-lit darkness? It came to me suddenly that this was how I would always remember him, someone standing alone, apart from the others even of his own family. And, I think for the first time, I began to see him as he really was - not any more as a projection of my young romantic longings, not any more as Prince Charming, the handsome sophisticate, the tiger I thought I preferred...This was Raoul, who had been a quiet lonely little boy in a house that was ‘not a house for children,’ an unhappy adolescent brought up in the shadow of a megalomaniac father, a young man fighting bitterly to save his small inheritance from ruin...wild, perhaps, hard, perhaps, plunging off the beaten track more than once...but always alone. Wrapped up in my loneliness and danger I hadn’t even seen that his need was the same as my own. He and I had hoed the same row, and he for a more bitter harvest. 

Mary Stewart, Nine Coaches Waiting

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And it was a lie that time didn’t pass for beings like her. She was tired. She longed for each summer to be the last, and she spent more and more time in the lookout tower, where she could barely hear the whisper of the living, which she knew how to imitate so well, but could not comprehend. 

Mariana Enríquez, The Lookout

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Because, although they had told him at school that he did not like music and that he could not play the piano, already there was something whispering in his head, a snatch of melody, half-heard and half-forgotten; and it was all mixed up with that first violin there, tuning his fiddle, and the hot, musty, draughty smell of the theatre itself, and the knowledge that someone he knew and loved, like Mama once, like Maria now, was sitting before a mirror in a dressing-room at the back of the stage there, putting make-up on her face. 

Daphne du Maurier, The Parasites

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She was well made, and the tip of her chin was of a most promising cast for the rest of the face; but, Heaven save you! she came upon business! and for a lawyer to fall in love with a pretty client on a single consultation, would be as wise as if he became enamoured of a particularly bright sunbeam which chanced for a moment to gild his bar-wig. 

Walter Scott, Redgauntlet

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For wherever the Claimant went, there went his friend Mr Bogle, and she had her paper and her pen and her inkpot and the timing was impeccable. On the train, she could barely control herself, fingers thrumming on the window. She had known the giddiness of love, and the febrile sensations of hate and fear, but this feeling was different. It was an excitement of the blood that was yet under the total control of her mind. Was this what the admirable Mrs Lewes felt as she worked? What William and Charles had known, all those years?

Zadie Smith, The Fraud

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Your threats are worth nothing.  Your boasting comes to this: when you ask for quarter, I’ll be merciless.  For I know you of old, bird-hearted little boy - when it comes to the bit, you’re not very bold. 

The Táin (trans. Ciarán Carson)

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She caught a familiar sound, distant, like something heard on the edge of a dream. Maybe it was only a memory, but it meant so much. It meant freedom, a love that embraced the alien, the outsider, and the oppressed. This sound couldn’t tolerate hatred and violence, but found itself unable to be silent in the face of evil. That’s why it rended, tore its way across time. To Ace, the wheezing, groaning sound seemed to be blown from the distance on some Christmas breeze, a legend as silly and as powerful as Santa Claus in the gathering twilight. 

Paul Cornell, Timewyrm: Revelation

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Among the most desperate were those referred to in the office jargon as ‘victims of parental kidnapping’. Fathers or mothers whose spouse or partner had fled with the baby they shared. Usually, it was the mothers who ran. And the men came in often, distraught: for them, time was essential, because babies’ appearances change very quickly. As soon as the first personality traits emerged, hair grew out, and eye color was defined, that baby, frozen in time in the photo on the ‘Missing’ posters, would disappear once again.

Mariana Enríquez, Kids Who Come Back

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My brothers, my husband, even Edmé, my little sister, belonged to this moment, had waited for it, even, welcoming change as something they could themselves shape and possess, just as they moulded glass to a new form. What they had been taught as children did not matter any more. Those things were past and done with; only the future counted, a future which must be different in every way from what we had known. Why, then, did I lag behind? Why must I be reluctant? I thought of the winter, and how the families and ourselves had suffered, and I knew what Michel meant when he said it must never happen again; yet, even so, everything within me baulked at what he had done. 

Daphne du Maurier, The Glass-Blowers

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What would I have given that I could have procured that solemn grave visage of thine, to dignify this joke, as it has done full many a one of thine own! Thou hast so happy a knack of doing the most foolish things in the wisest manner, that thou mightst pass thy extravagances for rational actions, even in the eyes of Prudence herself. 

Walter Scott, Redgauntlet

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"Of course I did, thought Peter; it almost broke my heart too, he thought; and was overcome with his own grief, which rose like a moon looked at from a terrace, ghastly beautiful with light from the sunken day.

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

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‘There are those today who leave behind lovers, friends and relations. And if they do not come back safe and sound, they all will curse me, because I made the call to arms. Yet I too have to go, and count myself as much as them. Find out for me if I will come back or not.’

The Táin (trans. Ciarán Carson)

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Something fell apart, the layer upon layer of defence protecting every individual from assault so that no challenge can be heard, no signal seen; the core, left untouched in isolation, crumbled for one brief moment as I spoke, and I felt, in the hand that tightened on mine, the loneliness of years, the numbed senses, the mocking mind, the empty heart. It was as though, touching her then, these things became part of me and were now mine, and the burden was intolerable beyond belief.

Daphne du Maurier, The Scapegoat

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‘Nevertheless - in short, sir, we wander at present as in a morning mist - the sun will, I trust, soon rise and dispel it, when all that now seems mysterious will be fully revealed - or it will sink into rain,’ he added, in a solemn tone, ‘and then explanation will be of little consequence.’

Walter Scott, Redgauntlet

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Ace swam up in a stream of butterfly bubbles, powering up out of a sea-black pit at the heart of the whirlpool. It wasn’t water she was swimming through but words, language. All around her rolled and broke phrases and meanings, and sometimes it seemed that she was part of the tide, her sense of self being only the ridge of a wave, about to crash and die on the beach, sweeping her back into a totality of nothingness. 

Paul Cornell, Timewyrm: Revelation

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Amir took flight. Headlong into the seaborne sky, the roof of the great inverted world. In meeting him the water was not cold or concussive but warm and tranquil, its temperature the temperature of a body, the temperature of blood. With ease and without pain, he flew past the surface, past the depths, past the places where light and life surrendered and the domain of stillness began. And then lower, farther, past the crust of a million interlocking bodies who’d braved this passage before him and come to rest at the bottom, sick with the secrets of their own unallowed mourning. Past the smallest flower-white bones, past the world at the feet of the world. To the lowest deep, then a lower deep still. Until finally to a dry womb of a place in which were kept safe and unchanging everyone he had ever known, and everyone each of those had ever known, outward forever to encompass the whole of the living and the lives. And each of these the boy met, in their old lives and their new lives waiting, and from each drew confession and each he felt into as though there were no barrier between them, no silo of self to keep a soul waiting. What beautiful rebellion, to feel into another, to feel anything at all.

Omar El Akkad, What Strange Paradise

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Brought up with him! How can he say so! Was he not abroad for some time? And when, of late, at home, how has he eyed me with scorn sometimes! How has the MEAN girl been ready to tremble under his disdainful eye! How have I fought for excuses to get from my lady, when he came to visit her in her apartment, though bid to stay, perhaps! Brought up with him! I say - Brought up with him! He may as well say, The poor frighted pigeon brought up with the hawk! He has an eye like a hawk’s, I am sure! and a heart, I verily think, as cruel!

Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded