"Titus Groan" [.]

[fiefoe]

'Steerpike was beginning to enjoying himself in his own dry, bloodless way.' But pretty much everybody else wasn't. It's also rare to read a phrase like 'the three of them coming together into a compact volume of sympathy'.

• "In dead and shackled language, my dears, you are glorious, but oh, to give vent to a brand new sound that might convince you of what I really think of you..! But no, it is impossible. Life is too fleet for onomatopoeia. Dead words defy me."
• leaving (Mrs Slagg) in a state of querulous collapse, which was not remedied by his tickling her rudely in the ribs as (Steerpike) skipped past her to the door.
  
• His left eye had become involved with a female spider. She sat upon it squarely, enjoying the rolling movement of the orb she covered.
  

'Self-contained, carrying their whole selves with them as they moved, as a vessel that holds its own distinctive wine, bitter or sweet.'

• From infancy until this tragic interim of beauty their loveliness was of a strange innocence, a crystal-like tranquility that held no prescience of the future. When in this clearness the dark seeds began to root and smoke was mixed with the flame, then, as with Keda now, a thorny splendour struck outward from their features.
• If Mr Flay stalked, Mr Swelter insinuated... through space. His body encroached, sleuth-like, from air-volume to air-volume, entering, filling and edging out of each in turn.
• All things in the long room absorbed his melancholia. The shadowing galleries brooded with slow anguish; the books receding into the deep corners, tier upon tier, seemed each a separate tragic note in a monumental fugue of volumes.
• There was blood in him to revitalize an anaemic army, with enough left over to cool the guns.
• The death-dew rose and the wild birds in her breast climbed to her throat and gathered songless, hovering, all tumult, wing to wing, so ardent for those climes where all things end.
  
• She was in love with what he meant to her as someone she could love.
• For every hair that's hurt I'll stop a heart.

'Haunting' is the word between lines such as 'the outpouring of a continent of sky had incarcerated and given a weird hyper-reality of closeness to those who were shielded from all but the sound of the storm.'

• As the lunar silence came down as though for ever in a vast white sheet, the long-drawn screech of a death-owl tore it, as though it had been calico, from end to end.
• All things were tinted, as though they had awaited the particular concentration of hue which the sky now held, before admitting the opinions of their separate colours to be altered or modified.
• an expanse of translucence, that stain, chill and secret, in the throat of a lily, a sky so peerless...
• Glimmering in half-light, or flaming exquisitely with a kind of filigree and leprous brilliance where the moon fell unopposed upon them, the innumerable webs of the spiders filled the air.
• the hot breath of rotting plumes / a constant and indigenous sorrow / the light was crumbling / a flirt of rain
  

Ichabod: no glory
empiric: a charlatan
daedal: skillful; cleverly intricate
footling, gristle, jarl, pullulation, raddle, caul, triturated, lorn

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