#0093: I Feel Like the Morning Star, by Gregory Maguire

[orbitaldiamonds]

I Feel Like the Morning Star
by Gregory Maguire

p.106 "Jesus Buddha Krishna Christ." --Mart

p.254 "I feel, I feel, I feel... I feel like the morning star"

p.185 She pulled his head to her side as if it were a bottle whose stubborn lid she was trying to loosen.

p.190 So they fell silent and listened to the story of God's love affair with Himself, giving Himself more and more elaborate presents and seeing that it was good. Mart thought the story showed God to be lacking in a certain amount of native intelligence. If he couldn't see the grand finale--the creation of man and woman--was less than good, was in fact disastrous--"And God looked at what He saw and realized He had made a serious mistake"--then He probably deserved the turning away from him that the Jews and Gentiles persisted in doing throughout the millennia. A child eventually gets a sour taste in the mouth when the failings of the parents become evident."

p.203-204 Mart winked. It went like a thunderclap across Sorb's thoughts. Mart's lashes lowered with colossal intention, shielding acre by acre the vast taut shimmering dome of storm-gray iris, crashing and meshing with the windscreen of the lower lashes, and then coming to an interminable midpoint of lockout (when the sun and stars and moon and any other heavenly bodies up there had fallen due to lack of human adoration and human longing, for when the sky has been forgotten and orbits lose their elastic strength and the whole mesmorama slips its gears) but like the first wave in the first ocean, the top lashes stirred and lifted and the globe of power reasserted itself, the streaks and trails of dawn dust in the revealed iris shocking him, the screws and grommets of the muscles at either end of the eye's bulge wrinkling clockwise and back again, and finally Sorb was naked as a fish before the eye of a whale, about to be eaten, digested, and eliminated without the consciousness of the whale so much as flinching.

NAMES: Nazira, Afshar, Mbulu, Vavilys, Sorb, Mart, Ella, Mazerius

#0094: Dragonriders of Pern: Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey

[orbitaldiamonds]

Dragonriders of PernDragonflight
by Anne McCaffrey

p.12 Fax sternly gestured to a blue-gowned woman, her hair white-streaked, her face lined with disappointments and bitterness, her body swollen with pregnancy. She advanced awkwardly, stopping several feet from her lord. From her attitude, F'lar deduced that she came no closer to Fax than was absolutely necessary.

p.30 They had been built outside the cliff of Ruatha by Fax's first Warder, a subtler man than all eight of his successors. He had achieved more than all the others, and Lessa had honestly regretted the necessity of his death. But he would have made her revenge impossible. He would have found her out before she had learned how to camouflage herself and her little interferences. What had his name been? she could not recall. Well, she regretted his death.

p.73 "You wash up...pretty, yes, almost pretty," he allowed with such amused condescension in his voice that she pulled roughly away from him, piqued. His low laugh mocked her. "How could one guess, after all, what was under the grime of...ten full Turns, I would say? Yes, you are certainly pretty enough to placate F'nor."
     Thoroughly antagonized by his attitude, she asked in icy tones, "And F'nor must be placated at all costs?"
     He stood grinning at her till she had to clench her fists at her sides to keep from beating that grin off his face.
     At length, he said, "No matter, we must eat, and I shall require your services." At her startled exclamation, he turned, grinning maliciously now as his movement revealed the caked blood on his left sleeve. "The least you can do is bathe wounds honorably received in fighting your battle."

p.75 Ashamed of her unbased fright and furious that he had witnessed it, Lessa sat rebelliously down on the fur-covered wall seat, heartily wishing him a variety of serious and painful injuries that she could dress with inconsiderate hands. She would not waste further opportunities.

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