"All he could do was try, with a febrile, terrified intensity, to remember which of the dreams was his own." From Perdido Street Station by China Mieville.
"There were other cities and countries and continents in these dreams. Some were doubtless dreamlands born behind flickering eyelids. Others seemed references: oneiric nods to solid places, cities and towns and villages as real as New Crobuzon, with architecture and argots that Isaac had not seen or heard." From Perdido Street Station by China Mieville.
"'Yeah, well, you thought wrong, didn't you, old son? You're nothing but a f*cking dreg, and I...' Isaac broke off from his contumely and stared in astonishment." From Perdido Street Station by China Mieville.
"The empty integuments of grand buildings began to fill. Rural poor from Grain Spiral and the Mendican Foothills began to creep into the deserted borough." From Perdido Street Station by China Mieville.
"She was dressed carefully. Dirty and torn clothes, no hint of money to attract unwanted attention in the Fenn, but not so fouled as to attract the opprobrious wrath of travelers in The Crow, where she had started her journey." From Perdido Street Station by China Mieville.
"Something swirled oleaginously through a huge vat of liquid mud: she saw toothy tentacles slapping at her and scouring the tank." From Perdido Street Station by China Mieville.
"The box of caterpillars swung as it was tugged through the darkness. Oblivious to their journey, the grubs circumscribed their little prison with peristaltic motion." From China Mieville's Perdido Street Station.
"Isaac's request swept through the slums and rookeries. It traveled the alternative architecture thrown up in the human sumps." From China Mieville's Perdido Street Station.
"The three small figures disappeared into the dimly lit streets of Sobek Croix, where gaslight was brown and half-hearted where it existed at all. Behind them the enormous imbroglio of colour, metal, glass, sugar and sweat continued to pour its noise and light pollution into the sky." From Perdido Street Station by China Mieville.
"I hide like a parasite in the skin of this old city that snores and farts and rumbles and scratches and swells and grows warty and pugnacious with age." From Perdido Street Station by China Mieville.
"I remember the desert winds: the Kamsin that scourges the land like smokeless fire; the Fohm that bursts from hot mountainsides as if in ambush; the sly Simoom that inveigles its way through leather sandscreens and library doors." From Perdido Street Station by China Mieville.
"I have taken to foraging alone after nightfall when the city quiets and becomes introspective. I walk as an intruder on its solipsistic dream. I came by darkness, I live by darkness. The savage brightness of the desert is like some legend I heard a long time ago. My exsistence grows nocturnal. My beliefs change. From Perdido Street Station by China Mieville.
"Two long trenches of flesh on Yagharek's shoulderblades were twisted and red with tissue that looked as if it were boiling. Slice marks spread like small veins from the main eructations of ugly healing." From Perdido Street Station by China Mieville.
"She stood on a tripod of stiff telescoping metal. her body had been altered for heavy labour, with pistons and pulleys giving her what looked like ineluctable strength." From Perdido Street Station by China Mieville.
"Isaac was still piqued by the ignorance surrounding watercraeft. It brought home to him, again, how much mainstream science was bunk, how much 'analysis' was just description--often bad description--hiding behind obfuscatory rubbish." From Perdido Street Station by China Mieville.
"Sil idly scooped up another handful from his tub and kneaded it. The water responded like clay, holding the shape Sil gave it. Scraps of the dirt and discoloration of the tub eddied inside it. Sil pinched the figure's face and made a nose, squeezed the legs to the size of small sausages. He perched the little homunculus in front of Isaac." From Perdido Street Station by China Mieville.
"Other khepri glanced at Lin. Her skirt was long and bright in the fashion of Salcus Fields: human fashion, not the traditional ballooning pantaloons of these ghetto-dwellers. Lin was marked. She was an outsider. Had left her sisters. Forgotten hive and moiety." From Perdido Street Station by China Meiville.
"In another twist to the myth, his Head of Department, the ageless and loathsome Vermishank, was not a plodding epigone but an exceptional bio-thaumaturge, who had nixed Isaac's research less because it was unorthodox than because it was going nowhere." From Perdido Street Station by China Meiville.
"In another twist to the myth, his Head of Department, the ageless and loathsome Vermishank, was not a plodding epigone but an exceptional bio-thaumaturge, who had nixed Isaac's research less because it was unorthodox than because it was going nowhere." From Perdido Street Station by China Meiville.
"In the tea-houses and bars of Salacus Fields, Lin's escapades--broadly hinted at, never denied, never made explicit--would be the subject of louche discussion and innuendo." From Perdido Street Station by China Meiville.
"She stood with her back to him, nude at the stove, dancing back as hot drops of oil leapt from the pan. The covers slipped from the slope of Isaac's belly. He was a dirigible, huge and taut and strong. Grey hair burst from him abundently." From Perdido Street Station by China Meiville.
"'Termagant' he moaned after her. 'Shrew! Harridan! Alright, alright, you win, you, you...uh...virago, you spitfire." From Perdido Street Station by China Meiville.
"There are roof emerging from the river. A line of sunken houses, built on the wrong side of the wall, pressed up against the bank in the water, their bituminous black bricks dripping." From Perdido Street Station by China Meiville.
"I am compelled to worship this extraordinary presence that has silted into existence at the conjunction of two rivers. It is a vast pollutant, a stench, a klaxon sounding." From Perdido Street Station by China Mieville.
"The sawdust that was spread neatly over the floor each morning was by now kicked into heaps and soaked by the splashings of wine. And where, scattered about the floor, little blobs of fat had been rolled or trodden in, the sawdust stuck to them giving them the appearance of rissoles." From Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake.
"The wall of the vast room, which were steaming with calid moisture, were built with gray slabs of stone and were the personal concern of a company of eighteen men known as the 'Gray Scrubbers.'" From Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake.
"As objects of beauty, these works held little interest for him, and yet in spite of himself he had become attached in a propinquital way to a few of the carvings." From Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake.
"They were all-but-forgotten people: the breed that was remembered with a start, or with the unreality of a recrudescent dream." From Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake.
"Her eyes moved from side to side in small, shooting peeks. Scraggle-headed and tremble-mouthed, she looked like a diseased coyote driven into its final arroyo." From Wizard and Glass by Stephen King.
"The only item of interest was in the bottom drawer: a pair of spurs. One still had its star rowel, but the other had been broken off." From Wizard and Glass by Stephen King.
"Important people came in from the farther corners of the Barony, and there were a good many Conversationals leading up to the main Conversational on Reaping Day. Susan was expeccted to be present at these--mostly as a decorative testimony to the Mayor's continuing puissance." From Wizard and Glass by Stephen King.
"To the north were the mines themselves: dangerous, undershored scratch drifts that went down fifty feet or so and then spread like fingers clutching for gold and silver and copper and the occasional nest of firedims. From the outside they were just holes punched into the bare and rocky earth, holes like staring eyes, each with its own pile of till and scrapings beside the adit." From Wizard and Glass by Stephen King
"The jug was labeled fairly enough--CAMEL PISS--and a double shot could be obtained for three pennies. It was a drink only for the reckless or the impecunious, but a fair number of both passed beneath the stern gaze of The Romp each night; Stanley rarely had a problem emptying the jug." From Wizard and Glass by Stephen King.
"'Hear, hear,' Mayor Thorin said in a voice that strove for the high ground of solemnity and fell with a splash into fatuity instead." From Wizard and Glass by Stephen King.
"And where's the horse that could support him through a day of range-riding? Roland thought. I'd like to see the cut of that Cayuse." From Wizard and Glass by Stephen King.
"Later, the two of them had walked the high battlements above Mid-World's last living city--green and gorgeous Gilead in the morning sun, with its pennons flapping and the vendors in the streets of the Old Quarter and horses trotting on the bridle paths which radiated out from the palace standing at the heart of everything." From Wizard and Glass by Stephen King.
"It is unlikely that Rhea would have seen Susan's face through the dense overgrowth of pig ivy even if the old besom had been looking in that direction, and she wasn't." From Wizard and Glass by Stephen King.
"And, she supposed, it really hadn't been such a bad idea; if nothing else, it had kept the worst of her megrims away." From Wizard and Glass by Stephen King.
"Musty shied back, hissing like a kettle, and stalked in dudgeon to the hummock which marked the very tip of Coos Hill." From Wizard and Glass by Stephen King.
"Its silvery blackness was all around them now, as if the whole world had turned into a flat Norfolk fen at dawn." From Wizard and Glass by Stephen King.
"Eddie started pushing Susannah along the smooth macadam of the parking lot again, pointing to cars as they passed them." From Wizard and Glass by Stephen King.
"There were certain ways of referring to things in the gang Henry was a part of (and which Eddie, as his little brother, was also a part of); the argot of their miserable little ka-tet . From Wizard and Glass by Stephen King.
"Roland had never in his life seen such animals or countryside, and it made his skin want to crawl right off his flesh. It was inimical, but that was not the problem. It was alien-- that was the problem. From The Wastelands by Stephen King.
"Ahead, a vast grilled barrier like a castle barbican swam out of the gloom...and beyond it, they caught their first glimpse of Blaine the Mono." From The Wastelands by Stephen King.
"As he took yet another deep breath of that speciously sweet cinnamon smell, it seemed to him that he had never wanted anything so badly in his whole life." From The Wastelands by Stephen King.
"And in between the news bulletins and the announcements, squalling military music and exhortations to respect the fallen by sending more men and women into the red throat of the abattoir." From The Wastelands by Stephen King.
"Eddie peered at the huge concrete caissons to which the main cables were anchored and thought the one on the right side of the bridge looked as if it had been pulled part way out of the earth." From The Wastelands by Stephen King.
"If we had two more in our party, I'd put Jake in a moving box with guns on every side of him. Since we don't, we'll move in column--me first, Jake pushing Susannah behind, and you on drogue." From The Wastelands by Stephen King.
"He spoke in the hoarse, cadenced tones of a lifelong teller of tales--one of those devine fools born to merge memory and mendacity into dreams as airily gorgeous as cobwebs strung with drops of dew." From Stephen King's The Wastelands
Comments by 5814738
5814738 commented on the word febrile
"All he could do was try, with a febrile, terrified intensity, to remember which of the dreams was his own." From Perdido Street Station by China Mieville.
December 6, 2011
5814738 commented on the word oneiric
"There were other cities and countries and continents in these dreams. Some were doubtless dreamlands born behind flickering eyelids. Others seemed references: oneiric nods to solid places, cities and towns and villages as real as New Crobuzon, with architecture and argots that Isaac had not seen or heard." From Perdido Street Station by China Mieville.
December 6, 2011
5814738 commented on the word veldt
"He wandered through the flattened veldt of the daydreaming cactacae mind." From Perdido Street Station by China Mieville.
December 6, 2011
5814738 commented on the word contumely
"'Yeah, well, you thought wrong, didn't you, old son? You're nothing but a f*cking dreg, and I...' Isaac broke off from his contumely and stared in astonishment." From Perdido Street Station by China Mieville.
December 5, 2011
5814738 commented on the word integument
"The empty integuments of grand buildings began to fill. Rural poor from Grain Spiral and the Mendican Foothills began to creep into the deserted borough." From Perdido Street Station by China Mieville.
December 5, 2011
5814738 commented on the word opprobrious
"She was dressed carefully. Dirty and torn clothes, no hint of money to attract unwanted attention in the Fenn, but not so fouled as to attract the opprobrious wrath of travelers in The Crow, where she had started her journey." From Perdido Street Station by China Mieville.
December 5, 2011
5814738 commented on the word oleaginous
"Something swirled oleaginously through a huge vat of liquid mud: she saw toothy tentacles slapping at her and scouring the tank." From Perdido Street Station by China Mieville.
December 5, 2011
5814738 commented on the word peristaltic
"The box of caterpillars swung as it was tugged through the darkness. Oblivious to their journey, the grubs circumscribed their little prison with peristaltic motion." From China Mieville's Perdido Street Station.
October 1, 2011
5814738 commented on the word sump
"Isaac's request swept through the slums and rookeries. It traveled the alternative architecture thrown up in the human sumps." From China Mieville's Perdido Street Station.
October 1, 2011
5814738 commented on the word imbroglio
"The three small figures disappeared into the dimly lit streets of Sobek Croix, where gaslight was brown and half-hearted where it existed at all. Behind them the enormous imbroglio of colour, metal, glass, sugar and sweat continued to pour its noise and light pollution into the sky." From Perdido Street Station by China Mieville.
October 1, 2011
5814738 commented on the word histrionic
"'Back, ladies and gents, back, I beg of you!" The showman's voice was pompous and histrionic." From Perdido Street Station by China Mieville.
September 27, 2011
5814738 commented on the word pugnacious
"I hide like a parasite in the skin of this old city that snores and farts and rumbles and scratches and swells and grows warty and pugnacious with age." From Perdido Street Station by China Mieville.
September 27, 2011
5814738 commented on the word inveigles
"I remember the desert winds: the Kamsin that scourges the land like smokeless fire; the Fohm that bursts from hot mountainsides as if in ambush; the sly Simoom that inveigles its way through leather sandscreens and library doors." From Perdido Street Station by China Mieville.
September 27, 2011
5814738 commented on the word hirsute
"They wound through the ranks of the deformed and obese, the bizarrely hirsute and the small." From Perdido Street Station by China Mieville.
September 27, 2011
5814738 commented on the word solipsism
"I have taken to foraging alone after nightfall when the city quiets and becomes introspective. I walk as an intruder on its solipsistic dream. I came by darkness, I live by darkness. The savage brightness of the desert is like some legend I heard a long time ago. My exsistence grows nocturnal. My beliefs change. From Perdido Street Station by China Mieville.
September 22, 2011
5814738 commented on the word eructation
"Two long trenches of flesh on Yagharek's shoulderblades were twisted and red with tissue that looked as if it were boiling. Slice marks spread like small veins from the main eructations of ugly healing." From Perdido Street Station by China Mieville.
September 22, 2011
5814738 commented on the word ineluctable
"She stood on a tripod of stiff telescoping metal. her body had been altered for heavy labour, with pistons and pulleys giving her what looked like ineluctable strength." From Perdido Street Station by China Mieville.
September 22, 2011
5814738 commented on the word obfuscatory
"Isaac was still piqued by the ignorance surrounding watercraeft. It brought home to him, again, how much mainstream science was bunk, how much 'analysis' was just description--often bad description--hiding behind obfuscatory rubbish." From Perdido Street Station by China Mieville.
September 21, 2011
5814738 commented on the word homunculus
"Sil idly scooped up another handful from his tub and kneaded it. The water responded like clay, holding the shape Sil gave it. Scraps of the dirt and discoloration of the tub eddied inside it. Sil pinched the figure's face and made a nose, squeezed the legs to the size of small sausages. He perched the little homunculus in front of Isaac." From Perdido Street Station by China Mieville.
September 21, 2011
5814738 commented on the word shambolic
"The pub was empty of all but the most dedicated drinkers, shambolic figures huddled over bottles." From Perdido Street Station by China Mieville.
September 21, 2011
5814738 commented on the word epigone
Heh. Yeah. Total douche bag.
September 18, 2011
5814738 commented on the word moiety
"Other khepri glanced at Lin. Her skirt was long and bright in the fashion of Salcus Fields: human fashion, not the traditional ballooning pantaloons of these ghetto-dwellers. Lin was marked. She was an outsider. Had left her sisters. Forgotten hive and moiety." From Perdido Street Station by China Meiville.
September 18, 2011
5814738 commented on the word thaumaturge
"In another twist to the myth, his Head of Department, the ageless and loathsome Vermishank, was not a plodding epigone but an exceptional bio-thaumaturge, who had nixed Isaac's research less because it was unorthodox than because it was going nowhere." From Perdido Street Station by China Meiville.
September 18, 2011
5814738 commented on the word epigone
"In another twist to the myth, his Head of Department, the ageless and loathsome Vermishank, was not a plodding epigone but an exceptional bio-thaumaturge, who had nixed Isaac's research less because it was unorthodox than because it was going nowhere." From Perdido Street Station by China Meiville.
September 18, 2011
5814738 commented on the word louche
"In the tea-houses and bars of Salacus Fields, Lin's escapades--broadly hinted at, never denied, never made explicit--would be the subject of louche discussion and innuendo." From Perdido Street Station by China Meiville.
September 18, 2011
5814738 commented on the word dirigible
"She stood with her back to him, nude at the stove, dancing back as hot drops of oil leapt from the pan. The covers slipped from the slope of Isaac's belly. He was a dirigible, huge and taut and strong. Grey hair burst from him abundently." From Perdido Street Station by China Meiville.
September 18, 2011
5814738 commented on the word virago
"'Termagant' he moaned after her. 'Shrew! Harridan! Alright, alright, you win, you, you...uh...virago, you spitfire." From Perdido Street Station by China Meiville.
September 18, 2011
5814738 commented on the word unctuous
"Isaac had been staring anxiously at the class when that unctuous bastard Vermishank had looked in." From Perdido Street Station by China Meiville.
September 18, 2011
5814738 commented on the word bituminous
"There are roof emerging from the river. A line of sunken houses, built on the wrong side of the wall, pressed up against the bank in the water, their bituminous black bricks dripping." From Perdido Street Station by China Meiville.
September 18, 2011
5814738 commented on the word klaxon
"I am compelled to worship this extraordinary presence that has silted into existence at the conjunction of two rivers. It is a vast pollutant, a stench, a klaxon sounding." From Perdido Street Station by China Mieville.
September 18, 2011
5814738 commented on the word opopanax
"He raised the opopanax feather and said, 'Hear what I say! Would ye hear, I beg!'" From Stephen King's Wolves of the Calla.
June 20, 2011
5814738 commented on the word rissole
"The sawdust that was spread neatly over the floor each morning was by now kicked into heaps and soaked by the splashings of wine. And where, scattered about the floor, little blobs of fat had been rolled or trodden in, the sawdust stuck to them giving them the appearance of rissoles." From Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake.
February 12, 2011
5814738 commented on the word calid
"The wall of the vast room, which were steaming with calid moisture, were built with gray slabs of stone and were the personal concern of a company of eighteen men known as the 'Gray Scrubbers.'" From Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake.
February 12, 2011
5814738 commented on the word ribald
"Here among the stone passages were all the symptoms of ribald excitement." From Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake.
February 12, 2011
5814738 commented on the word propinquity
"As objects of beauty, these works held little interest for him, and yet in spite of himself he had become attached in a propinquital way to a few of the carvings." From Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake.
February 12, 2011
5814738 commented on the word recrudescent
"They were all-but-forgotten people: the breed that was remembered with a start, or with the unreality of a recrudescent dream." From Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake.
February 12, 2011
5814738 commented on the word turgid
"The air between them was turgid with contempt and jealousy." From Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake.
February 12, 2011
5814738 commented on the word arroyo
"Her eyes moved from side to side in small, shooting peeks. Scraggle-headed and tremble-mouthed, she looked like a diseased coyote driven into its final arroyo." From Wizard and Glass by Stephen King.
January 28, 2011
5814738 commented on the word rowel
"The only item of interest was in the bottom drawer: a pair of spurs. One still had its star rowel, but the other had been broken off." From Wizard and Glass by Stephen King.
January 28, 2011
5814738 commented on the word puissance
"Important people came in from the farther corners of the Barony, and there were a good many Conversationals leading up to the main Conversational on Reaping Day. Susan was expeccted to be present at these--mostly as a decorative testimony to the Mayor's continuing puissance." From Wizard and Glass by Stephen King.
January 28, 2011
5814738 commented on the word adit
"To the north were the mines themselves: dangerous, undershored scratch drifts that went down fifty feet or so and then spread like fingers clutching for gold and silver and copper and the occasional nest of firedims. From the outside they were just holes punched into the bare and rocky earth, holes like staring eyes, each with its own pile of till and scrapings beside the adit." From Wizard and Glass by Stephen King
January 28, 2011
5814738 commented on the word impecunious
"The jug was labeled fairly enough--CAMEL PISS--and a double shot could be obtained for three pennies. It was a drink only for the reckless or the impecunious, but a fair number of both passed beneath the stern gaze of The Romp each night; Stanley rarely had a problem emptying the jug." From Wizard and Glass by Stephen King.
January 27, 2011
5814738 commented on the word fatuity
"'Hear, hear,' Mayor Thorin said in a voice that strove for the high ground of solemnity and fell with a splash into fatuity instead." From Wizard and Glass by Stephen King.
January 27, 2011
5814738 commented on the word cayuse
"And where's the horse that could support him through a day of range-riding? Roland thought. I'd like to see the cut of that Cayuse." From Wizard and Glass by Stephen King.
January 27, 2011
5814738 commented on the word pennon
"Later, the two of them had walked the high battlements above Mid-World's last living city--green and gorgeous Gilead in the morning sun, with its pennons flapping and the vendors in the streets of the Old Quarter and horses trotting on the bridle paths which radiated out from the palace standing at the heart of everything." From Wizard and Glass by Stephen King.
January 22, 2011
5814738 commented on the word besom
"It is unlikely that Rhea would have seen Susan's face through the dense overgrowth of pig ivy even if the old besom had been looking in that direction, and she wasn't." From Wizard and Glass by Stephen King.
January 22, 2011
5814738 commented on the word megrims
"And, she supposed, it really hadn't been such a bad idea; if nothing else, it had kept the worst of her megrims away." From Wizard and Glass by Stephen King.
January 22, 2011
5814738 commented on the word dudgeon
"Musty shied back, hissing like a kettle, and stalked in dudgeon to the hummock which marked the very tip of Coos Hill." From Wizard and Glass by Stephen King.
January 22, 2011
5814738 commented on the word fen
"Its silvery blackness was all around them now, as if the whole world had turned into a flat Norfolk fen at dawn." From Wizard and Glass by Stephen King.
January 22, 2011
5814738 commented on the word calliope
The carousel's very silence, its flashing lights and steamy calliope music stilled forever, gave Jake a chill." From Wizard and Glass by Stephen King.
January 19, 2011
5814738 commented on the word macadam
"Eddie started pushing Susannah along the smooth macadam of the parking lot again, pointing to cars as they passed them." From Wizard and Glass by Stephen King.
January 19, 2011
5814738 commented on the word nonce
"But for the nonce she only stood there, biting her lower lip." From Wizard and Glass by Stephen King.
January 11, 2011
5814738 commented on the word sotto voce
"'Everybody's a goddam critic,' Susannah said sotto voce." From Wizard and Glass by Stephen King.
January 11, 2011
5814738 commented on the word wot
"AND THE FAIR-DAY GOOSE IS ALMOST MINE, I WOT." From Wizard and Glass by Stephen King.
January 11, 2011
5814738 commented on the word argot
"There were certain ways of referring to things in the gang Henry was a part of (and which Eddie, as his little brother, was also a part of); the argot of their miserable little ka-tet . From Wizard and Glass by Stephen King.
January 10, 2011
5814738 commented on the word inimical
"Roland had never in his life seen such animals or countryside, and it made his skin want to crawl right off his flesh. It was inimical, but that was not the problem. It was alien-- that was the problem. From The Wastelands by Stephen King.
January 9, 2011
5814738 commented on the word barbican
"Ahead, a vast grilled barrier like a castle barbican swam out of the gloom...and beyond it, they caught their first glimpse of Blaine the Mono." From The Wastelands by Stephen King.
January 9, 2011
5814738 commented on the word specious
"As he took yet another deep breath of that speciously sweet cinnamon smell, it seemed to him that he had never wanted anything so badly in his whole life." From The Wastelands by Stephen King.
January 9, 2011
5814738 commented on the word abattoir
"And in between the news bulletins and the announcements, squalling military music and exhortations to respect the fallen by sending more men and women into the red throat of the abattoir." From The Wastelands by Stephen King.
January 9, 2011
5814738 commented on the word fakement
"He wiggled the hand he held in the air. 'It's all the same jolly fakement to me, one way or t'other.'" From The Wastelands by Stephen King.
January 9, 2011
5814738 commented on the word caisson
"Eddie peered at the huge concrete caissons to which the main cables were anchored and thought the one on the right side of the bridge looked as if it had been pulled part way out of the earth." From The Wastelands by Stephen King.
January 3, 2011
5814738 commented on the word drogue
"If we had two more in our party, I'd put Jake in a moving box with guns on every side of him. Since we don't, we'll move in column--me first, Jake pushing Susannah behind, and you on drogue." From The Wastelands by Stephen King.
January 2, 2011
5814738 commented on the word mendacity
"He spoke in the hoarse, cadenced tones of a lifelong teller of tales--one of those devine fools born to merge memory and mendacity into dreams as airily gorgeous as cobwebs strung with drops of dew." From Stephen King's The Wastelands
January 1, 2011