“I planned to reintroduce him to my friends lorazepam and oxycodone in a big, big way.”
― Cassie Alexander, quote from Nightshifted
“Welcome to the secret wing of County Hospital ....Where vampires get transfused, werewolves have silver allergies, and one nurse is way over her head !”
― Cassie Alexander, quote from Nightshifted
“Nurses are natural kleptos. You don't want to be in a roon without enough supplies, so every time you walk past the med-cart you pocket another saline flush. By the end of the shift you can look like a chipmunk if you're not careful. Some days it's hard to remember that the gum at the end of the grocery aisle isn't there just for you.”
― Cassie Alexander, quote from Nightshifted
“But if you believe in heaven then you have to believe someone's keeping score. And if someone's keeping score, if what we do really matters, then life ought to be fair. And I'm sorry it isn't. Shitty things happen to good people, and bad people never get what's coming to them. Don't tell me that there is a heaven as some sort of perverse reward for being good. That is bullshit of the highest caliber”
― Cassie Alexander, quote from Nightshifted
“My voice mail message says I work nights and sleep days. Everyone who knows me, knows this. And still, people who aren’t employed at the Nursing Office feel compelled to call me before three P.M. Certain people feel compelled to call me repeatedly, until I pick up—namely, dicks.”
― Cassie Alexander, quote from Nightshifted
“I nodded. Everyone at the hospital wanted to think that their case was special, and if you were a good nurse, you helped them keep that illusion alive. Knowing that someone down the hall had it worse than you never stopped your own paper cut from hurting, at least not until they came in and bludgeoned you senseless with their amputated leg.”
― Cassie Alexander, quote from Nightshifted
“We could crawl inside your head and make you but a shell of yourself, a puppet of meat, for which we keep the only strings.” It paused to let the impact of this settle in. “Please stop trying to be brave, and become the pathetic creature we both know you to be.”
My short nails bit against my arms. “Fuck you.”
― Cassie Alexander, quote from Nightshifted
“Nurses are natural kleptos. You don’t want to be in a room without enough supplies, so every time you walk past the med-cart you pocket another saline flush. By the end of the shift you can look like a chipmunk if you’re not careful.”
― Cassie Alexander, quote from Nightshifted
“Compulsion, guilt, pick your poison.' Meaty shrugged. 'You make a better nurse than a patient.”
― Cassie Alexander, quote from Nightshifted
“No matter how much I fought him or gave in to him in turns, I couldn’t fuck away my fears.”
― Cassie Alexander, quote from Nightshifted
“I sank into the chair and checked to see if the charge nurse could see me—not if I didn’t lean out too far. The night was looking up! Two patients who ought to sleep all night long, and an Internet connection. How lucky was I? Pretty damn lucky, at least until someone needed a diaper change.”
― Cassie Alexander, quote from Nightshifted
“The Shadows this, the Shadows that—I’d asked Charles about them once, when our breaks had overlapped....But Charles said “they” (complete with scare quotes) lurked in the corners by our entrance door, screening visitors, unseen. Since that made them sound like omnipotent dust bunnies, I preferred the version of them in my own imagination.”
― Cassie Alexander, quote from Nightshifted
“I thought how lovely and how strange a river is. A river is a river, always there, and yet the water flowing through it is never the same water and is never still. It’s always changing and is always on the move. And over time the river itself changes too. It widens and deepens as it rubs and scours, gnaws and kneads, eats and bores its way through the land. Even the greatest rivers- the Nile and the Ganges, the Yangtze and he Mississippi, the Amazon and the great grey-green greasy Limpopo all set about with fever trees-must have been no more than trickles and flickering streams before they grew into mighty rivers.
Are people like that? I wondered. Am I like that? Always me, like the river itself, always flowing but always different, like the water flowing in the river, sometimes walking steadily along andante, sometimes surging over rapids furioso, sometimes meandering wit hardly any visible movement tranquilo, lento, ppp pianissimo, sometimes gurgling giacoso with pleasure, sometimes sparkling brillante in the sun, sometimes lacrimoso, sometimes appassionato, sometimes misterioso, sometimes pesante, sometimes legato, sometimes staccato, sometimes sospirando, sometimes vivace, and always, I hope, amoroso.
Do I change like a river, widening and deepening, eddying back on myself sometimes, bursting my banks sometimes when there’s too much water, too much life in me, and sometimes dried up from lack of rain? Will the I that is me grow and widen and deepen? Or will I stagnate and become an arid riverbed? Will I allow people to dam me up and confine me to wall so that I flow only where they want? Will I allow them to turn me into a canal to use for they own purposes? Or will I make sure I flow freely, coursing my way through the land and ploughing a valley of my own?”
― Aidan Chambers, quote from This is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn
“I loved every part of him. The smell of his skin, the scar on his cheek, the feel of his fingers pressing into my back. The way he could tell what I was thinking just by looking at me.”
― Anna Carey, quote from Once
“They got their happy ending. That’s the only reason why I can make myself walk away, make myself say goodbye to my girls, even though it kills me that I’m not the reason behind their smiles. And I will never be.”
― Mia Asher, quote from Arsen: A Broken Love Story
“Nothing happened, and time stubbornly refused to pass.”
― Michel Faber, quote from Under the Skin
“I know babe" he said, wrapping me in his arms. I could hear the loudly thu-bump of his heart as he picked me up and carried me like a child. And he called me Babe.”
― Ripley Patton, quote from Ghost Hand
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