{"quotes":[{"text":"I spent a year in that town, one Sunday.","author":"George Burns","tags":["year","sunday","town "],"id":81616,"author_id":"George+Burns"},{"text":"Will you be all right?' she askedHow could.","author":"Carol Matas","tags":["family","murder","town"],"id":95896,"author_id":"Carol+Matas"},{"text":"In one opinion, the house in which you stay, the church you attend and the town in which you reside may not determine the size of your dreams, but they can influence the rate of maturity of what you have planted.","author":"Israelmore Ayivor","tags":["1","big-dreams","change-environment","change-location","change-position","change-the-world","church","city","dream-big","environment","food-for-thought","house","influence","israelmore-ayivor","make-a-change","mature","one","opinion","plant","rate-of-maturity","reap","ripe","sow","sown","town"],"id":109086,"author_id":"Israelmore+Ayivor"},{"text":"To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.","author":"Freya Stark","tags":["world","strange","town "],"id":157750,"author_id":"Freya+Stark"},{"text":"The moon seemed to veil herself before the bold looks of Satan. The night was cold. All the doors were closed, all the windows darkened. And the streets deserted. From their appearance, one would have imagined that, for a long time past no foot had traversed those silent streets. Everything around us bore a death-like aspect. It seemed as if, when day came, no one would open their doors; that no head, of woman or of child, would look out of those dark, dull windows; that no step would break the silence which fell, like a pall, upon all around. I seemed to be walking in a city which had been buried some ages. In truth, the town seemed to have been depopulated, and the cemetery to have grown full.Still we went forward, without hearing a murmur, or meeting even with a shadow. The street stretched for a long way across this fearful city of silence and repose. At last we reached my house.'You remember it?' said the fiend.'Yes,' replied I, sullenly, 'let us enter.' 'First,' said he, 'we must open the door. It is I, by the way, who invented the science of opening doors without breaking them in. In fact, I have a second key to all doors and gates - with one exception - that of Paradise!","author":"James Hain Friswell","tags":["deserted","devil","door","doors","key","keys","late","lock","locks","lonely","night","satan","town"],"id":166960,"author_id":"James+Hain+Friswell"},{"text":"She loves mysteries that she became one.","author":"John Green","tags":["girl","green","john","mystery","paper","town"],"id":175676,"author_id":"John+Green"},{"text":"There seemed to be handfuls of stars tossed right above the rooftops in Haddan, keeping the town still alight at midnight.","author":"Alice Hoffman","tags":["midnight","rooftop","stars","town"],"id":176049,"author_id":"Alice+Hoffman"},{"text":"Somewhere, things must be beautiful and vivid. Somewhere else, life has to be beautiful and vivid and rich. Not like this muted palette -a pale blue bedroom, washed out sunny sky, dull green yellow brown of the fields. Here, I know ever twist of every road, every blade of grass, every face in this town, and I am suffocating.","author":"Lisa Ann Sandell","tags":["a-map-of-the-known-world","beautiful","dull","face","grass","life","muted","palette","rich","sky","somewhere","suffocating","town","vivid"],"id":190010,"author_id":"Lisa+Ann+Sandell"},{"text":"We get so used to the gregarious nature of our towns and villages that we forget how crowded our existence has become.","author":"Fennel Hudson","tags":["city","countryside","rural-life","town"],"id":200832,"author_id":"Fennel+Hudson"},{"text":"March 1898What a strange dream I had last night! I wandered in the warm streets of a port, in the low quarter of some Barcelona or Marseille. The streets were noisome, with their freshly-heaped piles of ordure outside the doors, in the blue shadows of their high roofs. They all led down towards the sea. The gold-spangled sea, seeming as if it had been polished by the sun, could be seen at the end of each thoroughfare, bristling with yard-arms and luminous masts. The implacable blue of the sky shone brilliantly overhead as I wandered through the long, cool and sombre corridors in the emptiness of a deserted district: a quarter which might almost have been dead, abruptly abandoned by seamen and foreigners. I was alone, subjected to the stares of prostitutes seated at their windows or in the doorways, whose eyes seemed to ransack my very soul.They did not speak to me. Leaning on the sides of tall bay-windows or huddled in doorways, they were silent. Their breasts and arms were bare, bizarrely made up in pink, their eyebrows were darkened, they wore their hair in corkscrew-curls, decorated with paper flowers and metal birds. And they were all exactly alike!They might have been huge marionettes, or tall mannequin dolls left behind in panic - for I divined that some plague, some frightful epidemic brought from the Orient by sailors, had swept through the town and emptied it of its inhabitants. I was alone with these simulacra of love, abandoned by the men on the doorsteps of the brothels.I had already been wandering for hours without being able to find a way out of that miserable quarter, obsessed by the fixed and varnished eyes of all those automata, when I was seized by the sudden thought that all these girls were dead, plague-stricken and putrefied by cholera where they stood, in the solitude, beneath their carmine plaster masks... And my entrails were liquefied by cold. In spite of that harrowing chill, I was drawn closer to a motionless girl. I saw that she was indeed wearing a mask... And the girl in the next doorway was also masked... And all of them were horribly alike under their identical crude colouring...I was alone with the masks, with the masked corpses, worse than the masks... When, all of a sudden, I perceived that beneath the false faces of plaster and cardboard, the eyes of these dead women were alive.Their vitreous eyes were looking at me...I woke up with a cry, for in that moment I had recognised all the women. They all had the eyes of Kranile and Willie, of Willie the mime and Kranile the dancer. Every one of the dead women had Kranile's left eye and Willie's right eye... So that every one of them appeared to be squinting.Am I to be haunted by masks now?","author":"Jean Lorrain","tags":["automata","cholera","dead","death","decadence","dream","mannequin","mannequins","marionettes","mask","masks","nightmare","plague","prostitutes","puppets","town"],"id":233824,"author_id":"Jean+Lorrain"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":24,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}