She was unbinding her turban... He watched, not breathing, a presentiment of something horrible stirring in his brain, inexplicably...The red folds l… - Catherine Lucile Moore

When you’re young you never doubt yourself. You never wonder if you’re justified. But as a man gets older he learns to doubt. Whether he can do a thing—whether he should.

Beauty is as tangible as blood, in a way. It is a separate, distinct force that inhabits the bodies of men and women. You must have noticed the vacuity that accompanies perfect beauty in so many women...the force so strong that it drives out all other forces and lives vampirishly at the expense of intelligence and goodness and conscience and all else.

She half expected, despite her brave words, to come out upon the storied and familiar red-hot pave of hell, and this pleasant, starlit land surprised her and made her wary. The things that built the tunnel could not have been human. She had no right to expect men here. She was a little stunned by finding open sky so far underground, though she was intelligent enough to realize that however she had come, she was not underground now. No cavity in the earth could contain this starry sky.