He would sooner live a life of endless blessing than one of dying curse, and after all, it was in how you chose to see things that the narrow border between Hell and Paradise was traced.
Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It’s us. Only us. Streets stank of fire. The void breathed hard on my heart, turning its illusions to ice, shattering them. Was reborn then, free to scrawl own design on this morally blank world.
She finds herself suspicious of religious zeal that has a business plan.
Let me show you firmness of my belief.
The brightest has a gathering of people stood about it. Trapped beneath their heels, stretched shadows shy back from the flames, yet do not jump or dance. What are they burning there, so still by night? My.
Labour at your work until people cannot imagine what you have designed existing any other way.
I believe he’s a man of great integrity, but he seems to see the world in very black and white. Manichean terms. I personally believe that to be an intellectual limitation.
Miracles. Events with astronomical odds of occurring like oxygen turning into gold. I’ve longed to witness such an event, and yet I neglect that in human coupling, millions upon millions of cells compete to create life for generation after generation until finally, your mother loves a man and out of that contradiction against unfathomable odds, it’s you-only you-that emerged, to distill so specific a form from all that chaos. It’s like turning air into gold. A miracle.
I imagine that existential dread probably ought to get a devil. A devil of post-colonial angst. A devil of complicated grief.
It smelled big, smelled like morning in a church hall where a jumble sale was going on, the air a weak infusion in which stale, damp coats steeped with the crumbling fresh pinkness of homemade coconut ice, the sneeze-provoking pages of old children’s annuals and the sour metal lick of cast-off Dinky cars.
Evening work is economical. Power comes most cheaply by night.
Information is the only thing that can be lost in an imperishable universe. Mind is the only thing that truly dies.
You have to impress him! Be independent and plucky, but often do things that are moronic and out of character!
If you would know my path and follow in its way, then know the land about, both track and willage, in its bridge and in its drownings. Know the outcast rat-shacks, relic stones and gill-halls. Mark each path above and know the underpath below, its secret way from vault to treasure hole.’ My.
Alma had told him once that to smell burning was a symptom schizophrenics suffered from, adding “but then they probably set fire to things quite often, so it’s bound to be a tricky judgement call.
They made you into a victim, Evey. They made you into a statistic. But that’s not the real you. That’s not who you are inside.
Madness was all very well if you were Alma and in a profession where insanity was a desirable accessory, a kind of psycho-bling. You couldn’t get away with it down Martin’s Yard, though. In the reconditioning business there was no real concept of delightful eccentricity. You’d find yourself as the recipient of a pharmaceutical lobotomy provided on the National Health, as a result of which your waistband would expand as your abilities to think, talk and respond to stimuli contracted. This.
They are bright and exciting. Like America. Like its women.
Crazed with helplessness, I cursed God and wept, wondering if he wept also.
He’d been wrong to tell the freaked-out teenager that it would all get better, because actually it didn’t. It just faded to a deep held chord, a pedal-organ drone behind the normal noise of life, a thing that you forgot about and thought you’d put away forever, but it was still there. It was still here. He.