But Marchent, most journalists can’t be trusted. You do know that, don’t you?
Your cigarette has become one long cylindrical ash.
A dreadful suspicion was coming over me. Hadn’t my mortal life been nothing but abysmal struggle and trivia and fear? Wasn’t that the way it was for most mortals? Wasn’t that the message of a score of modern writers and poets – that we wasted our lives in foolish preoccupation? Wasn’t this all a miserable cliche?
There are times when one simply cannot say no.
And I had the most disconcerting sensation: that in my memory she would look up from that game of solitaire and the sockets of her eyes would be empty.
Some things one doesn’t want to remember.
Why don’t people do what they really want to do, Reuben?” he asked. “Why do we so often settle for what makes us devoutly unhappy! Why do we accept that happiness just isn’t possible?
Because if it’s really true that there’s no order, then anything can happen to us. Anything at all. There’s no real natural law, no right and wrong that’s immutable, and the world is suddenly a savage place where any number of things can go wrong.
I watched them with the eyes of a hungry ghost.
He took another quick swallow of the coffee. Tasted awful to him, though it was good coffee, he’d brewed it himself. A beer was what he wanted. Not to have a beer right now was like not breathing. But it was just too great a risk.
Treasure the pain; treasure what you have with her, including the fear. Treasure what you may have, including the failure. Treasure it because if we don’t live this life, if we don’t live it to the fullest year after year and century after century, well, then, we die.
This was that lucid and dangerous state with drinking, when everything began to shimmer; when there was meaning in the grain of the marble; when one could make the most offensive speeches.
He looked away as if he were again disengaging himself from the present.
If it’s all connected, I don’t like it,” I muttered. “All this is too apocalyptic,” I said. “I can live with the notion that this world is a Savage Garden, that things are born and die for random reasons, that suffering is irrelevant to the great brutal cycle of life. I can live with all that. But I don’t think I can live with great overarching connections.
The Coven of the Articulate – A modern slang term popular among the Undead for the vampires whose stories appear in the Vampire Chronicles – particularly Louis, Lestat, Pandora, Marius, and Armand.
Five nights ago the Voice had said, “You of all understand me. You of all understand power, the desire for power, what is at the heart of the desire for power.” “Which is what?” Rhosh had asked the Voice. “Simple,” the Voice had replied. “Those who desire power want to be immune to the power of others.
She said that no system based on arcana or esoteric knowledge would survive this age. No new revealed religion could take hold in it.
Strength? What strength! This is a weak, flopping, sloshy, repulsive collection of nerves and ganglia. Don’t even mention the word ’strength.
Mary Beth considered the matter for a long time, and then explained in her simple straightforward manner that the future wasn’t predetermined, it was merely predictable.
Yes, you are right, those of us who are known to everyone today are romantics. We are. We are poets. But we are individuals, with an immense faith in the individual and a love of the individual.