Being Necessary is food no less than cabbages and strawberry pies.
Being a troll, he loved the earth. A troll’s love for the earth is a peculiar thing – it is something like the way you and I love our parents and our dogs and our favorite novels and the stuffed rabbits we have had since we were in our cradles and the very best thing we have ever done with our own two hands, all smashed up together in a rough, enormous ball of feeling the size of a planet.
Hey there,” the steely abomination said with infinite, Buddha-like compassion, “it looks like you’re trying to come to grips with the existence of events and entities far beyond your experience and, as a result, are currently undergoing a small, entirely understandable, psychological break. Would you like help?
Shadows are where magic comes from. Your dark and dancing self, slipping behind and ahead and around, never quite looking at the sun.
You’re grown – crooked and backbent, but grown – and it’s time to stop hanging your heart on your mother.
All our precontact simulations categorized you as a Down-to-Clown Unflappable Guy Who Can Handle This Sort of Thing No Problem with a high probability of Being Actually into It All the Way.
The only question is this: Do you have enough empathy and yearning and desperation to connect to others outside yourself and scream into the void in four-part harmony?
But no one may know the shape of the tale in which they move. And, perhaps, we do not truly know what sort of beast it is, either. Stories have a way of changing faces. They are unruly things, undisciplined, given to delinquency and the throwing of erasers. This is why we must close them up into thick, solid books, so they cannot get out and cause trouble.
But when it finally did happen, the alien invasion turned out to be much more like Mr. Looney of the Tunes than Mr. Ridley of the Scott. Point to Nani.
I really don’t know what you’re talking about,” said the Speaker of the United State House of Representatives. “We’re doing great. Turn on any news channel, they’ll tell you. Taxes are low, business is booming, crime is down, the Patriots win the Super Bowl every year, and we’re finally getting our country back. I’ll admit, it used to be a real nightmare around here.
I asked a queen once why she didn’t want me. She wasn’t a powerful queen, not a monarch of Spain or of Albania. Just a little kingdom of nowhere, but she married well and she had a crown. The queen of nowhere looked at me with her clear grey eyes and said: “Because I don’t want to be in a story.” Princesses usually grow up to be queens. The cleverness sticks long after the beauty goes.
In my mind I know the name of an ocean the size of everything that was. My mouth can only call it death.
But even the wisest of men may die, and that is especially true when the wisest of men has a fondness for industrial chemicals.
I could not say what creeps and whispers through the branches and down the threaded Road, but I hear it, and I am not afraid.
Secrets are delicate things. They can fill you up with sweetness and leave you like a cat who has found a particularly fat sparrow to eat and did not get clawed or bitten even once while she was about it. But they can also get stuck inside you, and very slowly boil up your bones for their bitter soup. Then the secret has you, not the other way around.
If you have ever seen a falling star, you have seen a Changeling arriving.
The ghosts will eat everything because the bellies of ghosts want the whole world, just to fill one tiny corner.
All the rest of the nonsense a story requires is just a long seduction of the ending. You throw out murders and reversals and heroes and detectives and spies, juggle love affairs and near escapes and standoffs with marvellous guns, kidnappings and sorcery and comic relief and gravediggers and princesses and albino dragons, and it’s all just to lure an ending into your bed.
Perhaps one was not meant to see what a husband looked like before he made himself more or less presentable. Perhaps the republic of husbands was a strange and frightening place full of not only birds, but bats too, and lizards, and bears, and worms, and other beasts waiting to fall out of a tree and into a wedding ring.
Sometimes I am a cicada, hissing and singing in the leaves of a tree by the sunlit water, thoughtless and wordless, a voice that is all consonants and tribal clicks. Sometimes I rub my legs together like a string bass, and the lake quivers.