When you don’t need anything anymore, the only thing you need is stories, and songs, and beauty, and spectacle. That’s the good stuff. The stuff that reminds us who we are.
Time is no one’s friend – time has no social niceties and holds the door for nobody nowhere. But I hold the door for time, with my one good paw.
Didn’t you know? All stepmothers are witches. It is our compensation for remaining forever an intruder in another woman’s house.
However unlikely it may seem, it is the truth and, therefore, one hundred percent likely.
The body does the living; the shadow does the dreaming.
As you swallow the cow’s tongue, think for a moment about how strange and holy that is, to devour the tongue of another. To steal from it all its power to speak, to low at the moon, to call to its calf. To be worthy of such food you must guard your own words carefully, speaking only the wise and clever ones, lest your tongue end up likewise, on the plate of a rich man.
What happens to the West happens to Snow White, which is to say they both turn into jokes.
Old things have strange hungers.
We who were once living can guard you still, and love you, and keep you living safe and whole. Nothing ever truly dies.
Do you know what a thirteen-year-old girl can do when she is alone and frightened and believes she is right?
Still life is boring. Never stand still! Jumping bean life!
Dredge up a hostile, sulfurous silicate lava sink slaloming between two phlegmy suns well into their shuffleboard years, a miserable wad of hell-spit, free-range acid clouds, and the gravitational equivalent of untreated diabetes, a stellar expletive that should never be forced to cope with something as toxic and flammable as a civilization, and before you can say no, stop, don’t, why? the place will be crawling with postcapitalist glass balloons filled with sentient gases all called Ursula.
So it is written – but so, too, it is crossed out. You can write over it again. You can make notes in the margins. You can cut out the whole page. You can, and you must, edit and rewrite and reshape and pull out the wrong parts like bones and find just the thing and you can forever, forever, write more and more and more, thicker and longer and clearer. Living is a paragraph, constantly rewritten.
We are halves, but we make an infinite whole.
People who share a secret share a heart.
That’s the only way to look at things, I always say,” propounded the Duke. “Slantways, sideways, and upside down.
But the Tsar of Death and the Tsar of Life greatly feared one another, for Death is surrounded by souls, and is never lonely, and the Tsar of Life had hidden his death away in a place deeper than secrets, and more secret than depth.
Just slip on something black and low-cut, carve yourself the biggest goddamn slice of whatever cake they said you couldn’t have, and be a VILLAIN for a night! Come on. You know they deserve it. You know they ALL deserve it. What’s the use of all that rage you got if you don’t take it out for spin?
Is it really a cage if it’s the size of the world?” “Yes,” said Emily, Charlotte, and Anne together, rather more loudly than any of them expected.
But the trick most folk are so awfully fond of learning, the absolute second they’ve got hold of a heart, is to pretend they don’t have one at all. It is the very first danger of the hearted.