The dead know how to savor as the living never can.
Eternity takes forever. The infinite expanse of time just does not know when to quit.
The light is the color of brandy seeping. It has a taste. Your skin tastes it, like you’re all over tongues. The taste is sugar-cane, slowly rotting, turning into the great god rum. It’s always that magic hour those film-boys love to shoot down here. Always gold.
First Law of Heroics.” The Monaciello grinned up at a confused September. “Someone has to tell you it’s impossible, or the Quest can’t go on.
Everything in creation is just a trick of the light – the only difference between heaven and hell is who’s running those lights, who’s got the switch, who knows the cues.
September smiled at her wonderful friends in all their colors and bright eyes and gentle ways. “You know, in Fairyland-Above they said that the underworld was full of devils and dragons. But it isn’t so at all! Folk are just folk, wherever you go, and it’s only a nasty sort of person who thinks a body’s a devil just because they come from another country and have different notions.
A house is a kind of box you put a girl in.
Everyone cried when the creature first spoke to them. No, not cried. They wept. They wept like the cavemen of Lascaux suddenly transported into the Sistine Chapel just in time for a live performance of Phantom of the Opera as sung by Tolkien’s elves. Their senses simply were not built for this, weren’t meant to come anywhere near this kind of velvet-barreled sensory shotgun, loaded for bear.
It’s like Goguenar’s Fourth General Unkillable Fact says: Everyone’s always saying love is the element that binds the universe together, but that’s a load of bollocks; It’s convenience.
Because the opposite of fascism isn’t anarchy, it’s theater.
But the story is no good without a villain. It can’t feel true without a villain. Otherwise, everything would already be as it ought to be, yes? Someone has to be at fault. And if you are the hero, it stands to reason that folk who do not look like you or talk like you or like to eat the same things you like to eat must be the villains. After all, the world is easy and simple, is it not?
The bears, over the years, have developed a primitive but heartfelt Buddhist discipline. Beneath the cinnamon trees they practice the repetition of the Growling Sutra. The.
She drank like a Czar and sang like a broken squeezebox and danced like the Sugarplum Fairy cutting loose at last.
I readied myself for the great effort of speaking with the throat-and-belly instead of the mind-and-heart. It is altogether a different skill.
In war you must always choose sides. One or the other. Silver or black. Human or demon. If you try to be a bridge laid down between them, they will tear you in half.
All coral in every world think of Australia the way that you and I think of Mesopotamia – it is the ancestral paradise of their civilization and they send it Valentines each February.
Eternity takes forever.
Each arrow was fletched in feathers that once belonged to immortal birds so wise that if you asked them to tell you the meaning of life, they would have an answer, and it would be short, and easy to understand, and as true as tea.
But soon the wine sack was empty, and sleep brushed my ears with her ash-lips.
When it was all done and said and shot and ignited and vaporized and swept up and put away and both sincerely and insincerely apologized for, everyone left standing knew that the galaxy could not bear a second go at this sort of thing. Something had to be done. Something mad and real and bright.