I won’t be one of the hundreds telling you that being alive flows like a story you write consciously, deliberately, full of linear narrative, foreshadowing, repetition, motifs. The emotional beats come down where they should, last as long as they should, end where they should, and that should come from somewhere real and natural, not from the tyranny of the theatre, the utter hegemony of fiction.
They knew all about the war with France from Papa’s magazines. But whenever they tried to imagine what a war was actually like, it unfolded in their heads like a cross between a chess game, a horse race, a country dance, and a very racy night at the theater.
It is important to announce your intentions at top volume, she thought, or your intentions will think you are ashamed of them.
Over in the refrigerated section hang lies told so long ago and so often that they turned into the truth and get taught in history books.
Narrators may go where they please.
I thought that for a long while, but you chose me, and then you chose him, and choosing is hard – one choice is never the end of the story.
You are not the chosen one, September. Fairyland did not choose you – you chose yourself.
It is in the nature of winds to Snatch and Grasp at things, and Blow Them Away.
Check your pockets, my chimney-child.
Time is communal, Marya Morevna, the most purely communal of all commodities. It belongs to us all equally.
The Heart of Fairyland is a story,” she said, and she felt so warm and light and full of rightness of it that she thought she might faint.
Jee haan, but they are the same! One hunts, one runs; one chews the carrot, one chews the Sir John Hurt. One makes eggs that go BANG! One makes Acme traps that go BANG! See? Sameful.
There is no end and no beginning. There is only we two, alone in the dark, for always.
A body needs a good memento mori to flush out the humors.
Mabry Muscat looked pleadingly at Mallow, and she could not understand why they all obeyed him – except that of course the King could eat them, and of course he was King, and did not people everywhere do more or less as they were told when someone with a crown did the telling?
I’ve always found chess to be a bit too much like real life to provide much enjoyment as a game.
Meet the fans, smile for the camera, charm the venue management, chuck anything that smacked of weakness or desperation or fear of the rapidly approaching future, secure the best possible bed for the night. The trick of it was to be ever-so-slightly too honest. No one warmed up to a perfectly professional musician, not even other musicians. They wanted you to be a little more real, a little more raw, a little more broken than they were, so they could feel magnanimous.
A heart can learn ever so many tricks, and what sort of beast it becomes depends greatly upon whether it has been taught to sit up or to lie down, to speak or to beg, to roll over or to sound alarms, to guard or to attack, to find or to stay.
But then someone didn’t do the laundry for two weeks, and now it’s nothing but tears and red faces and imprecations against one person or the other’s slovenly upbringing and laser cannons and singularity-bombs.
Perhaps my philosophy is not so sophisticated. It goes: Come inside. I love you. A Whelk’s love will grow as big as it’s allowed.