Love makes its demands, and you listen. You can’t bargain with it. You can’t fight it. Not if it’s really love.
Putting down the devil was the Lord’s own sport.
Stories had a way of doing that, in Grillo’s experience. It was his belief that nothing, but nothing, could stay secret, however powerful the forces with interests vested in silence. Conspirators might conspire and thugs attempt to gag but the truth, or an approximation of same, would show itself sooner or later, very often in the unlikeliest form. It was seldom hard facts that revealed the life behind the life. It was rumour, graffiti, strip cartoons and love songs.
We’re living; but we impersonate the dead better than the dead themselves.
Kaufman calculated the risks of his situation: the mathematics of panic.
To every hour, its mystery. At dawn, the riddles of life and light. At noon, the conundrums of solidity. At three, in the hum and heat of the day, a phantom moon, already high. At dusk, memory. And at midnight? Oh, then the enigma of time itself; of a day that will never come again passing into history while we sleep.
Especially politics; that was the best trough to wallow in. You could get your snout, eyes, head and front hooves in that mess of muck and have a fine old time splashing around. It was an inexhaustible subject to devour, a swill with a little of everything in it, because everything, according to Judd, was political.
Minds weren’t pictures at an exhibition, all numbered, and hung in order of influence, one marked “Cunning,” the next, “Impressionable.” They were scrawls; they were sprawling splashes of graffiti, unpredictable, unconfinable.
I am inevitable.
It was that sleep itself – the act of closing the eyes and relinquishing control of her consciousness – was something she was temperamentally unsuited to.
There was pain without hope of healing. There was life that refused to end, long after the mind had begged the body to cease. And worst, there were dreams come true.
If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke – Aye, and what then? – S. T. Coleridge, Anima Poetae.
War is but a continuation of diplomacy by alternate means.
And with that comprehension, so unlike the simplifications she’d been ruled by hitherto, she became even more certain that the carpet they carried was a last hope, while he – whose home the Weave contained – seemed increasingly indifferent to its fate, living in the moment and for the moment, touched scarcely at all by hope or regret.
Remember, Lucius, that everything you learn is already a part of you, even to the Godhead Itself. Study nothing except in the knowledge that you already knew it. Worship nothing except in adoration of your true self. And fear nothing” – there the Maestro stopped and shuddered, as though he had a presentiment – “fear nothing except in the certainty that you are your enemy’s begetter and its only hope of healing. For everything that does evil is in pain. Will you remember those things?
I am not your Father. I am but a child, like you. Afraid, like you. Fearing sometimes, as you fear.
Talk of Power and Might would always attract an audience. Lords never went out of fashion.
He loved getting crucified at the summer and winter solstices,” Norma told Harry. Norma listened while the invisible presence added something to this. “He says you should try it, Harry. A crucifixion and a good blow job. Heaven on Earth.
I will treat you with my knife the way you’ve treated my pages with your merciless eyes. Backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards.
Do you understand?” the figure beside the first speaker demanded. Its voice, unlike that of its companion, was light and breathy – the voice of an excited girl. Every inch of its head had been tattooed with an intricate grid, and at every intersection of horizontal and vertical axes a jeweled pin driven through to the bone. Its tongue was similarly decorated. “Do you even know who we are?” it asked.