The pain, I can assure you, will be exquisite.
Living in Hell kept him aware of the possibility of Heaven, and he’d never felt more alive.
I was born alive. Isn’t that punishment enough?
Make a fist. Lightly. Leave enough room for a breath to pass through. Good. Good. All magic proceeds from breath. Remember that.
Hopelessness is reasonable. But nothing of worth in my life came of reason. Not my love, not my art, not my heaven. So I am hopeful.
Her skin was flawless and always cool, always pale; her body was long, like her hair, like her fingers, like her laughter; and her eyes, oh, her eyes, had every season of leaf in them: the twin greens of spring and high summer, the golds of autumn, and, in her rages, black midwinter rot.
The un-people, the anti-tribe, humanity’s sack unpicked and sewn together again with the moon inside.
Hell was easy; romance was hard.
Indifference was the best remedy. Once you conceded defeat, life was a feather bed.
I have such sights to show you. Soon, you will have answers to questions you have never even dared to ask.
He’d fill every moment with the seasons he’d found in his heart: hopes like birds on a spring branch; happiness like a warm summer sun; magic like the rising mists of autumn. And best of all, love; love enough for a thousand Christmases.
They knew a lot, the dead. How many times had she said to Harry they were the world’s greatest untapped resource? It was true. All they’d seen, all they’d suffered, all they’d triumphed over – lost to a world in need of wisdom. And why? Because at a certain point in the evolution of the species a profound superstition was sewn into the human heart that the dead were to be considered sources of terror rather than enlightenment.
Pleasure was pain there, and vice versa. And he knew it well enough to call it home.
Sometimes, of course, the war required that he be cruel, but what cause worth fighting for did not require cruelty of its champions once in a while?
A sweet slip of a girl like you, why should you have to know anything about the sorrow of the world? You just believe me when I tell you... there’s no way to live your life to the full and not have a reason to shed a tear now and again. It’s not a bad feeling, child. That’s what a lament does. It makes you feel happy to be sad, in a strange way. D’you see?
Hell is reimagined by each generation. Its terrain is surveyed for absurdities and remade in a fresher mold; its terrors are scrutinized and, if necessary, reinvented to suit the current climate of atrocity; its architecture is redesigned to appall the eye of the modern damned.
It’s all part of the dance, she thought; the dust, her hands, the light that was spiraling around her: it’s all part of the same wonderful dance. And I’m in it.
She’d taken the harlot century she’d been born into for granted, knowing no other, but now-seeing it with his eyes, hearing it with his ears-she understood it afresh; saw just how desperate it was to please, yet how dispossessed of pleasure; how crude, even as it claimed sophistication; and, despite it’s zeal to spellbind, how utterly unenchanting.
I’m not afraid,” he said. “What’s the use of fear? You can’t buy it or sell it, you can’t make love to it. You can’t even wear it if they strip off your shirt and you’re cold.
What do the good know?’ he said. ‘Except what the bad teach them by their excesses?