He could not construct for the child’s pleasure the world he’d lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he.
War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.
Do you think that your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledgerbook? Against what? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground.
Because the question for me was always whether that shape we see in our lives was there from the beginning or whether these random events are only called a pattern after the fact. Because otherwise we are nothing.
If one were to be a person of value that value could not be a condition subject to hazards of fortune. It had to be a quality that could not change. No matter what.
Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I’d always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it is always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals come easily.
People don’t pay attention. And then one day there’s an accounting. And after that, nothing is the same.
People complain about the bad things that happen to em that they don’t deserve but they seldom mention the good. About what they done to deserve them things.
You keep runnin that mouth and I’m goin to take you back there and screw you.
Life is a memory, and then it is nothing.
Do you have any notion of how goddamned crazy you are?
Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.
This country will kill you in a heartbeat and still people love it.
The nights were blinding cold and casket black and the long reach of the morning had a terrible silence to it.
Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.
No one can tell you what your life is goin to be, can they? No. It’s never like what you expected. Quijada nodded. If people knew the story of their lives how many would then elect to live them?
Perhaps in the world’s destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.
We think we are the victims of time. In reality, the way of the world isn’t fixed anywhere. How could that be possible? We are our own journey. And therefore we are time as well. We are the same. Fugitive. Inscrutable. Ruthless.
Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.
The small wad of burning paper drew down to a wisp of flame and then died out leaving a faint pattern for just a moment in the incandescence like the shape of a flower, a molten rose. Then all was dark again.