People talk about the Endarkenment like our ancestors talked about the Black Death, as if it’s an act of God. But we summoned it, with every tank of oil we burned our way through. My generation were diners stuffing ourselves senseless at the Restaurant of the Earth’s Riches knowing – while denying – that we’d be doing a runner and leaving our grandchildren a tab that can never be paid.
I looked gloomily into the murky lake at the bottom of my teacup, and.
But, Henry, this is wicked!′ But, Adam, the world is wicked. Maoris prey on Moriori, Whites prey on darker-hued cousins, fleas prey on mice, cats prey on rats, Christians on infidels, first mates on cabin boys, Death on the Living. ‘The weak are meat, the strong do eat.
Time cannot permeate this sabbatical. We do not stay dead long.
Then the true true is diff’rent to the seemin’ true? said I. Yay, an’ it usually is, I mem’ry Meronym sayin’, an’ that’s why true true is presher’n’rarer’n diamonds.
A dragonfly arrives and leaves like a change of mind.
And she looks like a girl unwrapping an expensive present she knew she was getting.
There’s no future in stories... Stories are things of the past, things for museums.
Why’s it okay to draw spaceships if you’re seven, but not okay to draw diabolical mazes? Who decides that spending money on Space Invaders is fine, but if you buy a calculator with loads of symbols you’re asking to be picked on? Why’s it okay to listen to the Top 40 on Radio 1 but not okay to listen to stations in other languages?
But this isn’t a ghost story: the ghost is in the background, where she has to be. If she was in the foreground she’d be a person.
Your leaders must know powerful magic. Yes, said one of the women. The magic is called Marx, Stalin, Lenin and Class Dialectics. It didn’t sound like very powerful magic to me.
Wrong turns teach us the right way.
The world runs on strangers coping.
There’s a splish of a fish. I see where it was, but not where it is.
Orito pictures the human mind that weaves disparate threads of belief, memory, and narrative into an entity whose common name is Self, and which sometimes calls itself Perception.
Siddhartha is a dead man and a living ideal. The man taught about overcoming pain, and influencing one’s future reincarnations. “But I pray to the ideal.
I lied, yes, but that doesn’t make me a liar. Lying’s wrong, but when the world spins backwards, small wrong may be a big right.
Prayer may be a placebo for the disease of helplessness, but placebos can make you feel better.
Small talk, thinks Elf, is Polyfilla you fill cracks with so you don’t have to watch them widening.
Love’s a dictator. I know this, yet the blast furnace in my ribcage roars You You You You You You just the same, and there’s bugger-all I can do about it.