The Future,” says Ian, in a film-trailer voice. “Coming soon, to a Present near you.
The most humiliating thing you can do to a man is to save his life.
Valleysmen’d not want to hear, she answered, that human hunger birthed the Civ’lize, but human hunger killed it too. I know it from other tribes offland what I stayed with. Times are you say a person’s b’liefs ain’t true, they think you’re sayin’ their lifes ain’t true an’ their truth ain’t true.
Air in the chateau clammy like laundry that won’t dry. Door-banging drafts down the passageways. Autumn is leaving its mellowness behind for its spiky, rotted stage. Don’t remember summer even saying good-bye.
Why have you given your life to books, TC? Dull, dull, dull! The memoirs are bad enough, but all that ruddy fiction! Hero goes on a journey, stranger comes to town, somebody wants something, they get it or they don’t, will is pitted against will. “Admire me, for I am a metaphor.
This is how to control entire populations – don’t suppress news, but make it so dumb and dull that nobody has any interest in it.
Since when, mocks the moon-gray cat, do cats need keys?
The best pop songs are art,” says Jasper. “Making art is already a political act. The artist rejects the dominant version of the world. The artist proposes a new version. A subversion. It’s there in the etymology. Tyrants are right to fear art.
When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to exist.
I loved Vinny like he was a part of me, and he loved me like a stick of gum. He’d spat me out when the flavor went, unwrapped another, and stuffed it in, and not just anyone, but Stella Yearwood. My best mate.
Yet the way men live is so far removed from the way they ought to live that anyone who abandons what ‘is’ for what ‘should be’ pursues his downfall rather than his preservation;.
Growing old is an unwinnable campaign. During this war we witness ugly scenes. Truths mutate to whims. Faith becomes cynical transactions between liars. Sacrifices turn out to be needless excesses. Heroes become old farts, and young farts become heroes. Ethics become logos on sports clothing.
Time is the speed at which the past decays, but disneys enable a brief resurrection.
We drift, often on a whim, searching for something to search for.
Acting like an insider can be enough to be one.
The devil, Sixsmith, is in the pronouns.
But Ed Brubeck’s a guy, like Vinny’s a guy, and guys are all sperm-guns.
The truth of a myth, your Honor, is not its words but its patterns.
Then the three of us hug, and if I could choose on moment of my life to sit inside of for the rest of eternity... it’d be now, no question.
Neither of us had anything to say, or rather we had everything to say, but after all those nights of not saying a word, we suddenly found we had not one dollar of time left between us.