When she pulled the ribbon out of her mattress, at first light the next morning, it was brown.
From having nursed alongside a variety of women, Lib knew that self-mastery counted for more than almost any other talent. She.
A door must be open or shut... You can’t have it both ways.
Over a lifetime you packed your brain tight with data, like an overstuffed suitcase, only for it all to fall out in the end.
Evolution protects those who protect themselves.
Those fruity stenches brought Lib back to Scutari, where the sedatives always seemed to run out halfway through a run of amputations. As.
All this reverential – I’m not a saint.” Ma’s voice is getting loud again. “I wish people would stop treating us like we’re the only ones who ever lived through something terrible. I’ve been finding stuff on the Internet you wouldn’t believe.
They used to draw a skull at the bottom of a tankard, so when you’d drained it you’d be reminded you were going to die someday.
Dearest Fido! You’re not the stuff of a chapter,” Helen protests. “Several volumes, at least.
When I was four I didn’t know about the world, or I thought it was only stories. Then Ma told me about it for real and I thought I knowed everything. But now I’m in the world all the time, I actually don’t know much, I’m always confused.
How could anyone bear to be a parent? Like contracting to love a werewolf.
She struggled to think of one day in more than fifteen years of life when instead of drifting along like a leaf on the river she’d simply grabbed what she wanted. The.
It was as if I had spent thirteen years specialising in a certain language, only to discover all its speakers had scattered and renounced their native tongue. No, worse than that, because at least dead languages could be studied. This was as if I had spent my life learning to play a certain unique instrument, only to see some crazed vandal smash it to pieces.
I looked at my stepmother, and she stared back at me, and our eyes were like mirrors set opposite each other, making a corridor of reflections, infinitely hollow.
Was genius a weed that sprang up anywhere, or did it need a particular habitat?
The human mind needs boundaries. Without them it would fall in on itself, like a crushed honeycomb.
I heard a knocking in my skull, and kept running to the door, but there was never anyone there.
When I was as young as you are now I learned how to save my own life.
The thing is to take your life in your hands.
Would have pleased. Such convoluted grammar death required: what tense to describe the hypothetical emotions of a woman who didn’t exist anymore?