How could anyone live without flying?
Ah, the inner eye blinks, and the spirit trembles, at the dangerous cost of seeing one’s self as one is.
He was not so lucky. He hadn’t yet had enough experience with humans to know that the thing the hold dearest to their hearts, the last thing they relinquish when all else is fading, is the consoling belief in the inferiority of others.
At its most elemental, a spell is no more than a recipe for change.
I do not deny that you overwhelm me with your beauty. You are the moon in the season of shadow light; you are the fruit of the candlewood tree; you are the phoenix in circles of flight – .
Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling porcupine,” she crooned. “Little critters fried like fritters come out crunchy and divine.
If the unlettered farmers of Munchkinland and the factory workers of Gillikin believe that their fate is being determined by how the Time Dragon dreams them up, they don’t need to bother to take responsibility for their actions or for changing their class and station in life.
The beauty of the day is the only thing that doesn’t fade in time. Day after day, such beauty revives itself.
We stand at a crossroads. Idolatry looms. Traditional values in jeopardy. Truth under siege and virtue abandoned.
And what new life can emerge from a book. Any book, maybe.
To consider what other people might say is hardly a good reason to take action or defer it.
All these last months he had begun to talk about Sarima and the family as if they were ghosts, hiding just around the curve of the spiral staircase in the tower, suppressing giggles at this long, long game of hide-and-seek.
She wondered, faintly, if it was immoral to raise children in the habit of hope. Was it not, in the end, all the harder for them to adjust to the reality of how the world worked?
There was something about words and music together that allowed people to get nearest to honest truth about what was most difficult to say. Paradoxically, only through the essential instantaneity of music could you approach its eternal pertinence.
One doesn’t know, necessarily, when one meets the trip-action person in one’s life. A good teacher, a flirt behind the dry-goods counter, a petty thief wielding a knife. Any one of a thousand chance encounters might be the chance of a lifetime. Or a deathtime.
The cunning old cow, thought Melena. She is trying that rarest of strategies, telling the truth, and making it sound plausible.
The surface of the shoes seemed to pulse with hundreds of reflections and refractions. In the firelight, it was like looking at boiling corpuscles of blood under a magnifying glass.
What more does one ask of life, really, but to stagger from moment to moment with a reason to wake and wait for the next reason to wake?
What good is it being a painter if you can’t paint yourself?
He kissed her, he kissed her, he kissed her, little by little by little.