He dreamed of deserts and great empty cities and imagined he could feel the minutes and hours of his life running through him, as though he were nothing but an hourglass of flesh and bone.
For an instant, at least, they seemed one and the same, as though all anguish exists in the same deep well, no matter what loss or misfortune leads us to it. We might be at odds, hate each other, and desired each others destruction, but in our despair, we are lost in the same darkness, breathing the same air as we choke on our grief.
She was young and lovely and surprised and dead. She was also blue. Blue as opals, pale blue. Blue as cornflowers, or dragonfly wings, or a spring – not summer – sky.
In moments Akiva was up in the ether, scarcely feeling the sting of ice crystals in the thin air. He let his glamour fall away, and his wings were like sheets of fire sweeping the black of the heavens. He moved at speed, onward toward another human city to find another doorway bitter with the devil’s magic, and after that another, until all bore the black handprint... Once all the doors were marked, the end would begin. And it would begin with fire.
Get out of doors, Strange. Breathe air, see things. A man should have squint lines from looking at the horizon, not just from reading in dim light.
She had inherited a story that was strewn with corpses and clotted with enmity, and was only trying to stay alive in it.
You needn’t trouble yourself. He’s only a librarian.
The world was carnage. You either suffered it or inflicted it.
The ones who know can’t tell us, and the ones who tell us don’t know.
Lazlo. You have to wake up now, my love. And he did.
It was the hate of the used and tormented, who are the children of the used and tormented, and whose own children will be used and tormented.
He’d sooner die trying to hold the world on his shoulders than running away. Better always to run toward. And so he did.
Weep slept. Dreamers dreamed. A grand moon drifted, and, and the wings of the citadel cut the sky in two: light above, dark below.
Once upon a time, there had been gods. Now there were only children going about in their dead parents’ undergarments.
He had, in his hearts, declared war on the dark child, but Lazlo was no warrior, and his hearts had no talent for hate.
Hate could do that, too – live off nothing but itself – but not forever.
There comes a certain point with a hope or a dream, when you either give it up or give up everything else.
Many a choice is made this way: By pretending it makes itself.
The way he looked at her, she felt like some kind of miracle, as though his dreamer’s eyes cast her in their glow of wonder.
The function of hate, as Sarai saw it, was to stamp out compassion – to close a door in one’s own self and forget it was ever there. If you had hate, then you could see suffering – and cause it – and feel nothing except perhaps a sordid vindication.