Whoever that hermit was, he obviously despised his fellow man, and that meant he was OK in Eliot’s book.
Hate isn’t like love, it doesn’t end. It goes on forever. You can never get to the bottom of it. And it’s so pure, so unconditional!
Based on what he had overheard, one of his classmates had placed second in the Putnam Competition, as a high school junior. He knew for a fact that one of the girls had managed to take over the plenary session of the national model UN and push through a motion sanctioning the use of nuclear weapons to protect a critically endangered species of sea turtle. This while representing Lesotho.
It was ending too soon, the way everything did, everything except Ebola viruses and really bad people like psychopaths. Those things never ended.
Magic, Quentin discovered, wasn’t romantic at all. It was grim and repetitive and deceptive. And he worked his ass off and became very good at it.
This was bad behavior, and she knew it. She did it because she was angry and because she disliked herself. The more she disliked herself, the more she took it out on other people, and the more she took it out on other people the more she disliked herself.
The quietness of it was weird: real fights happened without a sound track.
Quentin hadn’t planned on spending the rest of his afternoon – or morning, or whatever this was – taking a standardized test on an unknown subject, at an unknown educational institution, in some unknown alternate climatic zone where it was still summer.
And at that moment, out of nowhere, Janet knew that she herself would never have children. Probably she’d known it for a while, but it was the first time she’d admitted it to herself. Let others breed. Let them, and God be with them. She would be the witness – she was tough enough to see everything break and not break herself. They also serve who fly around on hippogriffs and watch.
Quentin did a magic trick. Nobody noticed. They picked their way along the cold, uneven sidewalk together: James, Julia, and Quentin. James and Julia held hands. That’s how things were now. The sidewalk wasn’t quite wide enough, so Quentin trailed after them, like a sulky child. He would rather have been alone with Julia, or just alone period, but you couldn’t have everything. Or at least the available evidence pointed overwhelmingly to that conclusion.
Nothing a recovering addict likes more than a tale of how bad it had been in the old days, and how low a fellow addict had sunk. Let the one-downsmanship begin.
Apparently if you’re enough of a power nerd, there is nothing that cannot be flowcharted.
It didn’t feel like an exalted business – there was nothing grand about it. It hadn’t felt noble and righteous, it felt rough and ugly and bloody and cruel. It was what was necessary, that was all.
When he saw Julia, he searched himself for the old love he used to feel for her. It wasn’t gone, but it was a dull, distant ache, still there but healed over – just the shrapnel they couldn’t remove.
Her depressive tendency, the flip side of her manic streak, was stirring. Why were they even doing this? it wanted to know. What a waste of time, of effort. Of pencils. Plum needed to get moving, but she was having trouble attaching meanings to things; the meanings kept peeling off like old stickers.
I’ve waited a long time for this,” Penny said. “Then this is going to be kind of an anticlimax,” Alice said, and she punched him in the face. Boom! Oh my God. It was beautiful, just like in a movie: straight from the shoulder, feet planted, hips rolled, follow-through, the works. Penny never saw it coming.
Welcome to Facelessbook: an antisocial network.
The past was ruins, but the present was still in play. They would have to tie him down to keep him from going to Ember’s Tomb.
Age is wasted on the young. Just like youth.
It would be like Prospero’s island, but in a good way: not a country of exile, a model world, safe and peaceful and private. A magician’s land.