I’ve never done acid, finding it hard to go willingly to a place that could be frightening, hellish, and totally beyond my control. A place much like high school.
But if we are to remain a great empire, we must have a greater understanding of the hearts and minds of others.
I’ve heard it said that God is in the details. It’s the same with the truth. Leave out the details, the crucial heart, and you can damn someone with the bare bones of it.
Travel opens your mind as few other things do. It is its own form of hypnotism, and I am forever under its spell.
People think boundaries and borders build nations. Nonsense-words do. Beliefs, declarations, constitutions-words. Stories. Myths. Lies. Promises. History.
There is no greater power on this earth than story.
It is a giggle full of high spirits and merry mischief, proof that we never lose our girlish selves, no matter what sort of women we become.
We all walk in a land of dreams. For what are we but atoms and hope, a handful of stardust and sinew? We are weary travelers trying to find our way home on a road that never ends. Am I a part of your dream? or are you but a part of mine?
I feel like I swallowed a Magritte. Like on the inside, I’m made of clouds and floating eyes, green apples, and slowly rising men in bowler hats.
Will was making a speech, something about having been young and careless once, the sort of thing old-timers said when they issued a deathblow, as if they thought their sanctimonious ramblings disguised as empathy would be welcomed, but Evie was only half listening.
She hadn’t meant to get trapped in a conversation. That was the trouble with offering help to old people.
She knew what it was to wait for someone who would never come home. She knew that grief, like a scar, faded but never really went away.
With each shimmy, the bugle beads on their scandalously revealing costumes swung and shook. It was the sort of display Evie knew her mother would have found appalling – an example of the moral decay of the young generation. It was sexual and dangerous and thrilling, and Evie wanted more of it.
I’m from the health department. You’ve heard of Typhoid Mary? This fella’s got enough typhoid to start his own colony.
They see her differently now, as somebody. And isn’t that what everyone wants? To be seen?
Adina appealed to the sky. “We asked for rescue and you sent us incompetent rockstar pirates with a broken ship and perfect abs?” “Thank you, God,” Petra said.
The world expected girls to pluck and primp and put on heels. Meanwhile, boys dressed in rumpled T-shirts and baggy pants and misplace their combs, and yet you were suppose to fall at their feet? Unacceptable.
Might. Is there any opiate more powerful than that word?
For once, Evie didn’t know what to say. She hadn’t really thought of her uncle as very human. He was more like a textbook who occasionally remembered to put on a tie. But it was clear that he was, indeed, human, with a deep wound named Rotke.
I told myself it was the snow – she couldn’t possibly get to Philadelphia on the roads. I told myself a hundred lies. Children do that. It’s amazing the sorts of things you’ll make yourself believe.