William sits opposite her, drinking water from a Murray’s glass with a trace of lipstick on the rim. His fingers hold the glass, his other hand lies on the table, his neck comes out of his shirt collar, which is light green, and on top of that is his head. His eyes are blue and he has two of them. This is the sum total of William in the present tense.
The more it hurt, the more – he was convinced – he loved her.
It’s literature. It’s all books. There are good books and bad books. Literary fiction can be bad, and so can sci-fi. Sci-fi can be wonderful and so can literary fiction. As long as it’s a good book, who cares? Hold my attention; that’s all I ask. Make me believe.
Is that all we are? he thinks. Unmistakable clothing, a hairstyle, a few exaggerated features, a gesture? –.
The Fall was ongoing, but its trajectory led ever downward. Sucked into the well of knowledge, you could only plummet, learning more and more, but not getting any happier.
Every war is the war for whoever’s lived through it.
Is it disapproval or extreme lust? Toby wonders. With some men it’s hard to tell the difference.
He loved her so much when he made her unhappy, or else when she made him unhappy: at these moments he scarcely knew which was which.
An odd thing souvenir-hunting: now becomes then even while it is still now.
He was entitled to his own versions, his own conjurings. as I am. I may have served his ends, but he served mine as well.
I was bedazzled, as if struck by lightning.
Roz is crying again. What she’s mourning is her own good will. She tried so hard, she tried so hard to be kind and nurturing, to do the best thing. But Tony and the twins were right: no matter what you do, somebody always gets boiled.
The night before I left on the sealed bullet train, I reread my old diary, and then I knew what the Gardeners meant when they said, Be careful what you write. There were my own words from the time when I was so happy, except that now it was torture to read them. I took the diary down the street and around the corner and shoved it into a garboil dumpster. It would turn into oil and then all those red hearts I’d drawn would go up in smoke, but at least they would be useful along the way.
But what if she discovers the truth? What he suspects is the truth. That he’s patchwork, a tin man, his heart stuffed with sawdust. He thinks of her waiting for him, somewhere else, an island, subtropical, not muggy, her long hair waving in the sea breeze, a red hibiscus tucked behind one ear. If he’s lucky she’ll wait till that happens, till he can get there to be with her.
But now here they are, right in front of me. It’s like seeing unicorns. I want to hear them purr.
They understood about dreaming, he knew that: they dreamed themselves. Crake hadn’t been able to eliminate dreams. We’re hard-wired for dreams, he’d said. He couldn’t get rid of the singing either. We’re hard-wired for singing. Singing and dreams were entwined.
She prefers the more dramatic shows where everyone’s getting kidnapped or raped or shut up in a dark hole, and you aren’t supposed to laugh at it. You’re supposed to be upset, the way you’d be if it was happening to you. Being upset is a warmer, close-up feeling, not a chilly distant feeling like laughing at people.
Art was a kind of demonic possession. Art would dance you to death. It would move in and take you over, and then destroy you.
Ed, knows power corrupts, they’ll have experienced that first-hand. They’ll see how I’d be tempted to use my own power for personal reasons. They may not approve of that, but they’ll buy.
Malum quidem nullum esse sine aliquo bono, Tin noted in the journal he was sporadically keeping then. Every cloud has a silver lining.