There’s a moon now, almost full. Good luck for owls; bad luck for rabbits, who often choose to cavort riskily but sexily in the moonlight, their brains buzzing with pheromones.
Between the living and the dead. They carried the Word made air.
There are no lawyers anymore, and the university is closed.
I am in love with his need.
Love was its own transparent bubble-dome: you could see the two inside it, but you couldn’t get in there yourself. That.
That was the trouble with Blood and Roses: it was easier to remember the Blood stuff. The other trouble was that the Blood player usually won, but winning meant you inherited a wasteland.
When did the body first set out on its own adventures, after having ditched its old travelling companions, the mind and the soul?
Yes, good, kind Crake. I will stop telling this story if you sing. Because it makes me forget what I am telling.
Rennie can see what she is now: she’s an object of negotiation. The truth about knights comes suddenly clear: the maidens were only an excuse. The dragon was the real business. So much for vacation romances, she thinks. A kiss is just a kiss, Jocasta would say, and you’re lucky if you don’t get trenchmouth.
But not, surely, for the first time in human history. How many others have stood in this place? Left behind, with all gone, all swept away. The dead bodies evaporating like slow smoke; their loved and carefully tended homes crumbling away like deserted anthills. Their bones reverting to calcium; night predators.
And it’s not the real Elvis you need to resemble, it’s the imitation Elvises. Not hard to look like one of them.
It disturbs me that he can remember some of these things about himself, but not others; that the things he’s lost or misplaced exist now only for me. If he’s forgotten so much, what have I forgotten?
All she wants is for both of them to be different. Not very different, a little would do it. Same molecules, different arrangement. All she wants is a miracle, because anything else is hopeless.
The combination of presence and anonymity – confession without penance, truth without consequences – it has its attractions. Getting the blood off your hands, one way or another.
After the wolvogs have gone he lies on his back on the platform, gazing up at the stars through the gently moving leaves. They seem close, the stars, but they’re far away. Their light is millions, billions of years out of date. Messages with no sender.
I need to feel physical pain, to attach myself to daily life.
Right now I still have some choice in the matter. Not whether to die, but when and how. Isn’t that freedom of a sort?
I’ve become swollen with power, true, but also nebulous with it – formless, shape-shifting. I am everywhere and nowhere: even in the minds of the Commanders I cast an unsettling shadow. How can I regain myself? How to shrink back to my normal size, the size of an ordinary woman?
In Tin’s already jaded view, experiences were what you got when you couldn’t get what you wanted, but Jorrie had always been more optimistic than him.
Were women being confined yet again to that alabaster pedestal so beloved of the Victorian age, when Woman as better-than-man gave men a license to be gleefully and enjoyably worse than women, while all the while proclaiming that they couldn’t help it because it was their nature? Were women to be condemned to virtue for life, slaves in the salt-mines of goodness?