And it’s late at night: a cloudless night, as I observed while walking here. The full moon is out, casting her equivocal corpse-glow over all.
I’ll make a quick exit. A needleful or two of morphine will do it. Best that way: if I allowed myself to live, I would disgorge too much truth. Torture is like dancing: I’m too old for it. Let the younger ones practise their bravery. Though they may not have a choice about that, since they lack my privileges.
Health and Beauty, the two seductive twins joined at the navel, singing their eternal siren songs.
On the other hand, she had an uncanny resistance to physical pain: if she burnt her mouth or cut herself, as a rule she didn’t cry. It was ill will, the ill will of the universe, that distressed her.
Of course Crake wasn’t Crake yet, at that time: his name was Glenn. Why did it have two n’s instead of the usual spelling? “My dad liked music,” was Crake’s explanation, once Jimmy got around to asking him about it, which had taken a while. “He named me after a dead pianist, some boy genius with two n’s.
And once you’ve got clocks, you’ve got death and dead people, because time, as we know, runs on, and then it runs out, and dead people are situated outside of time, whereas living people are still immersed in it.
Tonight I have a little surprise for you,” he says. He laughs; it’s more like a snigger. I notice that everything this evening is little. He wishes to diminish things, myself included.
Forbidden things are open to the imagination. That was why Eve ate the Apple of Knowledge, said Aunt Vidala: too much imagination. So it was better not to know some things. Otherwise your petals would get scattered.
Zenia has stolen something from him, the one thing he always kept safe before, from all women, even from Roz. Call it his soul. She slipped it out of his breast pocket when he wasn’t looking, easy as rolling a drunk, and looked at it, and bit it to see if it was genuine, and sneered at it for being so small after all, and then tossed it away, because she’s the kind of woman who wants what she doesn’t have and gets what she wants and then despises what she gets. What.
Stan got the message. He allowed the chicken assignations. What did that make him? A chicken pimp. Better than dead.
You don’t teach boys to be charming. It makes people think they are devious.
I made choices, and then, having made them, I had fewer choices.
Jealousy is a very destructive emotion, Adam One used to say. It’s part of the stubborn Australopithecine heritage we’re stuck with. It eats away at you and deadens your Spiritual life, but also it leads you to hatred, and causes you to harm others.
Many believed what they were told: that the welfare of the entire kingdom depended on their selflessness.
She wished him to owe his recovery to her alone – to her care, to her tireless devotion. That is the other side of selflessness: its tyranny.
Languor is a more efficient method of control.
Children believe that everything bad that happens is somehow their fault.
And what did I amount to, once the official version gained ground? An edifying legend. A stick used to beat other women with.
The palliative care nurses welcome him: he’s a spot of brightness, they claim he keeps the patients interested in life. “We don’t think of the clients here as dying,” one of them said to him on his first visit. “After all everyone’s dying, just some of us more slowly.
Words are so often like window curtains, a decorative screen put up to keep the neighbours at a distance.