If in doubt, play dumb,” said Ada.
They were too careful around me, as if I was breakable. It was like I was a prize cat they were cat-sitting: you’d take your own cat for granted, you’d be casual about it, but someone else’s cat would be another story because if you lost that cat you would feel guilty about it in a completely different way.
There is only so much manpower and tax revenue that can be devoted to riot control, to social surveillance, to chasing fast youths down dark alleyways, to fire-hosing and pepper-spraying suspicious-looking gatherings.
Curiosity got the cat in trouble. Let’s go.
On my Tree of Paradise, I intend to put a border of snakes entwined; they will look like vines or just a cable pattern to others, as I will make the eyes very small, but they will be snakes to me; as without a snake or two, the main part of the story would be missing.
Fallow state, the Gardeners would say. They used that diagnosis for a wide range of conditions, from depression to post-traumatic stress to being permanently stoned. The theory was that while in a Fallow state you were gathering and conserving strength, nourishing yourself through meditation, sending invisible rootlets out into the universe.
Boys with their first beards can be a thorough pain in the neck.
They should have never given us uniforms if they didn’t want us to be an army.
There are a great many buttocks in this room. I am no longer used to them.
Her strongest prison is of her own construct.
That is the “real” reader, the Dear Reader for whom every writer writes. And many Dear Readers will become writers in their turn. That is how we writers all started: by reading. We hear the voice of a book speaking to us.
Some might call the overthrowing of an illegitimate government an act of treason; without a doubt, many have had this thought about me. Now that you have joined us, it is the same thought that others will have about you. But loyalty to a higher truth is not treason, for the ways of God are not the ways of man, and they are most emphatically not the ways of woman.
Some cheap do-it-yourself enlightenment handbook, Nirvana for halfwits.
She’s certainly old enough,” said Aunt Vidala. “We have taught her all we can. If they stay in school too long, they become disruptive.
I know she’s looking at me, the lopsided mouth smiling a little, the face closed and defiant. There is the same shame, the sick feeling in my body, the same knowledge of my own wrongness, awkwardness, weakness; the same wish to be loved; the same loneliness; the same fear. But these are not my own emotions any more. They are Cordelia’s; as they always were.
Take what the moment offers. Don’t close doors. Be thankful.
Somewhere in Limbo, all the old devices and appliances and costumes are lined up, waiting their turn for reentry.
We should not expect too much from faith,” he said. “Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly.
Now it’s full night, clear, moonless and filled with stars, which are not eternal as was once thought, which are not where we think they are. If they were sounds, they would be echoes, of something that happened millions of years ago: a word made of numbers. Echoes of light, shining out of the midst of nothing. It’s old light, and there’s not much of it. But it’s enough to see by.
Sometimes there would be couples, arm in arm – laughing, happy, amorous. Victims of an enormous fraud, and at the same time its perpetrators, or so I felt.