They should all be cheered by it, for isn’t it what they want? What we all want: to leave a message behind us that has an effect, if only a dire one: a message that cannot be cancelled out.
The night is mine, my own time, to do with it as I will, as long as I am quiet. As long as I don’t move. As long as I lie still.
I suffer from my own multiplicity. Two or three images would have been enough, or four, or five. That would be allowed for a firm idea: This is she. As it is, I’m watery, I ripple, from moment to moment I dissolve into my other selves.
What you don’t know won’t hurt you.
But despite everything, we didn’t do badly by one another, we did as well as most. I wish she were here, so I could tell her I finally know this.
Yes,” she said in a voice squeaky with fright. She was younger and still attractive then; she hadn’t yet allowed her body to engorge. I have noted since that some kinds of men like to bully beautiful women.
He had been with me, but he wasn’t with me now, we had been walking along a street like this one and then the future swept over us and we were separated. He was in the distance now, across the ocean, on a beach, the wind ruffling his hair, I could hardly see his features. He was moving at an ever-increasing speed away from me, into the land of the dead, the dead past, irretrievable.
Our curiosity is supposed to have limits, though these have never been defined exactly.
Female artists are biologically confused,” said Crake.
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? Oh, and who to take down with me. I have made my list.
The liver is evil and must be punished.
Congratulations on a good outcome! We’ve all been rooting for you.” Charmaine wonders who’s been doing the rooting, because she hasn’t noticed anyone. But like so many things around here, maybe the rooting has taken place behind the scenes.
Ill winds blow far and find a ready welcome.
God had come in because God is everywhere, you can’t keep him out, he is part of everything there is, so how could you ever build a wall or four walls or a door or a shut window, that he could not walk right through as if it was air.
It’s foolish to joke with those who have absolute control over you. They don’t like it; they think you don’t appreciate the full extent of their power.
It was hard to believe. The entire government, gone like that. How did they get in, how did it happen? That was when they suspended the Constitution.
Maybe night falls because it’s heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes.
How tedious is a tyranny in the throes of enactment.
The freezing rain sifts down, handfuls of shining rice thrown by some unseen celebrant. Wherever it hits, it crystallizes into a granulated coating of ice.
Human society, they claimed, was a sort of monster, its main byproducts being corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-term pain.