I’m all ears,” she said. An untruth – her ears were a small part of her – but I let that pass.
Here comes his hand, planing slowly across the white tablecloth like a manta ray in one of those deep-sea documentaries. It’s descending onto her own hand, which she shouldn’t have left so carelessly lying around on the table.
Young love, thinks Felix wistfully. So good for the complexion.
A story is like a letter. Dear You, I’ll say. Just you, without a name. Attaching a name attaches you to the world of fact, which is riskier, more hazardous: who knows what the chances are out there, of survival, yours? I will say you, you, like an old love song. You can mean more than one. You can mean thousands. I’m not in any immediate danger, I’ll say to you. I’ll pretend you can hear me. But it’s no good, because I know you can’t.
One person alone is not a full person: we exist in relation to others.
It’s no good thinking you’re invisible if you aren’t.
The sands of time are quicksands, said Adam One. So much can sink into them without a trace. And what a blessing when those things that sink away are needless worries.
This could be the last time I have to wait. But I don’t know what I’m waiting for. What are you waiting for? they used to say. That meant Hurry up. No answer was expected. For what are you waiting is a different question, and I have no answer for that one either.
Reign of terror, they used to say, but terror does not exactly reign. Instead it paralyzes. Hence the unnatural quiet.
Sometimes these flashes of normality come at me from the side, like ambushes. The ordinary, the usual, a reminder, like a kick.
It’s like Janine, though, to take it upon herself, to decide the baby’s flaws were due to her alone. But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.
She had loved him, uselessly.
Constance did not have a bun. She didn’t need one. She more or less was a bun: neat and contained, and then so tumultuous when unleashed.
And the Internet was such a jumble of false and true factoids that no one believed what was on it any more, or else they believed all of it, which amounted to the same thing.
God isn’t what they say,” she said. She said you could believe in Gilead or you could believe in God, but not both. That was how she had managed her own crisis. I said that I wasn’t sure I would be able to choose. Secretly I feared that I would be unable to believe in either. Still, I wanted to believe; indeed I longed to; and, in the end, how much of belief comes from longing?
You don’t take a hammer – not to mention an electric screwdriver and a pipe wrench – to a guy’s computer without being quite angry.
You always do good ones. We trust you, Mr. Duke,” Says Dylan. Foolish lads, thinks Felix: never trust a professional ham.
I feared I might lose my faith. If you’ve never had a faith, you will not understand what that means. You feel as if your best friend is dying, that everything that defined you is being burned away; that you’ll be left all alone.
Each of the five tribes claims to have been the victorious attacker. Each recalls the slaughter with relish. Each believes it was ordained by their own god as righteous vengeance, because of the unholy practices carried on in the city. Evil must be cleansed with blood, they say. On that day the blood ran like water, so afterwards it must have been very clean.
Sucked into the well of knowledge, you could only plummet, learning more and more, but not getting any happier.