Thirty-five years a showgirl that she admits to, and her feet hurt, day in, day out, from the high heels, but she can walk down steps with a forty-pound headdress in high heels, she’s walked across a stage with a lion in high heels, she could walk through goddamn Hell in high heels if it came to that.
We’ll be out of business in a few years. We got savings put aside for the lean years, but the lean years have been here for a long while, and every year they just get leaner. Horus is crazy, really bugfuck crazy, spends all his time as a hawk, eats roadkill, what kind of a life is that?
I am the Dream of Cats, and I walk by myself.
I knowed a man in Paphlagonia who’d swallow a live snake every morning, when he got up. He used to say, he was certain of one thing, that nothing worse would happen to him all day.
You dumped me, and I don’t exist anymore.
I’m not much of a challenge here in the dark.
In my country we smile in bursts, like the sun coming out and illuminating the fields and then retreating again behind a cloud too soon. Smiles are valuable here. But you smiled all the time, as if everything you saw delighted you. You smiled the first time you saw me, even wider than before. You smiled and I was lost, like a small child in a great forest, never to find its way home again.
You’re too clever and too quiet for them to understand. They.
The heart is greater than the universe, for it can find pity in it for everything in the universe, and the universe itself can feel no pity.
Ah now, that’s manners for you,” said the little figure, who wore a large, floppy hat and a large, flappy overcoat. “Is there more? he says, as if it were poached quail’s eggs and smoked gazelle and truffles, not just a mushrump, what tastes more or less like something what’s been dead for a week and a cat wouldn’t touch. Manners.
Oh, sweety-weety-pudding-and-pie, you are in so much trouble.
Within my hearing you have spoken of the beauty of this small city. How standing inside the stained-glass confection of the old church was like being imprisoned inside a kaleidoscope of jewels. It was like being in the heart of the sun.
Nine nights I hung on the bare tree, my side pierced with a spear’s point. I swayed and blew in the cold winds and the hot winds, without food, without water, a sacrifice of myself to myself, and the worlds opened to me.
Sure we have. You work for me now. You protect me. You transport me from place to place. You run errands. In an emergency, but only in an emergency, you hurt people who need to be hurt. In the unlikely event of my death, you will hold my vigil. And in return I shall make sure that your needs are adequately taken care of.
I take it this is some obscure West Indian usage of the word ‘similar’ which means ‘nothing at all alike’?
It was a city that had been built just to be abandoned, in which all the fears and madnesses and revulsions of the creatures who built it were made into stone.
G. K. Chesterton compared fantastic fiction to going on holiday – that the importance of your holiday is the moment you return, and you see the place you live through fresh eyes.
If you change the world, the world will change.
I always meant to look you up, but I got distracted. You know how it is.” “Not really.” “Things came up.” “What kind of things?” “Things. They came up. That’s what things do. They come up.
Dinosaurs are reptiles, sir,” said Professor Steg. “We do not go in for milk.