Then she told me everyone can know everything destine knows. And more than that. She said we all not only could know everything. We do. We just tell ourselves we don’t to make it all bearable.
Death is never banished, it merely travels elsewhere.
I will wait until the end of all things, and I will eat the sun and I will eat the moon.
There was no sea and no sand, no grass nor rocks, no soil, no trees, no sky, no stars. There was no world, no heaven and no earth, at that time. The gap was nowhere: only an empty place waiting to be filled with life and with existence.
Alas, respect for the truth compels perfect honesty.
Just imagine how terrible it might have been if we’d been at all competent.
She was called Victoria, because she had beaten us in battle, seven hundred years before, and she was called Gloriana, because she was glorious, and she was called the Queen, because the human mouth was not shaped to say her true name. She was huge, huger than I had imagined possible, and she squatted in the shadows staring down at us, without moving.
Once you’ve got to the end, and you know what happens, it’s your job to make it look like you knew exactly what you were doing all along.
Yes, you’re right. It’s part of growing up, I suppose. You always have to leave something behind you.
You will forget. Death or life will take him from your minds. I know, whispered Despair, in her distant, empty voice. But I shall remember him.
I wondered, reading about the college discussions, whether, one day, people would put a trigger warning on my fiction. I wondered whether or not they would be justified in doing it. And then I decided to do it first.
And then I had to come up with a second line, and the whole thing completely fell apart. The best I could come up with was Tum-tumpty-tumpty-tumpty got a fright.” Fat Charlie blinked. “Who exactly is Tum-tumpty-tumpty-tumpty?” “It’s not anybody. It’s just there to show you where the words ought to be. But I never really got any further on it than that, and I couldn’t turn up with just a first line, some tumpties and three words of an epic poem, could I? That would have been disrespecting you.
And then I had it. The perfect first line: Blood calls to blood like sirens in the night.
Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art.
He was cold, standing in a wood, talking to a big black bird who was currently brunching on Bambi.
After that he had more or less stopped reading. You could not trust fiction. What good were books, if they couldn’t protect you from something like that?
There’s no theaters in Heaven,” said Crowley. “And very few films.
What are we going to do now?” “Try and get some sleep.” “You don’t need sleep. I don’t need sleep. Evil never sleeps, and Virtue is ever-vigilant.” “Evil in general, maybe. This specific part of it has got into the habit of getting its head down occasionally.
The world is full of all sorts of brilliant stuff and I haven’t found out all about it yet, so I don’t want anyone messing it about or endin’ it before I’ve had a chance to find out about it. So you can all just go away.
She rode a red motorbike. Not a friendly Honda red; a deep, bloody red, rich and dark and hateful.