Impossible things happen. When they do happen, most people just deal with it. Today, like every day, roughly five thousand people on the face of the planet will experience one-chance-in-a-million things, and not one of them will refuse to believe the evidence of their senses. Most of them will say the equivalent, in their own language, of “Funny old world, isn’t it?” and just keep going.
Names. Names. The old woman squinted, then she shook her head. She was herself, and the name she had been born with had been eaten by time and lack of use.
She wondered how she would feel to be a married woman. It would be the end of her life, she decided, if life was a time of choices.
A ghost-memory rises, here: a phantom moment, a shaky reflection in the pool of remembrance. I know how it felt when the scavengers took my heart. How it felt as the hunger birds, all mouth, tore into my chest and snatched out my heart, still pumping, and devoured it to get at what was hidden inside it. I know how that feels, as if it was truly a part of my life, of my death. And then the memory snips and rips, neatly, and -.
No two readers can or will ever read the same book, because the reader builds the book in collaboration with the author.
It’s Coraline, not Caroline. Coraline.′ said Coraline.
Writers live in houses other people built.
The Marquis de Carabas liked being who he was, and when he took risks he liked them to be calculated risks, and he was someone who double-and triple-checked his calculations. He.
Value’s in what people think. Not in what’s real. Value’s in dreams, boy.
I am thinking of a sky filled with spaceships, so many of them that they seem like a plague of locusts, silver against the luminous mauve of the night.
How can you be happy in this world? You have a hole in your heart. You have a gateway inside you to lands beyond the world you know. They will call you, as you grow. There can never be a time when you forget them, when you are not, in your heart, questing after something you cannot have, something you cannot even properly imagine, the lack of which will spoil your sleep and your day and your life, until you close your eyes for the final time...
I made a list of inventions the world would be better off without and, one by one, I uninvented them all.
I was going to the library, too. I’d get my parents to drop me off at the library on their way to work in the morning during school vacations. Sometimes my dad would embarrass me by making me take sandwiches. I was absolutely fine given the prospect of a day spent with books and not eating.
Being a geological formation gives you a lot of time to think. Also, I subscribed to a number of learned journals.
There was no moon, but the night sky was a riot of crisp and glittering autumn stars.
Life imitates art, but clumsily, copying its movements when it thinks it isn’t looking.
The old religion is what gets the crops up and keeps your cock hard and makes sure that nobody builds a bloody great motorway through an area of outstanding natural beauty. The Gateway stands, and the hill stands, and the place stands. It’s well, well over two thousand years old. You don’t go mucking about with anything that powerful.
I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality I knew was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger. I saw the world from above and below. I saw that there were patterns and gates and paths beyond the real.
There were ten tongues within one head, and one went out to fetch some bread, to feed the living and the dead.” “What does it mean?” “A wren made a nest inside the skull of a gibbeted corpse, flying in and out of the jaw to feed its young. In the midst of death, as it were, life just keeps on happening.
Mrs. Whitaker found the Holy Grail; it was under a fur coat.