He sat down on a grassy bank and looked at the city that surrounded him, and thought, one day he would have to go home. And one day he would have to make a home to go back to. He wondered whether home was a thing that happened to a place after a while, or if it was something that you found in the end, if you simply walked and waited and willed it long enough.
Sir. Might I with due respect remind you that Mister Vandemar and myself burned down the City of Troy? We brought the Black Plague to Flanders. We have assassinated a dozen kings, five popes, half a hundred heroes and two accredited gods. Our last commission before this was the torturing to death of an entire monastery in sixteenth-century Tuscany. We are utterly professional.
Each insult is woven with just enough truth to make it wound.
He was drowning in the Time, could feel it crushing him, like an ancient forest being crushed into oil.
A squirrel, Ratatosk, lives in the branches of the world-tree. It takes gossip and messages from Nidhogg, the dread corpse-eater, to the eagle and back again. The squirrel tells lies to both of them, and takes joy in provoking anger.
That’s how I want to be remembered. I want to shine.
The world is not ending. Not if, as Astounding Science Fiction used to suggest, humans are bright enough to think our way out of the problems we think ourselves into. I.
I’m just a soul whose intentions are good,’“ he sang to the crabs and the spiders and the palmetto beetles and the lizards and the night. ‘“Oh lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.
She asked me when I had started feeling a need to grant people’s wishes, and whether I felt a desperate need to please. She asked about my mother, and I told her that she could not judge me as she would judge mortals, for I was a djinn, powerful and wise, magical and mysterious.
I was never afraid of dead folk. You know that? They never hurt you. So many things in this town can hurt you, but the dead don’t hurt hurt you. Living people hurt you. They hurt you so bad.
I am only alive when I perceive a challenge.
I believe that in the battle between guns and ideas, ideas will, eventually, win.
I don’t have a lot of patience for stories in which women are rescued by men.
Huge, dizzying, clumps and clusters of snow falling through the air, patches of white against an iron-gray sky, snow that touches your tongue with cold and winter, that kisses your face with its hesitant touch before freezing you to death. Twelve cotton-candy inches of snow, creating a fairytale world, making everything unrecognizably beautiful...
This will be the age of cruel winds, the age of people who become as wolves, who prey upon each other, who are no better than wild beasts. Twilight will come to the world, and the places where the humans live will fall into ruins, flaming briefly, then crashing down and crumbling into ash and devastation.
When the first living thing existed, I was there, waiting.
Better I should call to people who aren’t there than that people who are there should miss us because I didn’t say anything.
We win some, but we lose many. We lose a lot. We lose our friends and we lose our family. In the end we lose everything. No matter who’s with us, we always die alone. When you fight your battles, whatever battles you fight, it’s always going to be about life.
Small world,” said Coraline. “It’s big enough for her,” said the cat. “Spiders’ webs only have to be large enough to catch flies.
I watched him even then as he fell, his face undefeated, his eyes still proud.