You cannot hear a poem without it changing you.
When I finish something, I try and read it as if I’ve never read it before. Mostly I’m looking to see what the themes are, what it’s About. When I revise, I’m trying to buttress those themes, highlight the things that add to them, remove the things that detract from them, and also make it look like I knew what I was doing all along.
He was not afraid. Not any more. Fear had died on the tree, as Shadow had died. There was no fear left, no hatred, no pain. Nothing left but essence.
Books have sexes; or to be more precise, books have genders. They do in my head, anyway. Or at least, the ones that I write do. And these are genders that have something, but not everything, to do with the gender of the main character of the story.
It adds a little wonder and beauty to the world.
It was like cooking a frog, he thought. You put the frog in the water, and then you turn on the heat. And by the time the frog notices that there’s anything wrong, it’s already been cooked. The world in which he worked was all too weird.
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.
What you have to remember,” said Mr. Ibis, testily, “is that life and death are different sides of the same coin. Like the heads and tails of a quarter.” “And if I had a double-headed quarter?” “You don’t. They only belong to fools, and gods.
Shadow had heard too many people telling each other not to repress their feelings, to let their emotions out, let the pain go. Shadow thought there was a lot to be said for bottling up emotions.
At the End, each of us stands naked. At the end, each of us stands alone.
Now, as all of you will have had reason aplenty to discover for yourselves, there are new gods growing in America, clinging to growing knots of belief: gods of credit-card and freeway, of internet and telephone, of radio and hospital and television, gods of plastic and of beeper and of neon. Proud gods, fat and foolish creatures, puffed up with their own newness and importance.
They just aren’t as interesting naked,” she said. “It’s the unwrapping that’s half the fun. Like with gifts, and eggs.
Olympic-grade lurkers.
There is more to it than just, you prosper, your enemies fail,” said Mama Zouzou.
It seemed like a fine title for a book of short stories. There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts.
They may share certain cultural signifiers – money, a federal government, entertainment; it’s the same land, obviously – but the only things that give it the illusion of being one country are the green-back, The Tonight Show, and McDonald’s.
You’ve hit someone,” he said. “No I haven’t,” said Crowley. “Someone’s hit me.
This country started going to hell when they stopped hanging folks.
We do not always remember the things that do no credit to us. We justify them, cover them in bright lies or with the thick dust of forgetfulness. All of the things that Shadow had done in his life of which he was not proud, all the things he wished he had done otherwise or left undone, came at him then in a swirling storm of guilt and regret and shame, and he had nowhere to hide from them.
But you stayed where you were meant to be, and you didn’t listen to them. Well done. That’s quality, that is.