Mr. Nancy passed a key to Shadow, another to Czernobog. “Is there a flashlight on the bus?” asked Shadow. “No,” said Mr. Nancy. “But it’s just dark. You mustn’t be afraid of the dark.” “I’m not,” said Shadow. “I’m afraid of the people in the dark.
You’ve a good heart,” she told him. “Sometimes that’s enough to see you safe wherever you go.” Then she shook her head. “But mostly, it’s not.
The old woman put the cloth down on the dresser. “Can’t drink the water from the sea, can you? Too salty. Like drinking life’s blood.
San Francisco isn’t in the same country as Lakeside any more than New Orleans is in the same country as New York or Miami is in the same country as Minneapolis... 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 is are the greenback, The Tonight Show, and McDonald’s.
He calls himself the Marquis de Carabas,” he said. “He’s a fraud and a cheat and possibly even something of a monster. If you’re ever in trouble, go to him. He will protect you, girl. He has to.
The black cat began to wash its face.
Instead he walked up the side of the hill to where a picnic some thirty years before had left its mark in the shape of a large apple tree.
You cannot hear a poem without it changing you,” she told me. “They heard it, and it colonized them. It inherited them, its rhythms becoming part of the way that they thought; its images permanently transmuting their metaphors; its verses; its outlook; its aspirations becoming their lives.
You write. That’s the hard bit that nobody sees.
I do not remember asking adults about anything, except as a last resort.
I want nothing. No heaven, no hell, no anything. Just let it end.
There was a guy in prison named Jackson,” said Shadow, as he ate, “worked in the prison library. He told me that they changed the name from Kentucky Fried Chicken to KFC because they don’t serve real chicken any more. It’s become this genetically modified mutant thing, like a giant centipede with no head, just segment after segment of legs and breasts and wings. It’s fed through nutrient tubes. This guy said the government wouldn’t let them use the word chicken.
It would not have occurred to the dwarfs to give the young queen anything they had dug themselves from beneath the earth. That would have been too easy, too routine. It’s the distance that makes a gift magical, so the dwarfs believed.
Omnia mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis. Todo cambia, y nosotros cambiamos con ello.
Ursula Monkton smiled, and the lightnings wreathed and writhed about her. She was power incarnate, standing in the crackling air. She was the storm, she was the lightning, she was the adult world with all its power and all its secrets and all its foolish casual cruelty.
The quickest way out of something is usually straight through it.
He had tried for so long to rule wisely, and well, and to be a good monarch, but it is hard to rule, and wisdom can be painful. And it is impossible, he had found, if you rule, to do only good, for you cannot build anything without tearing something down, and even he could not care about every life, every dream, every population of every world.
They have said that the Lilim were dead before now, but they have always lied. The squirrel has not yet found the acorn that will grow into the oak that will be cut to form the cradle of the babe who will grow to slay me.
They didn’t tell you?” Her voice was calm, emotionless. “Your wife died with my husband’s cock in her mouth, Shadow.
Doesn’t matter. You’ll pick up what you need to know – cultural osmosis.