What if, on some level, way down deep inside, right down to the very simplest, purified form of who he was, what if he was corrupted? What if there was some tiny, tiny fault in the first building blocks of who he was, and everything since that moment of life was just papering over an essential crack? And he was just a carapace built on a facade built on scaffolding and there was no real core to him, no real central worth? At all?
The loud is a different kind of loud, because swamp loud is just curiosity, creachers figuring out who you are and if yer a threat. Whereas the town knows all about you already and wants to know more and wants to beat you with what it knows till how can you have any of yerself left at all? Swamp.
For there are devils in the deep but worse are the ones we make.
Physical beauty, of all the curses, was obviously the best you could get. It was still a curse though.
Is it not a shame,” she says, “that we must wait until the end of the world for all boundaries to fall?
We’d all met in the office and told the vice principal – who, like all vice principals, is genetically Nazi – what we’d seen. He.
But how are you this fine evening? – My arches are falling. – Isn’t that the first line of a sonnet?
The best liar is the one who believes her lie is true.
That’s the secret of this planet, Todd. Communication, real and open, so we can finally understand each other for once.
Because humans are complicated beasts, the monster said. How can a queen be both a good witch and a bad witch? How can a prince be a murderer and a saviour? How can an apothecary be evil-tempered but right-thinking? How can a parson be wrong-thinking but good-hearted? How can invisible men make themselves more lonely by being seen?
Well, Adam thought. I’ve had my mouth on his bare skin. That seemed to be effective.
The Land looks deep inside itself to find the new Sky and there is no refusal for the one chosen. The past life is over and must be left behind, for the Land needs its Sky to watch over it and the Sky can have no other than the Land.
E se nessuno ti vede, esisti davvero?
Despair was one thing, despair had a component of energy, despair grappled and fought, despair needed you alive to feel its pain, but sadness, sadness was something else altogether. Sadness was a slow vampire. Sadness reached in and uncorked you like a full tub. Sadness was the parasite that killed its host.
It is a necessary difficulty that the Land must sometimes keep secrets from itself, the Sky shows as we walk. It is the only way to make hope possible.
Que importaria la distancia si solo fuera un sueno.
You may have no choice.” “There’s always a choice,” Viola says by my side. “Oh, people like to say that,” the Mayor says. “It makes them feel better.
Do you know what separates us from the beasts, Viola?’ I frowned, sensing a lesson. ‘The ability to wait to open a present?’ He laughed. ‘Fire,’ he said. ‘The ability to make fire at will. It allowed us light to see in the darkness, warmth against the cold, a tool to cook our food.’ He gestured vaguely in the direction of the Delta’s engines. ‘Fire is what eventually led to travel across the black beyond, the ability to start a new life on a New World.
His face is trying to look calm but everyone can hear how badly he don’t wanna die, how childlike his wishes are sounding, how loud his newly uncured Noise is spilling out all over the place.
Did it matter? George thought perhaps it did, and not in terms of finding truth or of any hope of discovering what really happened at any given moment. There were as many truths – overlapping, stewed together – as there were tellers. The truth mattered less than story’s life. A story forgotten died. A story remembered not only lived, but grew.