Even on the first day we invaded Plover’s house we sensed the conundrum that Americans are faced with in England: they’re too frightened of English people to behave rudely to them, and too ignorant to know how to behave politely.
A gang of wild turkeys patrolled the edge of the forest, upright and alert, looking oddly saurian and menacing, like a lost squadron of velociraptors.
Beer might help with that,” Quentin said. He felt punchy. “This could be the next clue. If it’s a talking beer, I mean a talking bear, we could, you know, talk to it.
I think you’re magicians because you’re unhappy. A magician is strong because he feels pain. He feels the difference between what the world is and what he would make of it. Or what did you think that stuff in your chest was? A magician is strong because he hurts more than others. His wound is his strength. “Most people carry that pain around inside them their whole lives, until they kill the pain by other means, or until it kills them. But.
Plum’s own romantic history so far had been pretty limited, with minimal drama. It was one area where she felt comfortable lagging behind her peers. But she prided herself on her powerful philosophical insights into other people’s relationships.
Bzzt!” Eliot pressed an imaginary game-show button on the arm of the chair. “The answer I was looking for was, ‘She’s not my girlfriend, she’s a crazy magic rage-demon.
He was unexpectedly happy, though he instinctively kept it a secret.
She was a goddess of darkness as well as light. A Black Madonna: the blackness of death, but also the blackness of good soil, dark with decay, which gives rise to life.
They think i’m at a special school for computer geeks and homosexuals.
The bear, it emerged, drank only peach schnapps, which it sipped from delicate thimble-size glasses.
You hate yourself so much, you’ll hurt anybody who loves you. That’s it, isn’t it? Just to get even with them for loving you.
He’d spent too long being disappointed by the world – he’d spent so many years pining for something like this, some proof that the real world wasn’t the only world, and coping with the overwhelming evidence that it in fact was. He wasn’t going to be suckered in just like that. It was like finding a clue that somebody you’d buried and mourned wasn’t really dead after all.
I thought about what time is, how we’re broken every second, we’re losing moments all the time, leaking them away like a stuffed animal losing its stuffing, until one day they’re gone an we lose everything. Forever. And then, at the same time, we’re gaining seconds, moment after moment. Every one is a gift, until at the end of our lives we’re sitting on a rich hoard of moments. Rich beyond imaging. Time was both those things at once.
Sorry”, Elliot said. “But you were kissing everybody else.
For a certain kind of person there is literally nothing nicer than eating breakfast by yourself on a moving train with a good book.
Julia didn’t laugh. She understood that she was looking at another person like herself, a broken person, but Pouncy was even more broken than she was. She was used to feeling sorry for herself, and angry at other people. She was less used at feeling sorry for someone else, but she felt it now. She would never be in love with Pouncy, but she felt love for him.
At this moment his dearest wish would have been just a moment’s grace to immerse his face in a sinkfull of warm water. And maybe to have somebody hold him under till he drowned.
She was young enough that all she had to do was kid things, but she was also getting old enough that she wanted to do more than play games and pretend.
Personal violence did not come naturally to Eliot; in fact he had found it distasteful. What could he say, he was a sensitive individual, fate had blessed and cursed him with a tender heart.
Right. You might just think about climbing down from there.” He was using that cautious tone you use when you’re trying to reason with a cat.
Privately Kate thought that for a guy in a banana-yellow suit he was turning out to be a pretty sharp operator.