My in-ear Babelfish provides synopses of the passages rather than a running translation, but now and then the interpreter confesses, “I’m sorry, but I have no idea what he just said. I’m not sure the author knew, either.
Oh, the greenness of green: back under the canopy, our ford slowed by a dew garden between squattened buildings. Feathery, fronded, moss drenched, green.
The empowered may serve justice, remodel the Earth, transform lush nations into smoking battlefields, and bring down skyscrapers, but power itself is amoral.
I light up, fumigate my alveolar sacs and think dark thoughts.
I wonder what love feels like on the inside because externally it turns you into the King of Tit Mountain.
Some magic is normality you’re not yet used to.
Valleysmen’d not want to hear, she answered, that human hunger birthed the Civ’lize, but human hunger killed it too.
Miguel tries to look jokey-penitent, but misses and looks like a man in white jeans who underestimates a spot of flatulence.
Leave Ueno Station through the park entrance, go past the concert hall and museums, skirt around the fountain, and you come to a sort of tree garden. Homeless people live here, in tents made of sky-blue plastic sheeting and wooden poles. The best tents even have doors.
Did you not detect the hairline cracks in the plot? Such.
The corporations have money, power and influence. Our sole weapon is public outrage. Outrage blocked the Yuccan Dam, ousted Nixon and, in part, terminated the monstrosities in Vietnam. But outrage is unwieldy to manufacture and handle. First, you need scrutiny; second, widespread awareness; only when this reaches a critical mass does public outrage explode into being. Any stage may be sabotaged.
Nowadays not even the villains smoke. Now smoking really is an expression of the rebel spirit – it’s virtually sodding illegal! Yet what are we without our addictions? Insipid. Flavorless.
There’s the blind, Mr. Grimaldi, there’s the willfully blind, and then there’s the soon to be retired.
It is a gift from your ancestors and a loan from your descendants.
The dumbest dog can sit and watch. What takes brains is knowing when to look away.
As if Art is the What, not the How!
Marvel at the Two-Headed Schizoid Man! Gaze upon Madame Matryoshka and Her Pregnant Embryo! Gasp in Horror at the Real, Live Merican – but don’t poke your fingers into his cage!
I rarely feel despair, I forget how it gouges.
A whoah game it was, said Catkin, but I din’t want to know its rules nor endin’.
I said something about reading not being true knowledge, that true knowledge without xperience is food without sustenance.
List’n, savages an’ Civ’lizeds ain’t divvied by tribes or b’liefs or mountain ranges, nay, ev’ry human is both, yay. Old Uns’d got the Smart o’ gods but the savagery o’ jackals an’ that’s what tripped the Fall.