Sometimes the people don’t know what’s best for them, Ivan,” she says. “Sometimes the people have to be convinced of things that are necessary. That’s what leadership is. Not shouting your head off in support of their every whim.
Anxiety is a feeling grown too large. A feeling grown aggressive and dangerous. You’re responsible for its consequences, you’re responsible for treating it. But Michael, you’re not responsible for causing it.
Death is suddenly objectionable to you when the dead has a name you know?
But the thing about good ideas is that they grow other ideas. Almost before I could help it, Siobhan’s ideas were suggesting new ones to me, and I began to feel that itch that every writer longs for: the itch to start getting words down, the itch to tell a story.
You can’t redeem him, Todd,” she says, a little softer but I flinch a bit at the word redeem. “You can’t. Because he doesn’t want it.
One night a whole storehouse of wheat was taken, so completely and successfully it’s obvious now there’s people in the town and the army who’ve been helping ’em. Which is bad news for the town and the army.
People began to live ON the earth rather than WITHIN it.
A monster, I think, remembering what Ben told me once. War makes monsters of men. “Wrong,” says the Mayor. “It’s war that makes us men in the first place. Until there’s war, we are only children.
There’s hope at the bottom of the biggest waterfall. And maybe it don’t hurt so much after all.
Isn’t dying once enough? he thinks. Am I going to have to keep doing it? But then he thinks, No. Because you can die before you’re dead, too.
Sheep got even less to say than dogs do.
But in my chest, there was still fear, and I didn’t know which kind it was. Fear with hope, or fear without it.
A world made of words, Seth thinks, where you live for a while.
He’s awake,” she said, tears of joy still streaming. “Lee, Wilf. He’s awake.
Son,” his father said, leaning forward. “Stories don’t always have happy endings.” This stopped him. Because they didn’t, did they? That’s one thing the monster had definitely taught him. Stories were wild, wild animals and went off in directions you couldn’t expect. His.
So go. Run with it. Make trouble.
I look up to him. His face and his Noise are as blank as I remember but the lesson of forever and ever is that knowing a man’s mind ain’t knowing the man.
Because who can say in the end that any one of these places is more real than any other?
The difference is that I think you never do it. Even if you’re tempted, even if you’re really close, because who knows? There might be more.
Crazy people don’t need an explanayshun for nothing.
You just got days, it seemed to her. Where stuff happened or it didn’t. Where planning just showed you what a fool you were to think you had any say over what your life would be.