Gerard turned away and ignored the cruelty of the meerkats, tore it from his mind. Lucretia needed a heart.
That’s how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.
It was a test of a fragile trust. It was a test of our curiosity and fascination, which walked side by side with our fear. A test of whether we preferred to be ignorant or unsafe.
Early on, I had thought Wick was reaching for a body across the bed. But, for a long time, he had been reaching for me–for the person called Rachel, who did indeed, in the end, love back the person name Wick.
They’d never really been my friends; I didn’t cultivate friends, I had just inherited them from my husband.
I didn’t answer her. All I could have said was I don’t know, a sentence that was becoming a kind of witness to our own ignorance or incompetence. Or both.
Control said nothing, had said nothing for quite some time as if he didn’t trust words anymore. Or had begun to cherish the answers silence gave him.
We live in a universe driven by chance,” his father had said once, “but the bullshit artists all want causality.
…your antagonist is a hero in their own mind… p.192
Think about how backstory fits the tale you’re trying to tell… p.195
I looked not for shooting stars but for fixed ones, and I would try to imagine what kind of life lived in those celestial tidal pools so far from us.
Even through the dulling effects of the pill, he wanted to be rid of his itching brain, his ignited skin, the flesh beneath, to in some way become so ethereal and Unbound to the earth that he could unsee, disavow, disavow
Has there always been someone like me to bury the bodies, to have regrets, to carry on after everyone else was dead?
I believed that it might be pulling these different impressions of itself from my mind and projecting them back at me, as a form of camouflage. To thwart the biologist in me, to frustrate the logic left in me.
I had long ago stopped believing in promises. Biological imperatives, yes. Environmental factors, yes. Promises, no.