How did you merit so much devotion so quickly?’ I asked, making no attempt to keep the sarcasm from my voice.’I show them Heaven’, said she, without a trace of irony. ‘People are so desperate for light’.
I had felt the shot coming; I hadn’t realized the bow was loaded with this very quarrel, perfectly calibrated to hit him hardest. What part of me had been studying him, stockpiling knowledge as ammunition?
This is my mind’s garden, I tend it; I order it. I have nothing to fear.
Claude rubs the back of his neck and wrinkles his nose, about to tell me he was never sad. I believe this is called bravado and is not limited to lawyers, or even men, although that combination makes it almost unavoidable.
I barely noticed loneliness anymore; it was my normal condition, by necessity if not by nature.
I understood something about myself as well, even if I didn’t have the will to examine it just then.
There are two sacred causes in this world,” he said, holding up his pinkie and ring ringer. “Chance and necessity. By chance I was there to help when you had need.
My companions ate the bear. I found I had no appetite.
Metaphor is awkward, but emotion, by its nature, leaves you no more scalable approach.
Here there was no monster greater than the ragged mountains.
My own survival required me to counterbalance interesting with invisible.
Oh, you humans may prefer empathy and mercy, but that’s like intuiting the answer to an equation: you still have to go back and work the problem to be certain you were right. We can come to genuinely moral conclusions by our own paths.
I scrupulously hide every legitimate reason for people to hate me, and it turns out they don’t need legitimate reasons. Heaven has fashioned a knife of irony to stab me with.
I was drawn to his aloofness, the way cats gravitate toward people who’d rather avoid them.
Someone should love you. I will bite him if he will not.
Sir James waved a gnarled hand. “They’re nothing but feral file clerks, dragons. They used to alphabetize the coins in their hoards.
I didn’t want this dance to end, or Kiggs to let go of my hand. I didn’t want him to turn his eyes away, or live any other moment than this one.
I smiled into the darkness. There was nothing “just” about metaphors, I was beginning to think; they followed me everywhere, illuminating and failing and illuminating again.
The Ninysh might have resisted a bit harder. I don’t mean to imply that they were cowards…,” Maurizio said shrugging, clearly implying that the Ninysh were cowards.