America pays defense contractors to build aircraft carriers. Google pays brilliant programmers to do whatever the hell they want.
Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines — it’s hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits.
So I guess you could say Neel owes me a few favors, except that so many favors have passed between us now that they are no longer distinguishable as individual acts, just a bright haze of loyalty. Our friendship is a nebula.
People want things to be real. If you give them an excuse, they’ll believe you.
It was tall, made of pale blue light, a creature with long arms and long legs and the shadow of a smile, and above it all, eyes that shone bluer still than its body. “What do you seek in this place?” the shade asked plainly.
He’s like a storybook spirit, a little djinn or something, except instead of air or water his element is imagination.
Its circumference was tiny, but he had a life, and he would not give it up.
She’s wearing the same red and yellow BAM! T-shirt from before, which means (a) she slept in, (b) she owns several identical T-shirts, or (c) she’s a cartoon character—all of which are appealing alternatives.
I’m going to put the moves on her,’ he says gravely. ‘Things might get weird.’ He says it like a commando setting up a midnight raid. Like: Sure, this is going to be extraordinarily dangerous, but don’t worry. I’ve done it before.
All the secrets of the world worth knowing are hiding in plain sight.
The internet: always proving that you’re not quite as special as you suspected.
…I can’t stop squirming. If fidgets were Wikipedia edits, I would have completely revamped the entry on guilt by now, and translated it into five new languages.
Of course, of course. Drugs, music, a new age dawning … and you came for an old book.
There is no immortality that is not built on friendship and work done with care.
When every single piece of media you consume is time-shifted, does that mean it’s actually you that’s time-shifted?
Now, for the first time in my life, I empathize 100 percent with Fluff McFly. My heart is beating at hamster-speed and I am throwing my eyes around the room, looking for some way out.
I always thought the key to immortality would be, like, tiny robots fixing things in your brain,” she says. “Not books.
The nature of immortality is a mystery,’ he says, speaking so softly that we have to lean closer to hear.’ But everything I know of writing and reading tells me that this is true. I have felt it in these shelves and in others.
A fellowship of secret scholars spent five hundred years on this task. Now we’re penciling it in for a Friday morning.