Scars are not injuries, Tanner Sack. A scar is a healing. After injury, a scar is what makes you whole.
In time, in time they tell me, I’ll not feel so bad. I don’t want time to heal me. There’s a reason I’m like this.I want time to set me ugly and knotted with loss of you, marking me. I won’t smooth you away.I can’t say goodbye.
Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they’re not absurd.
Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they’re amiable and sometimes not.
Art is something you choose to make… it’s a bringing together of… of everything around you into something that makes you more human, more khepri, whatever. More of a person.
Loads of children read books about dinosaurs, underwater monsters, dragons, witches, aliens, and robots. Essentially, the people who read SF, fantasy and horror haven’t grown out of enjoying the strange and weird.
The manager of my line told me, You never put anything down except to be read. Every word ever written is written to be read and if some go unread that’s only chance, failure, they’re like grubs that die without changing.
History seemed meaningless here, or at least bewildered.
If you’re brave enough to try, you might be able to catch a train from UnLondon to Parisn’t, or No York, or Helsunki, or Lost Angeles, or Sans Francisco, or Hong Gone, or Romeless.
Just thugs only ever got so far. The best thugs were all psychologists.
I just can’t get with this idea that literature is a 12-step program. If someone wants to read a book to see good people get rewarded and the bad people get punished, essentially what they want is a fairy tale.
In the right context you can make words do all kinds of things.
It felt like being a child again, though it was not. Being a child is like nothing. It’s only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.
It is not they who have closed but I. I’ve cut myself away. I’m alone, and lonely. What frightens me is that I’ve not become lonely now, but have looked inside and seen that I was, already. How long has that been going on?
Of all the skills necessary for her work, what she was perhaps worst at was being polite to inanimate things.
I think it’s important to remember that writers do not have a monopoly of wisdom on their books. They can be wrong about their own books, they can often learn about their own books
You can tell it any way you want, he said, you can be I or he or she or we or they or you and you won’t be lying, though you might be telling two stories at once.
Word spread because word will spread. Stories and secrets fight, stories win, shed new secrets, which new stories fight, and on.
Heaven might not be what everyone thinks it is, but that don’t mean it’s a myth.
Being a child is like nothing. It’s only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.
The choice not to have sex, not to be hurt. The choice not to risk pregnancy. And then… what if she had become pregnant? The choice not to abort? The choice not to have a child?
Saul was going to kill Anansi.They both knew it. Saul was going to kill Anansi and Loplop and King Rat, and Saul was going to die, all in an effort to prove that he was not his rat-father’s son.
Shadows fell on them like predators as the light went out.
People have wanted to narrate since first we banged rocks together & wondered about fire. There’ll be tellings as long as there are any of us here, until the stars disappear one by one like turned-out lights.
I needed to be alone for whatever would happen. I knew that something would as certainly as if this were a last chapter.
I’d never understood the injunction not to regret anything, couldn’t see how that wasn’t cowardice…
Like any dissidents they were neurotic archivists. Agree, disagree, show no interest in or obsess over their narrative of history, you couldn’t say their didn’t shore it up with footnotes and research.
A sense of wrongness, of fraught unease, as if long nails scraped the surface of the moon, raising the hackles of the soul.
Were you terrified, Murgatroyd?” Murgatroyd nodded eagerly. “There you go, girl: You’re a terrorist. You make me twitchy, and under Article Forty-One of the 2000 Terrorism Bill, that’s all I need. Time for some reasonable force, I think.
We should have just killed him, that’s a lesson, don’t get creative with revenge
A promise fulfilled may be a classic moment, but prophecies mean anticlimax. How much more awesome was an unexpected salvation?
Dark came early and stayed full of lights and the shouts of children.
For the Right, strikes are both devilish and pathetic, have both terrible and absolutely no effects.
She was intelligent enough to realize that her excitement was childish, but not mature enough to care.
The summer stretched out the daylight as if on a rack. Each moment was drawn out until its anatomy collapsed. Time broke down. The day progressed in an endless sequence of dead moments.
That’s what gets converts these days,” Baron said. “It’s a buyers’ market in apocalypse. What’s hot in heresy’s Armageddon.
A trap is only a trap if you don’t know about it. If you know about it, it’s a challenge.
You’d love a bit of pomp: that way in later years you might invoke end-of-empire ghosts.
But this was not quite the right kraken apocalypse.