And what new life can emerge from a book. Any book, maybe.
Brrr, who had never admired books particularly...didn't remember that a mere book might reek of sex, possibility, fecundity. Yet a book has a ripe furrow and a yielding spine, he thought, and the nuances to be teased from its pages are nearly infinit...
Are you an aberration to your species?' she cried. 'Cats don't look for approval!
Indeed, she often wondered if she were dead, or dying from the inside out, and that was the root of her calm, the reason she could surrender her character.
Your childhood," said Yackle coaxingly, as if she could smell his thoughts. As if she could sniff out those passages he hadn't chosen to retail at drink parties. Her words lulled him. The past, even a bitter past, is usually more pungent than the pre...
Children played at those stories; they dreamed about them. They took them to heart and acted as if to live inside them.
Waking up was a daily cruelty, an affront, and she avoided it by not sleeping.
Perhaps family itself, like beauty, is temporary, and no discredit need attach to impermanence.
Just my luck, if I believed in luck. I only believe in the opposite of luck, whatever that is.
But this was fancy; she was succumbing to fancy in a way she hadn't done before.
When you can't die, she thought, everything sounds like a clock ticking.
The circularity of influence was like a trail of dominoes falling in four dimensions. Each time one slapped another and fell to the ground, from a different vantage point it appeared knocked upright, ready to be slapped and fall again. Everything was...
Remember to breathe. It is after all, the secret of life.
The future reshapes the memory of the past in the way it recalibrates significance: some episodes are advanced, others lose purchase.
The momentum of the mind can be vexingly, involuntarily capricious.
I was quite a looker in my time," she said. Was she reading his mind, or only being smart, to know she must be hideous? "Oh, had they invented time as long ago as that?
He was not so lucky. He hadn't yet had enough experience with humans to know that the thing the hold dearest to their hearts, the last thing they relinquish when all else is fading, is the consoling belief in the inferiority of others.
He hadn't yet had enough experience with humans to know that the thing they hold dearest to their hearts, the last thing they relinquish when all else is fading, is the consoling belief in the inferiority of others.
