She looked defeated, a castle stormed, torn down, with no one living inside. She looked like a hollowed-out creature, only shell and no soul.
Does God think that, because it is raining, I am not going to destroy the world? - Lope de Aguirre after going mad in the Amazon
Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead.
For the first time, he looked at her, and she wasn’t a stranger, she was Clary—his friend. His family. The girl he’d sworn always to protect. The girl he loved as fiercely as he loved himself.
She wondered if it was her stupid mother, the goddess of love, messing with her thoughts. If Piper started getting urges to read fashion magazines, she was going to have to find Aphrodite and smack her.
Simon bristled. She wasn’t his Isabelle, not anymore. He wondered if she ever truly had been. Isabelle didn’t seem like the type of girl to belong to someone. It was one of the things he liked best about her.
Contemporary novels can have a fleeting existence within the current multiplication of medias and the technological rapidity with which art is delivered and consumed. A cultural lacuna has opened, one that needs arresting.
...Understanding as had the ancients that angels and demons were identical- interchangeable archetypes- all a matter of polarity: the guardian angel who conquered your enemy in battle was perceived by your enemy as a demon destroyer...
You know how, when you dream, sometimes you don't remember anything but what kind of dream it was? Frightening or hilarious or just strange? How there's only the feeling of it like a ghost in your mind?
Did you see the look on that guy's face when he hit the ground? He was all like "Come here, defenceless little girl,' and then you were like 'BAM! Take that, suck-face! I've got superpowers!
Paris shook his head."Do you think I would teach just anyone to fight me to the death? I want you to be my wife. My one and only wife.
Yes you may come." Paris held up a hand to delay Myrina's raptures. "But this time you will not be wearing my crown. You will be my slave, and believe me I shall enjoy ordering you around.
In my day the principal concerns of university students were sex, smoking dope, rioting and learning. Learning was something you did only when the first three weren't available.
Raising children is, in a sense, the reason the society exists in the first place. It's the most important thing that happens, and it's the culmination of all the tools and language and social structure that has evolved.
And I came to understand, in a way I never had before, that books are truly the stuff of miracles. I even dared to dream that someday, somehow, I might surround myself with books from many times and many tongues...
It is possible to cause seemingly biochemical changes through human emotional involvement. You literally have changed his chemistry by being his friend.
.. a friend is someone who inspires, who challenges, who sends you in search of some truer sense of yourself..
More than half described Christians as literalistic, anti-intellectual, judgmental, self-righteous, and bigoted.
There's an intimacy in listening to somebody's lies, I've always thought--you learn more about someone from the things they wish were true than from the things that actually are.
A battle is won by the side that is absolutely determined to win. Why did we lose the battle of Austerlitz? Our casualties were about the same as those of the French, but we had told ourselves early in the day that the battle was lost, so it was lost...
Books may look like nothing more than words on a page, but they are actually an infinitely complex imaginotransference technology that translates odd, inky squiggles into pictures inside your head.
