More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Could it have been an ancestor of yours, a long-ago Ehud, who freed the children of Israel from the horrid king of Moab?” “I doubt it, sir. It’s always been the women in my family who take on the tough jobs.”
Long ago, on the innocent side of puberty, Benny had realized that wealth and good taste were not necessarily linked.
When your mother turned out not to be the person you thought she was, when she would have called animal control and consigned you to the dog pound if only you’d been canine rather than human, when she cut you loose at thirteen, what naivete still pooled in your heart was flushed away as abruptly as the contents of a space-shuttle vacuum toilet.
My mission is to protect you, Benjamin, not to save the world. None of us can save the world. The world has to save itself. It knows the way.”
Benny went to the men’s room, and Harper went to the women’s, and Spike remained at the table, efficiently metabolizing every molecule he consumed.
“White chocolate sucks. It isn’t really chocolate. White chocolate is a fraud.”
When he picked up the pile of cash, he said only, “Decent of you, sir,” as if he had morphed into a British butler with the mastery of understatement required of that position.
“Some craggle protocols,” Harper said, “are maybe a lot like white chocolate.”
“So,” said Benny, after a brief pause for calculation, “one might conclude that you lose someone every nine hundred years. And now it’s time again.” “Not at all, Benjamin. It’s not a pattern.” “It kind of looks like a pattern,” Harper said.
Niceness plus free will minus wisdom equals sudden and horrific death.
In that case, to at least some extent, to a degree we cannot know, we possess the power to weave the lives that will bring us happiness if we’re wise enough to be nice, but not so nice that we’re foolish, and if we realize that our free will and creativity should be used with humility rather than to acquire power to oppress others.
