More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.
Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth.
Even though no threat had revealed itself, it seemed important to eliminate any possible moment of silence. As if somehow the blankness of the walls fed off of silence, and that something might appear in the spaces between our words if we were not careful.
“Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that…”
Looking for hidden meaning in these papers was the same as looking for hidden meaning in the natural world around us. If it existed, it could be activated only by the eye of the beholder.
There are certain kinds of deaths that one should not be expected to relive, certain kinds of connections so deep that when they are broken you feel the snap of the link inside you.
Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that …
… to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives while from the dim-lit halls of other places forms that never could be writhe for the impatience of the few who have never seen or been seen …
Why should I rest when wickedness exists in the world … God’s love shines on anyone who understands the limits of endurance, and allows forgiveness … Chosen for the service of a higher power.
in the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit shall come ripe and in the darkness of that which is golden shall split open to reveal the revelation of the fatal softness in the earth …
… the shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear …
The map had been the first form of misdirection, for what was a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible?
It was as if we had come up too fast from a deep-sea dive but it was the memories of the creatures we had seen that had given us the bends.
We clicked, by being opposites, and took pride in the idea that this made us strong. We reveled in this construct so much, for so long, that it was a wave that did not break until after we were married … and then it destroyed us over time, in depressingly familiar ways.
He drank deeply from his orange juice—really drank to savor it so that for a minute or two nothing existed in the house but his enjoyment.
“I am walking forever on the path from the border to base camp. It is taking a long time, and I know it will take even longer to get back. There is no one with me. I am all by myself. The trees are not trees the birds are not birds and I am not me but just something that has been walking for a very long time…”
when the mind expects a certain range of possibilities, any explanation that falls outside of that expectation can surprise.
That’s how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.
Observation had always meant more to me than interaction.
My sole gift or talent, I believe now, was that places could impress themselves upon me, and I could become a part of them with ease.
I loved him, but I didn’t need him, and I thought that was the way it was supposed to be.
To acknowledge it, to try to name it, might be a way of letting it in.
At a certain point, I discovered I was so overwhelmed I could not continue, could not even go through the motions. It was too much data, served up in too anecdotal a form.
But rather than looking forward to reading that account, I felt as if I were stealing a private diary that had been locked by his death.
“You’re very self-contained,” she said once, but not as a pejorative.
it struck me that perhaps the very qualities she might disapprove of from a psychiatric point of view made me suitable for the expedition.
We had all been given self-destruct buttons, but the only one who could push them was dead.
There shall be a fire that knows your name, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame shall acquire every part of you.
her rifle lying straight above her bloody head like an exclamation mark,
I could feel the absence of their regard like a kind of terrible bereavement.
You can either waste time worrying about a death that might not come or concentrate on what’s left to you.
some questions will ruin you if you are denied the answer long enough.
There shall be in the planting in the shadows a grace and a mercy that shall bloom dark flowers, and their teeth shall devour and sustain and herald the passing of an age …
That which dies shall still know life in death for all that decays is not forgotten and reanimated shall walk the world in a bliss of not-knowing
The shape spread until it was even where it was not, or should not have been.
floating dark motes that are tricks of the eye,
What occurs after revelation and paralysis?
Either death or a slow and certain thawing.
And it came for me. And it cast out all else.
“We all live in a kind of continuous dream,” I told him. “When we wake, it is because something, some event, some pinprick even, disturbs the edges of what we’ve taken as reality.”
