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the desire forever gestating in them: to be left alone, left to whatever state of dissolution and decay or, yes, peace they aspired to in that wild and beautiful place.
To process these “finds,” to be well and truly named, which were just parts of the Forgotten Coast that the locals had known about for years and that had not needed the formality of the kinds of names that the biologists wanted to give them.
“a bird can be a bat, a bat can be a bird, that’s just the way of things now.”
Iktr (politically)
they unnerved because one felt that they had always been here, and that they belonged here. That it was our conception of what belonged that had been wrong. That we did not belong, somehow.”
Mundane questions to quarantine the strangeness, to not think beyond certain boundaries, beyond which lay … what?
A rabbit that did not run away was, in some ways, not a rabbit at all.
“Tomorrow will be better,” Team Leader 1 said, after they had finished the ice cream. But it wasn’t.
“You did not want to be there. You didn’t want to be anywhere, ever again.”
weapons slack at their sides like a muscle memory that was amnesia,
No one could get the words to leave them alone, at first like a swarm of biting flies and then as a presence standing always behind them, so that if they turned at the wrong time, it would devour them whole. So they did not look back much, or go out into the dark, even if they carried the dark within.
The lack of parents. The lack of siblings. The lack of strong, close friends. The lack of all the normal things that perhaps were less normal than people who had them thought.
some dark emotion between grief and rage,
“If you feel this way again, remember that it’s natural and that it will pass.”
If you were an orchestra, what music would you play? If you were a school of fish, what kind of fish would you be?
“When snow flies in my face / I cast off its shroud; / when my heart speaks in its cage, / I sing bright and loud.”
So young to be so full of knives.
“What happened to my predecessor?” He’d found the question that had eluded him. “His head popped at a depth of four hundred meters.” “All on its own?” “And his bones liquified.” “Jack didn’t tell me any of that.” He couldn’t help a flicker of irritation, which receded because what good was it? The files had referenced “an accident.” “Or, maybe,” Jackie continued as if he hadn’t said anything, “he died because you wish for something you shouldn’t or you look behind you when you shouldn’t, and suddenly you’re a pillar of salt, and who follows orders from a pillar of salt? Not me.”
Most of Winter Journey had a kind of universal appeal, and the melancholy satisfaction of existing within someone else’s sadness, their expression of that condition removed from his by centuries and situation.
I follow dry riverbeds, in peace, I make my way; every stream will meet the sea, and every sorrow will have its day.
Did she not understand? How could she not understand? So he made her understand. “I wrote you so many letters. I wrote you so many and there was nowhere to send them.” He was standing over her with the empty box still held in one hand. She had receded into her chair, as if he meant her harm. Did he mean her harm? “I just kept writing them. And you just kept not being there.”
and though he felt the loss still, he looked back on the person who had been so distraught with pity, almost with contempt. Although he was that same person.
Did a fact, not, in fact, matter if in a sense matter had a different authority depending on one’s perception of the truth?
Hadn’t so many bars seemed the same—comfort and curse—
Didn’t know what to do with her thoughtfulness.
“Oh, I don’t know what it means, Jim,” Cass said wearily, as if she were older than him and more jaded. “I just know the answers lie so far outside the box that there is no box.
“If a bird flies long enough inside a house is it still a bird?”
“Here’s another one,” Old Jim said, his own special nod to the the manual for identifying psychopaths: “A belt buckle and a brick are traveling in opposite directions, away from each other, the brick at the speed of a snail on a bad day and the belt buckle at the speed of a waistline expanding at the rate of three inches per month. Which one will reach you first, if you stand at the exact opposite end of the universe? The snail or the waistline?”
Information helped, even when it made things more complex.
Any sympathy he had left Old Jim meant to apply as salve to his bruised ribs.
Debatable, the logic of psychopaths, but Old Jim didn’t want to debate it.
Light, every particle of it a miracle.
He could not hold on to the grief of that, wanted only the joy.
Here are the keys. This is the music. Let the music mean something. Just do as I do. It doesn’t need to be perfect. Nothing is perfect, ever. Nothing. I forgive you. Can you forgive me?
Who the fuck knew what she was thinking. He just knew she was thinking, all the time, and it made him fucking nervous.
howling at the moon or sun or whatever celestial body happened to be on fucking offer.
You fucking low-carb crisp of a fucking fuck.
Lowry said, amazed at how old his voice sounded. Like a cracked statue in a public park. Like a man in a coffin a thousand years. Like whatever the vultures couldn’t bear to eat.
Tomboys who didn’t give a shit what they broke because they were big and loud and strong, and, yes, loved by all. Unbreakable themselves.
But he couldn’t pin down the origin of the impulse. His mind or some external agent, and how would he know?
Okay, that was a lot to process, if he really thought about it, like so much beyond his control … so he just didn’t.
Hated that fucking thinking, which was no thought at all but some impulse of the reptile part of the brain to be scared, to be small, to be repulsive.
Nobody’s fool or tool, nobody’s anything anymore except what he fucking wanted to be.
If they were going to ignore him, he’d be the fucking loudest ghost in the world. He’d be the ghost with the most, the one with the fucking megaphone shouting out the truth of the spirit world, which was that it was just the real world when no one listened to it. That was the spirit world. Just people other people fucking ignored.
