More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Asking the Internet was like asking God; how could the answer not contradict itself and go on forever?
Care for her body wedded her to fear for its suffering. She’d read somewhere: You don’t believe in the soul until you feel it struggling to escape the body.
The current of fear that ran through the innocent when dealing with the police, because the world was crazy and innocence was no guarantee against anything
One of the first and most quickly wearying things you discovered if you were a cop was that everyone—everyone reacted to you as if they had something to hide. Because everyone does have something to hide, her grandfather had told her. It might only be a sugar habit or kinky fantasy—but a cop shows up and it’s like the eye of God turned on them.
People always know what the right thing to do is, her grandfather had told her. They just pretend they don’t.
Children were brutal realists. The only alternative was outright suppression. They had no knack for kidding themselves. It took adulthood to bring that dubious talent.
Thinking of a future without him was like thinking of never being warm enough for the rest of her life,
Valerie barely admitted it as even a theoretical possibility. Because the best-case scenario made it its business never to be the actual case scenario.
The woman’s pale belly a widening gory grin. The same body that had been born, and had its umbilical cord cut, and been swaddled and rocked and loved.
Fear, it turned out, was more than a match for truth.
She’d woken from a nightmare into a worse nightmare: the real world.
It was a terrible alignment, one more testimony in the already weighty case against a benevolent God.
The world was completely innocent. Evil was solely human.
At Peace, the gravestones said. She understood it now. Without your body and its suffering, you could be at peace.
Kids were so strong. Women. Women and children first. Maybe not because we thought they were weak, but because deep down, we knew they were strong. Carried the best of the species.
All fear was, in the end, fear of death. Once you knew you were dying, there was nothing left to fear. It gave you the last great gift: infinite courage.
The sciatica, seeing no reason why imminent death should stop it going about its business, didn’t let up.
The memory was so clear and disinterested—her soul sorting out its hierarchy of things to pack before death—that she smiled.
It wasn’t a bad thing to die, so long as you’d had a life full of life. And she had had that. It turned out all you needed to be OK with dying was knowing you’d lived.
It was a great relief, Valerie discovered, to realize you were ready to die. It gave you liberty for all sorts of academic exercises. One of them was to make this as annoying as possible for Leon.
The world was a wonderful place. Full of nightmares.
