More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
‘When?’ I asked, holding the twin legacies, letter and sword.
She turned, running the eyes of her gentle intuition over the loss and wounded love still prowling on my face.
Once we wandered a free Earth, carrying a picture of our God or king to ensure safe passage. Now the world is gated, and we carry pictures of ourselves, and nobody’s safe.
‘Okay,’ Vishnu said, when the month of two minutes ended.
Acid memories had burned his eyes, when he spoke to me. I had memories of my own. I woke too often still chained to a wall of the past, being tortured by the ghosts of men whose faces I’d already begun to forget.
Fear is a wolf on a chain, only dangerous when you set it free. Sorrow exhausts itself in the net of forgetting. Anger, for all its fury, can be killed by a smile. Only hope goes on forever, because hope doesn’t belong to us: it belongs to our ancestors, the first of our kind, whose brave love for one another gave us most of the good that we are.
‘Every goodbye is a dress rehearsal for the last goodbye,’
Truth is the warden in the prison of the soul.
Fate plays poker, and only wins by bluffing.
‘Grief is ghost empathy,’
The more slender your grip on reality, the more dangerous the world becomes. On the other hand, the more rational the world you find yourself in, the more carefully it must be questioned.
Loyalty is something you need for things you don’t love enough. When you love enough, loyalty isn’t even a question.
‘Obedience is the assassin of conscience,’ Idriss said softly, ‘and that is why every lasting institution demands it.’
I painted that laugh on a wall of my heart.
there are no bad or good men. That the deeds we do are good and bad, not the people who do them.’
‘At the end of the road, there are only two questions,’ the bartender said, inscrutably, preparing the drinks. ‘What did I do? and What did I miss?’
‘Life is short,’ the tall young bartender said, easing the cork from the bottle with a fist. ‘But made of long nights.’
‘Resentment is unmet need or desire,’
‘In peace time, you sacrifice twenty to save one. In war time, you sacrifice one to save twenty.’
‘War has the blood on the outside. Peace has the blood on the inside, where it belongs. That’s pretty much the difference, so far as I’ve seen.
I wanted to say something funny, but she had a gun.
you don’t have the right to take your own life. Nobody does.’ ‘Why not?’ Rannveig like the runway asked, her eyes wide, innocent of the cruel, broken question she’d just asked. ‘Think of it this way, Rannveig, does a deranged person have the right to kill a stranger?’ ‘No.’ ‘No. And when suicide is in your head, you’re the deranged person, and you’re also the stranger, in danger of the harm you might do to yourself. No matter how bad things get, you don’t have the right to kill the stranger that you might become, for a while, in your own life. The rest of your life would tell you, at that
...more
Regret is a ghost of love. Regret is a nicer self that we send into the past from time to time, even though we know it’s too late to change what we said, or did. We do it because it’s human: a thing of our kind. We do it because we care, drawn by threads of shame that only fray and wither in the sea of regret. Along the way regret, even more than love, teaches us that harm creates harm, and compassion creates compassion. And having done its work, regret fades to the nothing that all things become.
Fate leads you to what you desire, and Time makes sure that it’s the wrong moment. Was
‘No.’ ‘Pride is the only sin we can’t see in ourselves, you know.’
He wrapped my freshly skinned face in towels hot enough to force confessions.
Sin piled upon sin until the grave burden tore the last garment of tolerance, and frayed threads of honour and faith floated away on winter winds, leaving hatred naked, for all to see.
Young men from his family served us with coconut juice and bitter lime hummus dip with asparagus spines, as we sat together on the floor. By the time we’d eaten the snacks,
Did I like what he did? No. But what a man does isn’t always what a man is, and I’d learned that the hard way.
The second hit of the hookah pipe was kicking in: Time yawned, and took a nap. The Tuareg’s face blurred, suddenly fierce, suddenly kind, but he wasn’t moving at all.
Fate makes you a judge, as often as you’re judged.
we danced. Oleg danced for the fun of it, I think, but maybe the smiling Russian had demons of his own to release. I was thinking of the fight with Concannon, and I danced for absolution from victory: for defeating a foe, and regretting it.
The moon, our lonely sister, filters pain and harm from sunlight, and reflects it back to us safely, free of burn and blemish. We danced in moonlight on the balcony that night, Oleg and I, and we sang and shouted and laughed,
Faith is unconditional love, and love is unconditional faith. Vinson, Naveen and I were men in love, without the women we loved, and faith was a tree without shade.
Time can’t heal all wounds: Time is all wounds. Only love and forgiveness heal all wounds.
Hatred always leaves a stain on the veil. But sometimes the hatred isn’t your own. Sometimes you’re chained, and the hatred beaten into you is another man’s, grown in a different heart, and it takes longer than a fading bruise to forget.
staring at the flames painting rage on their faces.
The biker boys were looking at us. They were hopped up on watermelon juice and someone else’s victory. Young men, with girls to impress: body language, looking for an offence no one committed.
I also see some errors in your spiritual thinking, and because I like you, I’d be happy to realign your chakras for you, so to speak.’
Is it a sin to give your love to someone, when you can’t give your heart?
‘I know why I need you – you’re the other half of everything.
Men don’t like to be that honest about love: to put the gun in a woman’s hand, and hold it against their own hearts, and say, Here, this is how you kill me. But it was okay. It was okay.
‘You marry them,’ Blue Hijab said, ‘hoping they’ll change, and grow. And they marry us, hoping that we won’t.’
One of my ideas of hell is a world where you don’t just get a letter every week or so, but you get one every minute, of every day, forever. It’s the stuff of nightmares.’
and have my own bubbles of sorrow in the glass we raise.’
Karma’s a hammer, not a feather.’
wanting to kiss her, but enjoying the thought of it so much that I didn’t kiss her.
Men are wishes wrapped in secrets, and women are secrets wrapped in wishes.’
‘When will we demand peace, as passionately as we demand freedom?’
‘Exploitation is the spiritual language of profit,’ Idriss began sadly. The students, who’d heard Idriss riff before, were already beginning to nod their heads in time to his ontological poetry. ‘Oppression is the spiritual language of tyranny,’ Idriss said. The students began to mumble, wakening to Idriss’s chant. ‘Hypocrisy is the spiritual language of greed,’ Idriss continued. ‘Ruthlessness is the spiritual language of power, and bigotry is the spiritual language of fear.’
