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Magdalena rubbed her eyes, she'd never seen anything so beautiful. It seemed to her suddenly that the world was luminous before her; the future lay ahead, welcoming; the world behind, of dismal Black Rock, the airless crowded tenement flats, the endless winter of icy, snow-locked streets, the stink of factories and the soot-blackened walls and air singed with smoke that caused people to cough and choke until tears ran down their cheeks—all that was behind her, diminished and narrowed and rapidly retreating like a tunnel that has the power to terrify while you are in it but is forgotten as soon
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No-one can tear me down more than I do myself. It's an idiot's armor against the world.
It was night over the city and the stars hung in garlands across the sky, stars of silver and blue and red and green, like distant fireworks. The buildings were tall and narrow teeth, blackened in the indigo maw of the sky. It wasn't the sight of Jarry that made me draw a deep breath, like an infant's first, but the smell. Incense and jungle green and parrot feather sweetness and a cinnamony musk, the air of a different world. Behind me, the Hole and the stink of beer and cigs, salt and stale fish faded, the empty ocean night falling away.
what we understand as the human mind manifests as an infinitesimally complex series of logical deductions to derive the appropriate response to a given piece of data. Aspects of the mind, such as emotions or memories, are thus understood as units of this process, designed to facilitate thought. This means that, like a computer, the human mind is on no specific level truly conscious in any real sense. It merely thinks it is.
“I dream of cities and they sing like whales. I dream of strangers in a sunken reef and they call me by name. I can drink salt water, I can lie in a cold bath for hours. I just can’t fucking breathe.”
Some names are like keys; they swing doors wide open that are best left shut.
