Kindle Notes & Highlights
For some reason that he couldn’t explain, the world seemed to be altered, as if the streets downtown had been hurriedly dismantled and reconstructed during the night and some of the details hadn’t been put back exactly as they should be.
roots was in southwestern Nigeria, in all of the myths and the magic rituals of the Yoruba people, but when the Yorubas came to the New World, and they had to hide what they were doing, they borrowed a whole lot of fancy trappings from the Roman Catholic church.
“Santería is an earth religion, if you understand what I mean. It’s all about nature and the forces of nature, like the Native American beliefs.
Oyá is the wind, and the keeper of the cemetery, the watcher of the doorway between life and death. She ain’t death itself, but she’s the knowledge that we all have to die.”
But nothing had ever frightened him like this: the realization that there was a world in which the dead could live forever, and that men could walk through walls, and that none of the laws of possibility meant anything at all.
He was suddenly reminded of Eduard Munch’s painting of The Scream—the utter terror of finding out that life has no boundaries whatever.
