More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams,the way the whites are taking care of the Indians:killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits.” — William S. Burroughs
“Where you’ve nothing else,construct ceremonies out of the airand breathe upon them.” — Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Out here stars were perforations revealing the bleached skeleton of the universe through a collection of tiny holes.
“Dreams get caught in the webs woven in your bones. That’s where they live, in that marrow there.”
We needed to remember Story. It was his job to set the memory in perpetuity.
“Do you think circumstances make people turn bad? Or that people make circumstances bad to begin with?”
And a man without dreams is just a meaty machine with a broken gauge.
“At first, people turned to Indigenous people the way the New Agers had, all reverence and curiosity, looking for ways we could help guide them. They asked to come to ceremony. They humbled themselves when we refused. And then they changed on us, like the New Agers, looking for ways they could take what we had and administer it themselves. How could they best appropriate the uncanny ability we kept to dream? How could they make ceremony better, more efficient, more economical?
“It began as a rumor, that they had found a way to siphon the dreams right out of our bones, a rumor whispered every time one of us went missing, a rumor denounced every time their doctors sent us to hospitals and treatments centers never to return. They kept sending us away, enticing us to seek medical care and then keeping us locked up, figuring out ways to hone and perfect their ‘solution’ for sale.
“We go to the schools and they leach the dreams from where our ancestors hid them, in the honeycombs of slushy marrow buried in our bones. And us? Well, we join our ancestors, hoping we left enough dreams behind for the next generation to stumble across.”
It was about the time literature was going through a bit of a renaissance, people clinging to that old adage about bedtime stories and the dreams they might bring.
“It’s weird when you come to a spot in the story where the plot could go either way, you know?” She just stared. Maybe she wasn’t a big reader. “It’s just, when you could go one direction and have life turn out one way, or go another direction and have life be completely a different way, it’s nerve-wracking.”
Sometimes you risk everything for a life worth living, even if you’re not the one that’ll be alive to live it.”
I leaned into his side and just lay there for a minute, listening to the pull and thump of his broken heart against my hard head.
‘Jean, running only works if you’re moving towards something, not away. Otherwise, you’ll never get anywhere.’”
“Better to apologize later than to have to bury a friend.
And I understood that as long as there are dreamers left, there will never be want for a dream. And I understood just what we would do for each other, just what we would do for the ebb and pull of the dream, the bigger dream that held us all. Anything.
Everything.
