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My father is the kindest man in the world, but when I was a child trying to clean my room, he would always find the drawer I forgot, and he hasn’t changed. “The last time we saw it, the weeds were being strangled by the weeds.”
metaphorical shadow self.”
“Fantasy is relative,” Mum said, with a wry smile.
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Me. I didn’t say it, but I thought it. I was going to break.
barf
“Rob…” Charley said. He had an uncanny knack for making my name both a plea and a reproach.
It was a dark corner of someone’s psyche. It needed therapy, not literary analysis. And it was going to kill us.
Te Papa museum,
Somehow, the decision was made to go for pizza.
In the dark before midnight, it preyed on her mind.
I was walking the food back to the table when I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck and arms.
Barf
you know when you read a book, sometimes, and you suddenly realize that you’ve been missing something your whole life, and you weren’t even aware, and all at once you’ve found it and are just a little bit more whole?”
Do you have any idea what it’s like to grow up with everybody looking at you—scrutinizing you—and knowing that if they see what you really are, something terrible will happen?”
And yet deep down, the parts of me I didn’t want to own up to had stirred.
Big plot
It was cold outside. The stars above looked crisp and clear, and very far away.
He’s writing a thesis on Dickens and Foucault.
“I want to live in the world, unbound, following nobody’s plots but my own.”
“Tell me one thing now. Is Rob in trouble?” “Oh yes,” Eric answered promptly. “Yes, I would say that is exactly where he is.”
I tried his cell phone again, in one of those classic examples of hope over experience.
wry, confidential, witty, surprising.
It was one of those crisp, clear Wellington days, when trees and buildings are sharp-edged in the sunlight and the sky looks as though it would chime like crystal if flicked with a fingernail.
Fire
What you need to understand about protagonists, Sutherland, is that we’re all busy with our own plots. We can’t help it; we’re not used to sharing our stories.
It couldn’t hurt to look. “It always hurts to look,” Frankenstein said. It startled me, until I realized I had used the phrase earlier. “Sometimes it even blinds. But I’ll see what I can do.” I left him sitting on the headstone, the trees rustling and creaking above him against the cloudless sky.
A moment later, the room filled with stars. Not real stars, but poetic stars: tiny orbs of gold that danced and spun around the room like particles of dust in sunlight. The fire kindled too, with the same golden light, and the glow lit the room. For a moment, Millie forgot the shift and the summoner. She forgot everything. “I say,” she said, and felt the inadequacy of Jacqueline Blaine’s prose. “Those are rather nice. I meant switch on the gas lamp, or something.”
“You know, Copperfield,” he said, and his voice changed. At once, Millie could hear the grating wheedle of the other Uriah, stronger than before. It was a quotation. She recognized the tone of a character turning without warning into a caricature of themselves. “You’re in quite a wrong position. You can’t make this a brave thing, and you can’t help being forgiven. I’m determined to forgive you. But I do wonder that you should lift your hand against a person that you knew to be so umble!” Guilt crossed Charley’s face; then, just as quickly, his eyes flashed with anger. “Oh, you want to do
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before he could do any more well-meaning damage.
frankly, I don’t believe that anyone who manufactures slaves out of pen and ink cares very much for anybody’s freedom.”
“Have you heard of an implied author?” “Like the Implied Reader?” “Exactly. The implied author is the character a reader may attribute to an author based on the way a book is written. It might have nothing in common with the author as a real, historical person, or it might be very close—that’s completely irrelevant. What matters is what’s on the page.”
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Uriah Heep is a scapegoat, so that David can achieve what Uriah wants to achieve without being dangerous himself. That’s how happy endings work. For there to be a restoration of order, there has to be a sacrifice.”
emotional registers to be high.
The Victorians don’t mind coincidence—they wanted the world to make sense. They love people turning out to be related, especially people with titles. Seriously, if you bump into a kind aristocrat in a Dickens novel, he will turn out to be your uncle by chapter fifty-seven, so aim well.”
They’re entwined. It’s not just a coincidence. It’s a moral precept. And it’s a radical one, for the nineteenth century. It’s the darkness at the heart of Dickens’s world. Underneath all the fun stuff—and that fun stuff’s important, don’t misunderstand—these books are angry: about children being forced into workhouses and indentured servitude, about people being hanged or transported for stealing to feed their families, about ignorance and cruelty and complacency. About failure to recognize common humanity.”
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!”)
That was the understatement of the year.
Barf
I didn’t think it was necessary to be a complete bastard all the time.
“Last night I was on the threshold of hell,” he said. “Today, I am within sight of my heaven. I have my eyes on it: hardly three feet to sever me!”
I’m too happy; and yet I’m not happy enough. My soul’s bliss kills my body, but does not satisfy itself.”
I can feel the gap inside me where whatever it was I lost used to be. It’s not like a gap where a loose tooth was. It’s more like a spot on the lawn where a weed’s been yanked up. Bare and tender and ready for something else to take root, only I don’t know what that something is.
He ignored me, which was a fair response.
She hesitated, then touched my arm briefly; it might have been a compromise between a hug and nothing at all. Then she was gone.
I wondered about security cameras, but consigned it to the list of future worries.
Sutherland,” Dickens said. “He was dreaming. Dreams, after all, are the bright creatures of poem and legend, who sport on earth in the night season, and melt away in the first beam of the sun, which lights grim care and stern reality—” “Dreaming of what?” “He knows who the summoner is.”
feelings are a mind picking up on things it doesn’t always understand.”
It’s hard not to feel someone’s physical reality when they’re lying hooked up to machines monitoring every beat of their heart and fluctuation of their blood, and when you’re watching them intently for every tiny sign of movement or discomfort or life.
“So nice to see you.” “You too,” she replied. His mouth twitched. “I do like the way you bother to lie. Won’t you sit down?”
You make yourself indispensable to those above you, so that when you lie, they have no choice but to accept your vision of reality.
We changed again, and yet again, and it was now too late and too far to go back, and I went on.’” “I assume that’s Dickens.” “Great Expectations. He wasn’t really talking about that kind of change. But sometimes I think he was. The book is.”
Kind people don’t make things happen. They try to prevent bad things from happening, and they fail, and they live in fear of that failure. So do those under their protection.
She ignored the sudden rush in her heart and the lump in her throat. She was ignoring a lot of things at the moment.
I think we’ve found ourselves in the middle of an adventure.”
Moriarty is a product of intellect, not of Victorian social evils.
