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History was a chain, and many of the links were wet with blood.
“You’d be surprised at what you can do when the world ends.”
There was always someone like that out there, ready to ride their hate like a horse and gallop right over anybody who wasn’t like them, who had what they wanted. Someone always wanted to bathe in blood. Because hate like that didn’t stay quiet.
God has given us the skills to decipher His or Her or Their universe accordingly—science is just how we map that creation, how we understand it, and how we use it to better ourselves.”
Sure, hanging onto the cliff’s edge is better than falling over it, but after a while, what’s the point if you don’t pull yourselves up? Don’t you want a little rock-and-roll in your life?”
Joe knew history, knew that it was not a thing created externally but rather, was something humankind created through choices, and often very, very poor choices designed to consolidate power.
Sometimes you have to break the rules, Nessie, to change the world.
It’s like a broken mirror, this country. Shattered all over the ground. Some shards, they’ll show you something pretty: the sun, a smiling face, a bird above. Some of those pieces are pointed in the wrong direction, and all you see in them is something ugly.”
“Well, now, I didn’t say murder, I just mentioned a casual bludgeoning. You’re the one who had to upgrade it to murder.”
“Rock-and-roll has a sentimental heart underneath all that jangly noise and balls-out bravado. Lotta rock songs are really love songs.”
Our service and our purpose must be two circles perfectly overlapping. What we give to the world must be the work that defines us. Meaning we give ourselves to the world to make it better.
Nazis are like cockroaches and mosquitoes—they survive some shit. They blame everyone but themselves. Hate is their virus, and that one will never go away.
We’re all knee deep in blood, Matthew. We didn’t mean to be. We didn’t want to be. But here we are now and we can either choose to stay standing and wade through the blood toward something better, or we sink down in it, and let it drown us.”
I loved you when I met you, I love you now, and I love you in the future tense. Even gone from this world, I will love you, and I want that love to echo back and forth through time, till it finds you in every moment.
The tarantula, the adder, and the asp will also never change. Pain and death will always be the same. But under the pavements trembling like a pulse, under the buildings trembling like a cry, under the waste of time, under the hoof of the beast above the broken bones of cities, there will be something growing like a flower, something bursting from the earth again, forever deathless, faithful, coming into life again like April. —Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again
Winnowed to nothing, there was still a way to roar forth once more. But
Grief is like a cut in a strange place. You never know when you’re going to bump into it, make it hurt again.”
Friends till the end, they thought, not realizing that life had many endings, not just one. Little apocalypses and, as it turned out, big apocalypses, too.
a Very Good Dog—stands tall against a breaking world, barking at the badness, protecting his pack. The Very Good Dog does what he must, because he can.
