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but the dream chooses the dreamer, not the other way around.
“Life won’t just happen to you, boy,” he said. “You have to happen to it. Remember: The spirit grows sluggish when you neglect the passions.”
And as for fairy tales, he understood that they were reflections of the people who had spun them, and were flecked with little truths—intrusions of reality into fantasy, like . . . toast crumbs on a wizard’s beard.
“I admit, I prefer an open mind to a closed one,” he said.
“And women,” said Lazlo. “It’s a woeful species that’s all male.”
And that’s how you go on. You lay laughter over the dark parts. The more dark parts, the more you have to laugh. With defiance, with abandon, with hysteria, any way you can.
To be one of a pair of bodies that knew that melting fusion. To reach and find. To be reached for and found. To belong to a mutual certainty.
Their minds lay open to her—or at least, the surfaces did, and whatever bubbled up from beneath to paint them in streams of imagery, sensation, and emotion, endlessly combining and recombining in the ceaseless effort at making sense, at making self. For what was a person but the sum of all the scraps of their memory and experience: a finite set of components with an infinite array of expressions.
He had crossed continents and drunk starlight from rivers without names. There was no going back from that.
Her pulse was frantic, her breathing ragged, and it seemed impossible that people could live at all with such flimsy stuff as skin keeping blood, breath, and spirit safe inside their bodies. At the garden balustrade in the
The function of hate, as Sarai saw it, was to stamp out compassion—to close a door in one’s own self and forget it was ever there. If you had hate, then you could see suffering—and cause it—and feel nothing
To be so tired was like evaporating. Water to vapor. Flesh to ghost. Bit by bit, from the surface inward, you feel yourself begin to disappear, or at least to be translated into another state—from a tangible one, blood and spirit, to a kind of lost and drifting mist.
“Good people do all the things bad people do, Lazlo. It’s just that when they do them, they call it justice.”
