The Fall of Babel (The Books of Babel #4)

by Josiah Bancroft

“You brought company! You never bring company! I hate company!”

Some of my crew are convinced an old rope will continue to hold purely because it has held for so long. As if a ship was buoyed by precedent. As if the past promised a future.

Anger that survives until morning is either righteous or insidious. Either way, it must be dealt with.

Adam wanted nothing more than to close his curtains, turn off his lights, and sit on the floor eating buckets of pudding.

“Insects are pollinators and decomposers. Without them, the plants wouldn’t bear fruit, last year’s crops wouldn’t rot properly, and the soil would suffer. We’d starve to death in a world without insects.

Nearly fifty years of survival has taught me that often the best time to run away is shortly before you arrive.

She ticked across the steel deck on eight javelin-pointed feet and forty-eight undulating knees. She was a chimera. Below the waist, she was a mechanical spider; above it, she was a woman wrapped from forehead to hip in strips of tea-colored cloth. Thin, blue-black hair hung about her face like a veil. Her arms and fingers moved slowly, dreamily, like a cobweb in a draft. She seemed a body preserved for burial. The impression that she belonged in a mausoleum was only compounded by the fact that the entirety of her upper body was held inside a crystal bell jar.

At first Senlin saw no gaps in the wrapping for her eyes, mouth, or nose, rendering her featureless, ageless, inscrutable. But then she turned her head to look at him directly, and he beheld pinhole pupils staring out from under the gauze. Her mouth raised the fabric just enough to show the pearlescent shine of small white teeth.

I think it’s perfectly all right to be frightened. Sometimes the fear of change is just an expression of love for the life you had. That’s nothing to be ashamed of. I like who we were. And I like who you are, and I suspect I’ll like who you will be, too.”

Never was a rough road smoothed by looking backward; never was a great height shrunk by looking down.

I try not to dwell on my mistakes because it doesn’t change them; it only changes me. I cannot live inside those awful moments, those naive blunders and prideful errors. It would drive me mad if I did.”

“We all forget we’re mortal now and then. We have to, to keep from going mad. But I never forget the people I love, and that keeps me from taking myself for granted. I don’t want to leave them too soon. I’m sure you don’t want to leave us either.”

Survival makes you a stranger to yourself.”

Tom raised a hand to his headboard and rapped out their signal phrase—hard, soft, hard—a simple tattoo that had come to mean good night and I am glad you are close by and please, don’t leave and a hundred other things they’d not yet found the words or courage to say.

“Unlovable? You? Iren, dear, as far as I’ve ever seen, in this world there are two great nations of the Unadored. There are the Love Gluttons who feel they cannot dote on anyone for fear of stealing some small measure of kindness from themselves, and there are those Paupers of Affection who refuse to care in retribution for the love they feel they deserve and have been denied. Both think the feast of human kindness small, the table settings but few. That has never been you, my dear. Never. Your heart is bigger than your chest. It drums so loud I can hear it from across the room. I hear it through doors and down halls, hear it beat in my sleep and throughout my dreams…”

Pilgrims are encouraged to remember that the principal consumer of sheep is not wolves but shepherds.

When you think little of yourself, everyone else’s opinion of you becomes more important than your own.

Some fear the desolation of a broken heart; others dread the chronic suffering of an injured back. Both grievances benefit from a division of burdens. Lift your sorrows with a friendly ear and your luggage with a brawny porter.

Should you ever feel dread at the prospect of where your adventures have carried you, take solace in the fact that the vast majority of mortal accidents occur in the home. Perhaps the secret to longevity is absenteeism.

I think that if we really knew how good our lives were while they were good, we’d be too scared to do anything, change anything. We’d never take a risk, or explore, or grow. You can hate yourself for not fully appreciating your happy days while you had them, or you could look back and be warmed by the memory, couldn’t you?”

I think we’ve seen the end of always.”