The Ask and the Answer (Chaos Walking, #2)

by Patrick Ness

Without pain, it feels almost like I don’t have a body at all, almost like I’m a ghost, sitting in a chair, blinded and eternal. Like I’m dead already. Cuz how do you know yer alive if you don’t hurt?

“Yes, and now the women and children of this city will not die! Because I reached a peace!” “A peace that blacked yer eye,” I say. “A peace that split yer lip.” He looks at me for another second and then gives a sad snort. “The words of a sage,” he says, “in the voice of a hick.”

being a leader is making the people you love hate you a little more each day.”

“The way those soldiers looked at us,” she says. “Yeah?” She crosses her arms and shivers. “I don’t know if I like this version of peace very much.”

“If you ever see a war,” she says, not looking up from her clipboard, “you’ll learn that war only destroys. No one escapes from a war. No one. Not even the survivors. You accept things that would appal you at any other time because life has temporarily lost all meaning.” “War makes monsters of men,” I say, quoting Ben from that night in the weird place where New World buried its dead. “And women,” Mistress Coyle says.

“A man is capable of thought. A crowd is not.” “An army is,” I say. “Only if it has a general for a brain.”

“He’s the President of Lies, my girl. He will lie so well you’ll believe it’s the truth. The Devil tells the best stories.

She looks at me carefully. “Appeasement,” she says. “That’s what it’s called. Appeasement. It’s a slippery slope.” “What does it mean?” “It means you want to work with the enemy. It means you’d rather join him than beat him, and it’s a sure-fire way to stay beaten.”

“To see the ocean once is to learn how to miss it,”

“I have to try,” I say. “I have to do something.” I turn back to her, bag full. “That’s who I am.” I think of Todd, waiting for me, and my heart races faster. “That’s who I’ve become, anyway.” She regards me quietly and then she quotes something Mistress Coyle once said to me. “We are the choices we make.”

“To live is to fight,” she snaps. “To preserve life is to fight everything that man stands for.” She takes an angry huff of air. “And now her, too, with all the bombs. I fight them every time I bandage the blackened eye of a woman, every time I remove shrapnel from a bomb victim.” Her voice has raised but she lowers it again. “That’s my war,” she says. “That’s the war I’m fighting.”

“Patience,” she says again. But she says it impatiently.

Let your neighbour know he is watched. Only then are we truly safe.”

“Even if they’re dead,” he said, one night as we sat on the shore of the lake, throwing in stones, aching again after yet another long day’s training. “I just want to know.” I shook my head. “If you don’t know, then there’s still a chance.” “Knowing or not knowing doesn’t keep them alive.”

I look at her now, trying to understand her, trying to understand all that’s good in her and all that’s difficult and conflicted and all the things that went into making her the person that she is. We are the choices we make. And have to make. We aren’t anything else.

“One, if you can control yourself, you can control others. Two, if you can control information, you can control others.”

He’s brought us into what used to be the room with the round coloured glass window in it but it’s now open to the air on two sides and above, the window still there, looking down, but looking down on rubble.

Men have Noise and the way they handle it is to make themselves just a little bit dead, but you, even when you want to, you can’t. More than any man I’ve ever met, Todd, you feel.” “Shut up,” I say, trying to look away, not being able to. “But that makes you powerful, Todd Hewitt. In this world of numbness and information overload, the ability to feel, my boy, is a rare gift indeed.

It’s not that you should never love something so much it can control you. It’s that you need to love something that much so you can never be controlled. It’s not a weakness– It’s your best strength–

“Just cuz yer going there and I’m staying here,” I say. “It don’t mean we’re parting.” “No,” she says and I know she understands. “No, it certainly doesn’t.”