Kindle Notes & Highlights
She did something that was very difficult, but also important. It was another task from the crisis manual, and her Mom and Dad had emphasized it over and over again. She took a deep breath and she let go of the shame for everything she’d left undone and was not doing, and she closed her eyes and stood very still until she felt sure it was gone from her. Then she went back to the endless work that she still had to do.
The fundamental basis of an avian reporting system is small, smooth river stones. A bird marks the completion of each assigned task by carrying the stone to its bucket; management, for the birds in charge, becomes little more than a visual scan of the buckets, which easily reveals which birds and even which task groups are ahead and which are falling behind.
Train reading that is relevant to work.
“So I will tell you:” said the witch. She looked up at the sky. “I am the witch of looking-upon,” she said. “I am the witch of the eyes that see. He tried to fight me by dreaming things, things that he saw with the mind’s eye, imagining that the right dream would beat me. But I didn’t live in the dream that he dreamt. I lived behind the eyes he dreamed with. When he dreamed of an army, I was his dreaming of an army. When he dreamed of a keep, I was his dreaming of a keep. When he dreamed of hiding, I was the dreaming of that hiding … you see?” Valentina frowned at the witch, who looked down
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“Mm. Well, how have you been fighting the witch so far?” Valentina was uncomfortably silent. “Honestly,” sighed Mrs. Senko. “That bad?” “I hurt her once,” said Valentina. “That’s not the same as fighting someone,” said Mrs. Senko. “Fighting someone makes them change. Hurting them just makes them work harder to stay the same.”
“There’s better things a girl like you could be doing with your life,” Aggie pointed out, “than throwing it away on a vendetta with a god.” “There are no gods save the one God,” Valentina said, “and the Headmaster is not He.”
“The process of personhood,” Valentina said, “is therefore a process that is committed after-the-fact. We do not conduct personhood in the moment. We do not construct ourselves in the moment. We construct ourselves … later. Who are we in the moment? A shapeless, nameless doing. A thing that is in the world, that moves.”
“I think that one day I will no longer spend quite so much time angry at the Headmaster of the Bleak Academy. I think that one day the wound he’s done to me will not just have healed but will not come readily to mind. I think that will be better. I think that will be a kind of adulthood that I am failing in. And there, you see? Fifty-two years old, and so stuck in time that I worry about adulthood.
as bad as it is to plan to kill your son and raise him up again as a vampire, it’s a whole different order of bad to plan to kill him and hope for the best.”
“I am … I am not the leaving-home kind of vampire,” Svetlana said. “Oh,” Mariya said. “Do you have to be, ah, invited out?”
At the back of her throat a spark took light. Her breath blew into him as her nose mashed his inwards and her lips touched his, and on that breath of hers was fire. It spread through the channels of his head. It lit the candle of his brain and the wicks behind his eyes. It slipped down his throat into the brazier of his chest. “Oh,” he said, quite startled, as he came to life.
“If you were to commit a true act of miracle, if you were to abort the formation of the concept of the hair midway through the process through enlightenment and then … assert that a seagull mapped more closely to the truth to which your heart attends … then perhaps you would achieve the effect you noted. It would not be because you had realized that the hair might as well be a seagull, but because in bowing before the infinite majesty of the truth you decided in jest to veil it in a seagull’s form. Not ‘in jest.’ That was the wrong term. I do not have the words for it. … in a spirit of delight
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“I tend to imagine,” he said, “in any case, that to remove an absence is to lower the resistance in the circuit of the world. Does that make sense to you? It allows the thing to spark into being with much less ontological potential.
Aprosinya gave her a haunted look. “Tell me, Aprosinya,” Mrs. Senko said, “is it worthy of me? Are you worthy of me? Are you something lustrous, something jeweled, something that can grow beyond the petty bounds of this mortal earth and spread your wings above the Bleak Academy?” Aprosinya, jerkily, shook her head. Don’t be ridiculous. “Oh,” Mrs. Senko said. Her face fell, and she looked down. “Well, that is, of course, your choice.” She rose to her feet, creakily, bracing herself with her umbrella. She walked back to the front of the classroom. She took a breath to resume the lecture. “Wait,”
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