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And then it does, and the sun jumps into the sky, and everything is yellow and red and gold, and I whisper, “Morning, Mom,” and “Morning, Dad,” and the light is all around me now, so much of it that it finally spills over onto the west side of the Dune and fills the dark.
I will be asking you this discussion question: ‘What key turns on the ignition of the plot?’ Be ready with a respectable answer. And just so we’re clear on the nature of our class discussions, responses such as ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I didn’t understand what was going on’ or ‘I didn’t get a chance to read the book’ are not acceptable answers.”
They are stories meant to convey something about the world and about your place in it. In an academy studying environmental sciences, that seems to me to be pretty important—and therefore a worthy mission. Wouldn’t you say so, Sugimoto?”
“You’re not kids anymore,” he said. “And the world around you is vast and complicated and it sure isn’t going to wait for you to grow up. It’s time to think seriously about your place in it.
After Hercules’s whole family is killed, he becomes a secret to himself—which I think means he doesn’t know what the heck to do next.
“Does it really matter? You’re asking me if it really matters? I don’t know. Does it really matter if you’re standing on your feet or your head? Of course it matters. The way the light hits her face is everything.”
“You can tell a lot about someone when the right light is from the stars.”
“Perfect,” said Henry. “A storm, nighttime, a dark house full of wild cats, and the emergency room.”
And not to complain, but most of them stopped just for a second to take a clawing swat at my legs. I was wearing shorts.
But even all the system stuff was fine. It was. You know why? Because everything made sense. All you had to do was control all the variables and everything would work out the way it was supposed to.
So I tried to stay awake, but when the Vampire turned on her hypnotic music—“Do you like Vivaldi?” she said. “Love her,” I said—I fell asleep anyway, before we even got to East Sandwich.
“Most people don’t think we even look like brothers,” I said. “You do when you’re asleep,” she said. “Your faces relax, and you stop worrying, and all that grit you two carry around falls away, and you’re just you.”
Sometimes being still is the hardest thing to do—but in fact, the most productive.
“Courage is shown in what we do, not in what we’re feeling. I think you showed real courage.”
I know things can change in a millimillionth of a second. That means bad stuff sometimes. But maybe it can be good stuff too. Maybe I can help it mean good stuff sometimes. 150
Sometimes you need a disaster to teach you something new about life.”
“What happened to your squad when you didn’t have your hatchet?” Lieutenant Colonel Hupfer looked at me. He looked at me a long time. A really long time. A really really long time. “They didn’t make it,” he said.
But Lieutenant Colonel Hupfer read the last lines of the poem, first in English, then in Anglo-Saxon. It was very cool, like he was speaking in Old Castle.
Good writing is never done by the numbers. It is so much more subtle and evocative than mathematics.
I sometimes wonder what the guy who killed my parents was like when he wasn’t drunk. Maybe he wasn’t what I think he was. What was he like in the between times? 188
“Happiness beyond belief is going to be in their eyes,” he said. And he said it again: “Happiness beyond belief.”
I guess it’s a lot harder to love what doesn’t love you back.
Maybe art tells the truth best when it admits our mortality.
But that’s how artists make their living, Hercules. They create art, they sell art.”
“You can’t stop the waves,” said Mrs. Savage. “But you can watch them, I suppose. Would you like to come with me to the gala?”
“Because maybe sometimes,” I said, “you can get something back even when you think it’s lost.”
Sometimes you lose what you love because something happens and you can’t stop it. We know that. But you can stop it this time. You can. You know you can. And if you don’t, then you’re a jerkface.”
“You know, Beal, you’ve been fighting a whole lot of monsters this year, monsters much more real than any the mythical Hercules fought. And you’ve been fighting stuff that’s come at you out of the blue. And none of it is fair, and none of it is right, and none of it is anything you’ve deserved. That’s the world, Beal. But you haven’t crumbled, have you? And you haven’t disappeared. You’re still here. And the truth is, no matter what happened with your parents, and no matter what happens with Elly, you’re still going to be here.”
But I think I discovered something when I was working on the crab apple trees for the National Seashore. It’s a whole lot better to be not alone.
Maybe, the stuff we hold up, we don’t have to hold up by ourselves all the time.
Here’s what it’s like to go into hell: anything horrible that came before this crash is replayed for you, at rapid speed, with heightened lighting, with louder sound, with brighter colors, with higher production values than you can imagine. You can’t stop it, and you can’t stop it, and you can’t stop
It was like remembering everything that was good—and knowing you were going to remember all that forever.
