DB Graves > Recent Status Updates

"I think you're very sick," he said solemnly, "with an illness called 'a Mahisti looked at me' and as this is sometimes fatal--"
"We're not friends, Tadek."
"Yes, yes," he said patiently, "I know, we're working on it. Anyway, are you dying? You looked like you might have been dying in there."

Evemer has been suffering from this the entire book, good thing we have Tadek around to finally diagnose him.

When were they happy?
In the cracks.

But the truth was that anger required no trigger or pretext. It sourceless, a part of him, like yearning, curiosity, or sadness. Anger was his birthright. It was hard for him to surrender that longed-for crunch of bone.

...

"And I promise you, kiddo, I am never going to love you back until I am absolutely persuaded that you are not the kind of person who would beat a snake to death with a sledgehammer."

"You're going to spend all morning chasing after that fucking snake again?"
"I was just going back to my place."
"And then?"
"And then I was planning on spending all morning chasing after that fucking snake again."

"So when you said you weren't going to sneak out at dawn anymore," Sally said. Her voice was coming from somewhere underneath a pillow. "You meant you would still leave, but you would make a lot of noise."

3. The ideals of justice, of openness, of protecting the weak--of fundamental decency--[...]meant nothing to the country that espoused them. They were encumbrances to be circumvented in the exercise of power. They had not, in fact survived the war. This last implied that:

4. In a fundamental way both proved and exemplified by the spectacular postwar ascent of Werner van Braun, Nazi Germany had won the war.

Usually, you could rely on Americans to believe the worst about their heroes, but no one want to hear that America's assent to the Moon had been made with a ladder of bones.

...
He didn't have the heart or the stomach for the implications:

1. Scientific inquiry and pursuit were inherently amoral or ultramoral.

2. The wonder of rockets was inextricable from their fitness as instruments of death.

Not exactly the right edition, but the Acturus Publishing 2022 paperback from the box set isn't anywhere to be found on here.
Too bad because the cover is really nice.

I had buried all my baby teeth as they came out one by one and perhaps someday they would grow as dragons. All our land was enriched with my treasures buried in it, thickly inhabited just below the surface with my marbles and my teeth and my colored stones, all perhaps turned to jewels by now, held together under the ground in a powerful taut web which never loosened, but held fast to guard us.

nice.

Bicycles. Arrows. Soon they would be throwing bricks and rocks. They were already throwing the bodies of their children.

...and like a lot of grieving people who keep a habitual distance from their emotions, he thought being alone was what he needed.

I wanted to hold your power in my mouth.

I was tired of having the air sucked out of my lungs every time your eyes cut right to the heart of me. I was tired of the whole of the universe living in your circled arms, of the spark of life hiding in your kiss, of the power of death lying in wait in your teeth. I was tired of carrying the weight of a love like worship, of the sickly-warm rush of idolatry coloring my whole world.

Desperate, vulnerable. Fear for your life made you look like a man who could really love and be loved, like you might hand over your heart and all of your secrets without me having to crack your ribs open to get to them.