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all the tyranny in the world will never put a God in the heavens

It's all a matter of ideas, and God is just one idea I don't accept. It's not important. I am not going to go out and be immoral or commit crimes because I don't believe in God. I don't even think about it. I't just that I get tired of Him getting the credit for all the things the human race achieves through its own stubborn effort.

She shakes her head at the dissolved dream.

What a stage direction.

"Who the hell told you you had to be a doctor? If you so crazy 'bout messing 'round with sick people - then go be a nurse like other women - or just get married and be quiet."

*slams head against table*

After so much heartache, Maisie's birthday with Ivah, Blu, and Miss Ito is one of the most transcendent things I've read in a while.

So much abuse. Children, animals. The reviewer who called this novel comic must be psychotic.

Owens is a special kind of bitch.

[Magic is] in the listener, and for each and every ear it will be different, and it will affect them in ways they can never predict. From the mundane to the profound. You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone's soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. The tale will move them and drive them and who knows what they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift.

There are no longer simple tales with quests and beasts and happy endings. The quests lack clarity of goal or path. The beasts take different forms and are difficult to recognize for what they are. And there are never really endings, happy or otherwise....Good and evil are a great deal more complex than a princess and a dragon, or a wolf and a scarlet-clad girl. And is not the dragon the hero of his own story?

There are no longer simple tales with quests and beasts and happy endings. The quests lack clarity of goal or path. The beasts take different forms and are difficult to recognize for what they are. And there are never really endings, happy or otherwise....Good and evil are a great deal more complex than a princess and a dragon, or a wolf and a scarlet-clad girl. And is not the dragon the hero of his own story?

Pet peeve: when an author fails to make mention of the particular books or works of art her characters have supposedly been discussing for hours.

Give me those discussions, dammit.

Holy mother, part two turns an unlikely fairytale into a horror, with Fevvers turned Cockney princess into godmother-too-late.

'It was dreadful for her because nobody was behaving in the way she had planned they should.'

Hilarious. Damned free will.

The last paragraph:

'Perhaps vessels are setting out even now, traveling toward or away from him, steered by sailors armed with maps and knowledge of the stars, driven by need or perhaps simply by curiosity: whatever became of the countries on the other side? If nothing else, it's pleasant to consider the possibility. He likes the thoughts of ships moving over the water, toward another world just out of sight.'

He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like moths to a light. This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret.

'Dear friends, I find myself immeasurably weary and I have gone to rest in the forest.'

'She thought of the opening monologue often in the months that followed, weighing those first words like coins or pebbles turned over and over in a pocket, but she was unable to come up with the next sentence.

He woke to quiet voices. This had been happening more and more lately, this nodding off unexpectedly, and it left him with an unsettled intimation of rehearsal. You fall asleep for short periods and then for longer periods and then forever.

'Clark had always been fond of beautiful objects, and in his present state of mind, all objects were beautiful. He stood by the case and found himself moved by every object he saw there, by the human enterprise each object had required.'

Gorgeous and Heideggerian and sad.

She was thinking about the way she'd always taken for granted that the world had certain people in it, either central to her days or unseen and infrequently thought of. How without any one of these people the world is a subtly but unmistakably altered place, the dial turned just one or two degrees.

Prediction time. Tyler is the prophet. He came from Jerusalem with a hefty awareness of its history on a plane that miraculously didn't carry the Georgia Flu. It explains the symbol, the Luli, the connection to EVERYONE. Yep.

'he had an idea--too sentimental to speak aloud and he knew none of his divorced friends would ever own up to it--that something must linger, a half-life of marriage, some sense memory of love even if obviously not the thing itself. He thought these people must mean something to one another, even if they didn't like one another anymore.'

Yep.

"'Supportive of my vision'? He'd adopted new speech patterns. But of course he had, because since she'd last seen him there had been eleven years of friends and acquaintances and meetings and parties, travel here and there, film sets, two weddings and two divorces, a child. It made sense, she supposed, that he would be a different person by now."

I love the specificity, her personal fixations.

'You look like an executive,' she said to herself in the mirror, and the thought that flitted behind this was You look like a stranger. She pushed it away.

'These previous versions of herself were so distant now that remembering them was almost like remembering other people, acquaintances, young women whom she'd known a long time ago, and she felt such compassion for them.'

Familiar, sad, comforting.

'The memory had dimmed since she'd last retrieved it, imprecision creeping in.'

This is my soul and the world is unwinding, this is my heart in the still winter air.

Frank standing on a stool on his wondrously functional pre-Libya legs, the bullet that would sever his spinal cord still twenty-five years away but already approaching

Jeevan found himself thinking about how human the city is, how human everything is. We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt.

'adulthood's full of ghosts.
...
I'm talking about these people who've ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed....They've done what's expected of them. They want to do something different but it's impossible now, there's a mortgage, kids, whatever, they're trapped.
...
You probably encounter people like him all the time. High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.'

When Arthur danced he'd had a way of flailing just on the edge of the beat.

'Dear V.,
I'm a terrible actor and this city is fucking freezing and I miss you.
-A'

Heh! How many letters did Lydia get in Kenya with a sentence or two like this from me?