Danielle’s Reviews > The Toll > Status Update

“You are a terrible person,” the Thunderhead said. “You are a wonderful person.”

“Well, which is it?” Greyson demanded.

“Why can’t you see that the answer is both?”

“It was, he had come to realize, a matter of evolution. Not natural selection, because nature had become weak and toothless. Intelligent selection was more like it, with Goddard and his acolytes at the helm of the intelligentsia.”

“Fear, Ayn. Fear is the beloved father of respect.”

A successful lie is not fueled by the liar; it is fueled by the willingness of the listener to believe.

You can’t expose a lie without first shattering the will to believe it. That is why leading people to truth is so much more effective than merely telling them.

“No one’s memories are ‘true.’ Ten people remember the same thing in ten different ways. Who I factually was doesn’t matter…I love who I am—probably wasn’t true before, or I never would’ve been supplanted.” It was not exactly circular logic. More like spiral. An accepted lie that spun upon itself until truth and fiction disappeared into a singularity of who the hell cares, as long as I’m happy?

These glimpses of the future and the past are mind boggling.

“My existence has been all about silencing life but until now I have not dared to entertain that wholly mortal-age question of what lies beyond the silence. Such elaborate ideas those mortals had! Heaven and hell—nirvana and Valhalla, reincarnation, haunting, and so many underworlds…Mortals were the children of extremes. Either death was sublime, or it was unthinkable—such a mélange of hope and terror…”