Angela’s Reviews > The Gone-Away World > Status Update

"Grandmother Wu's voice, in my head, suggests that this is a very special hell for intellectual, caring men. You can get your ashes hauled, get fed grapes and eat pastry all you like, for ever, but the whole thing will eventually drive you into a coma of self-loathing and ennui which will destroy your mind and turn your self-respect into a razor in the soul."

"That's probably why she has added the two severed heads to the uprights of the throne. They lend her an undeniable air of not screwing around."

"not everything which is not simple is actually hard; even hard things can be done fast; even things which seem impossible turn out to be doable. We will survive."

A war here would not be legal or useful. It is not necessary or appropriate. It must be avoided. Immediately following this proud declamation comes a series of circumlocutions, circumventions and rhetoricocircumambulations which make it clear that we will go to war, but not really, because we don't want to and aren't allowed to, so what we're doing is in fact some kind of hyper-violent peace in which people will die.

"The Evangelist [highschool principal], driven by a wretched fear of hormonal wrongdoing in the Season of the Lord's Birth, pronounces that dating is forbidden by scripture. This is so remarkable that there is a queue at the library to read the Bible for anything we may have missed. A theological debate is set in motion which lasts into February and beyond."

"But satisfying as mayhem and (short) combat might be, these are not solutions. They are just reactions - as idiotic as Donnie himself. Thus I am paralysed, and upset. I want to unleash my anger. I do not believe that I should. [...] it is a terrible thing to be hog-tied by conscience."

"There were many great masters then, and some of them were very great and some of them were only a little bit great and some perhaps were only great as a courtesy."

"Step off the path, and maybe you'd get back and maybe you wouldn't, but you would be changed. Which sounds like strange and awful until you realize that that's actually pretty much how it's always been, and if you think any different, it's because you've never left that little stretch of comfort and gone someplace where what you know gets a bit think on the ground."