Bone Dance Quotes

“We're all born nameless, aren't we? And the name we end up with has only peripherally to do with our family tree.”
― Emma Bull, Bone Dance

“I don't trust memory, anyway. Why should I? Memories, however undependable, ought to be the stuff on the sand when the tides of experience recedes. As long as they're part of that process, there's something valid about them, something that ties them to real life.”
― Emma Bull, Bone Dance

“The origin of my body and my mind didn't matter. I, the part of me that learned, that called on my memories, that knew I'd pulled a plant like this before, that had moved this hand to do it, was fifteen years old and innocent of evil or good. Neutral. From here forward, I was blank tape; what would be recorded there, and when, and why, was up to me.”
― Emma Bull, Bone Dance

“A crisp new brain without a tenant. A bottle made to be filled by one of us, empty brass waiting to be turned into a bullet. A shiny new horse to be offered to the desperate Horseman in the vain hope that he or she will prefer it over the nearest infantry grunt. A domestic animal bred and broken for one of us to ride.”
― Emma Bull, Bone Dance

“Her skin was translucent pale, the complexion of the rich. Money made an excellent sunblock.”
― Emma Bull, Bone Dance

“Her coral liptint was faintly luminous; when she pressed her lips together, they made a glowing rosebud in her face.”
― Emma Bull, Bone Dance

“Happiness, in the land of Deals, is measured on a sliding scale. What makes you happy? A long white silent car with smoked-glass windows, with a chauffeur and a stocked bar and two beautiful objects of desire in the back seat? An apartment in a nice part of town? A kinder lover? A place to stand that's out of the wind? A brief cessation of pain? It depends on what you have at the moment I ask that question, and what you don't have. Wait a little, just a little. The scale will slide again.”
― Emma Bull, Bone Dance

“Death, the Sun, the Lovers. Lots of major arcana. Your future's controlled by others. There's powerful people playing with it. You're gonna have to fight to get it back...this is the country of truth. There the Devil, the Star, the Tower. In this country of truth, where your spirit lives, your life still isn't your own. Other stronger spirits, or maybe gods--they've got the say in what happens to you.”
― Emma Bull, Bone Dance

“From the lip of the Ravine I could see the Deeps on the other side, hard gray and brown brick on wood on the nearest structures, shading further in to rose, bronze, black pearl, and verdigris in spires of stone, metals, and brilliant glass. The empress of it all, rising from the center, was Ego, the tallest building in the City, whose reflective flanks had no color of their own, but worse the sky instead--relentless, cloudless blue today. The towers of the Deeps, rising in angles or curves, were made more poignant by the occasional shattered forms of their ruined kin.”
― Emma Bull, Bone Dance

“Suddenly I could imagine all the things my body might do when I wasn't there to stop it and I felt so vile they might as well have happened. Maybe they had; they just hadn't left marks. I thought about a future full of blank spaces, and I knew I couldn't bear it. If that was the future, I had to escape it.”
― Emma Bull, Bone Dance

“Nacemos solos en nuestra cabeza; vivimos solos allí; morimos solos. Los secretos, pues, a la tumba. Por un momento sentí deseos desesperados de no estar a solas...”
― Emma Bull, Bone Dance

“It's a cheval," said Mick, huge eyed.

..."A mindless, soulless, sexless shell, genderless as a baby doll," she said to me--at me--whoever she was talking to, it wasn't me. She didn't believe I existed.”
― Emma Bull, Bone Dance

“Have you seen it...Singin' in the rain, have you seen it?"

...His answer was all in his face, scornful and baffled at once. Money makes me ask stupid questions. He wanted it, of course, because someone else didn't have it.

"Debbie Reynolds dies in the end," I told him.”
― Emma Bull, Bone Dance