The God of Endings Quotes

“How presumptuous is the gift of life? What arrogance is implicit in the act of love that calls another into existence? This world, my love, I give it to you. All of it. You’re welcome, and I’m sorry.”
― Jacqueline Holland, The God of Endings

“Suddenly I couldn’t think what people were for, couldn’t think what their lives amounted to besides misery. Like a bird, I looked down from high treetops at all the wretched villages of men and felt only blank confusion. Those pitiful beasts, I would think if I were a bird, those poor, sad creatures dragging themselves along the ground, passing their days laboring and fearing and suffering until death. Too clever to live in peace, too stupid to live well. They’re better off in the dirt, finally quiet, finally peaceful.”
― Jacqueline Holland, The God of Endings

“It seems, unfortunately, that nothing can protect you from your own mind, your knowledge, your memories. The harder you fight to keep thoughts out, the harder they pound the battering ram to get in.”
― Jacqueline Holland, The God of Endings

“How curious it is that in nature, the most vibrant colors are those that precede death. The delicate pinks and blues of spring are wan in comparison to the dramatic crimson of the hawthorn berries or the bloody gashes of the buckthorn leaves in late November. Stars blaze pale in their infancy, but in old age they melt and simmer in reds and oranges just as the oaks and maples do. Youth, it seems, is a state of diffuse abundance, while death’s approach concentrates.”
― Jacqueline Holland, The God of Endings

“Wrong, right, you’ve done them all. All the things you’ve done are a little of both. Wrong things come out right, right things come out wrong, then with enough time, they switch.”
― Jacqueline Holland, The God of Endings

“Well, we children do not like emptying, clearing. We do not want Czernobog’s darkness, only Belobog’s light. Even us very old children. We forget that light, without shadow or variation, is blinding. We malign and fear and slander the Emptier, Czernobog, the Dark One, the god of endings. Perhaps we would do well to wait, like children learning patience, learning trust, and see what fills the space he clears, what light breaks into his darkness.”
― Jacqueline Holland, The God of Endings

“I envy these people terribly, it’s true, but not for their children and families; I envy their brevity. I envy the low stakes of their choices. Whatever they lose, whatever they suffer, they don’t suffer long. They get just a little life. Birth, some joys, some sorrows, then death to wash it all clean.”
― Jacqueline Holland, The God of Endings

“Children do deserve perfect love, but it isn't because they're perfect, which means it has to be some other word besides 'deserve'; but I don't know what the word is. But then it's true for adults too; after all, we're just the warped remains of imperfectly loved children. None of us gets the perfect love we ought, but maybe that's what life is for, to give us time to collect it in bits and pieces, a little here, a little there. Maybe we're supposed to put it together ourselves slowly.”
― Jacqueline Holland, The God of Endings

“the taking of anything sets into motion its eventual loss; nothing that is can resist becoming what was; to begin presumes the acceptance of an end.”
― Jacqueline Holland, The God of Endings

“We forget that light, without shadow or variation, is blinding.”
― Jacqueline Holland, The God of Endings

“We forget that light, without shadow or variation, is blinding. We malign and fear and slander the Emptier, Czernobog, the Dark One, the god of endings. Perhaps we would do well to wait, like children learning patience, learning trust, and see what fills the space he clears, what light breaks into his darkness.”
― Jacqueline Holland, The God of Endings

“IN LEO’S ROOM, I FIND the small stuffed giraffe, Max, on the floor beside the bed. I carry him down the hall, feeling the soft synthetic fur, the thick plush: all the pain and grief and tragedy accreted on this thing of string and cloth and stuffing, but how much Leo loves it, needs it, is soothed by it. That, I suppose, is how the brave do it, they just put it all together, the good and the bad, and they hold it tight to themselves, and walk on with it.”
― Jacqueline Holland, The God of Endings

“I’m not the nervous type. Deep-seated anxiety, crippling existential despair, sure. Nervous? Not as much.”
― Jacqueline Holland, The God of Endings

“I guess I've just realized recently that I've been obsessed with this idea that you speak of - getting what one deserves, or not - it has made me bitter. But that's because it doesn't make any sense to begin with. What you deserve and what you get: there's no way to measure them. You get the world and the world gets you, who's swindling whom?”
― Jacqueline Holland, The God of Endings

“Most people, I was learning, were cowards, and most laws had nothing to do with justice. Justice was a private matter that you didn’t expect anyone to execute for you. You did it yourself, or it didn’t get done.”
― Jacqueline Holland, The God of Endings

“When’s the last time you painted?” I laughed aloud at this. “Who knows? There’s no time for that, Anais. Don’t be ridiculous.” “It’s not ridiculous, Anna. It’s who you are. Coincidentally, it’s who we are too, the French. The Germans do not win only by taking down our flag, but by getting us to cease being who and what we are.”
― Jacqueline Holland, The God of Endings

“The building is a low gray concrete slab surrounded by thin, leafless poplars. Why Americans insist on housing beautiful works of art in such belligerently drab buildings, I’ll never understand, but I’m glad that modernism hit France only after its architectural style was already firmly established and enshrined in law.”
― Jacqueline Holland, The God of Endings

“EACH DAY AFTER CIRCLE TIME, the children exchange their fashionable jackets and sweaters for white linen smocks, which they run around in more freely, looking like a miniature and unruly assembly of ancient Greek statesmen.”
― Jacqueline Holland, The God of Endings

“Midsentence, midembrace, at the height of your hopes: that, you see, is when the god of endings likes to do it.”
― Jacqueline Holland, The God of Endings

“The hell of other people,’ as Sartre says.”
― Jacqueline Holland, The God of Endings

“Leo has apparently changed his mind about Sesame Street. Through the kitchen door, I can see it on the screen. The Count with his benign cloth fangs and his outlandish Transylvanian accent is counting “little batties,” one, two, three—a charming portrayal of blood drinkers, that little cloth puppet, and quite preferable to some others I’ve seen.”
― Jacqueline Holland, The God of Endings

“A small unenclosed pasture filled what remained of the clearing, and in it, a shaggy pony with cream-colored hair falling down into its eyes chewed at grass, a cow and calf lapped at water from a pond, and numerous sheep lay folded in the grass.”
― Jacqueline Holland, The God of Endings

“Youth, it seems, is a state of diffuse abundance, while death’s approach concentrates.”
― Jacqueline Holland, The God of Endings

“What will we carve together in the world to come, you and I?” my father asked,”
― Jacqueline Holland, The God of Endings

“It is a vile business. On that we are agreed, but then the powers of hell are vile. We do what we must, not because it is pleasant, but because it must be done.”
― Jacqueline Holland, The God of Endings

“I recorded all manner of diverse knowledge from Vano: the mythologies he dictated to me, the names that the monks had taught him for the Christian saints who now stood in for the exiled Slavic deities: Ognyena, who had become Saint Margaret the virgin; Yarilo, who had become Saint George.”
― Jacqueline Holland, The God of Endings

“Stories, after all, have boundaries, and fear needs nothing more desperately than boundaries.”
― Jacqueline Holland, The God of Endings

“We children do not like emptying, clearing. We do not want Czernobog's darkness, only Belobog's light. Even us very old children. We forget that light, without shadow or variation, is blinding. We malign and fear and slander the Emptier, Czernobog, the Dark One, the god of endings. Perhaps we would do well to wait, like children learning patience, learning trust, and see what fills the space he clears, what light breaks into his darkness.”
― Jacqueline Holland, The God of Endings

“I had come to Alexandria exhausted from moral calculations, but here they were, dredged up again. Some days I sought to flee the past. I wanted to think of nothing. Like a jungle beast I wanted my violences to have no meaning and no consequences. On those days, the scratch of Josef's pen, the intermittent clearing of his throat was an irritant that chafed abrasively at the conscience I wished to deny I had, and complicated my numb embrace of beastliness. On other days, I condemned myself savagely -- judge, jury, and hangman -- and sank without defense or justification into the damnation of the past. At those times, Josef's presence was a torment. He became host to a legion of ghosts haunting me sweetly.”
― Jacqueline Holland, The God of Endings