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Book and Story Quotes "You've told
me yourself, in the end, stories are all we've got. They're who we are
and what we are and why we are. We've got to share them with each other,
the good and the bad. Maybe especially the bad, you said to me once,
because anyone who doesn't remember history is doomed to repeat it...."
If I were a poet,
that's what I'd write about. People who worked in the middle of the
night. Men who loaded trains, emergency room nurses with their gentle
hands. Night clerks in hotels, cabdrivers on graveyard, waitresses in
all-night coffee shops. They knew the world, how precious it was when
a person remembered your name, the comfort of a rhetorical question,
"How's it going, how's the kids?" They knew how long the night
was. They knew the sound life made as it left. It rattled, like a slamming
screen door in the wind. Night workers lived without illusions, they
wiped dreams off counters, they loaded freight. They headed back to
the airport for one last fare.
"I'm not going
to the Arbors, I'll be mugged and raped."
I consider doing
some shaping. There are very few things as scary as turning around and
finding an eight-foot-high amphora behind you when there wasn't one
before, especially when that amphora is making faces at you. Most people
foul themselves and find it very hard to relax after that. Once every
three hundred years or so, I treat myself.
"Did I ever tell you about the Valley of the Kings?" she said.... "Cairo was quarantined, so we had to fly out of Addis Ababa, and on the way down I bribed the taxi driver to take us to the Valley of the Kings so I could see Tutankhamen's tomb," she said. "It was a foolhardy thing to do. The Pandemic had already reached Luxor, and we just missed being caught in the quarantine. We were shot at twice.... We might have been killed. My sister refused to get out of the car, but I went down the stairs and up to the door of the tomb, and I thought, This is what it was like when Carter found it.... "When they
found the door to the tomb, it was locked, and they were supposed to
wait for the proper authorities to open it. Carter drilled a hole in
the door, and held a candle up and looked through.... Carnarvon said,
'Can you see anything?' and Carter said, 'Yes. Wonderful things.'"
"Kenzie."
She saw the black boot standing in Sturm's blood, and she drew a deep breath. "Touch his
body, and you will die," Laurana said softly. "Your dragon
will not be able to save you. This knight was my friend, and I will
not let his killer defile his body."
Will wrestled with
his conscience, grappled it to the ground and sat on it until he couldn't
hear a squeak out of it.
Aziraphale grabbed the dashboard. "You can't do ninety miles an hour in Central London!" Crowley peered at the dial. "Why not?" he said. "You'll get us killed!" Aziraphale hesitated. "Inconveniently discorporated," he corrected, lamely, relaxing a little. "Anyway, you might kill other people." Crowley shrugged.
The angel had never really come to grips with the twentieth century,
and didn't realize that it is perfectly possible to do ninety miles
an hour down Oxford Street. You just arranged matters so that no-one
was in the way. And since everyone knew that it was impossible to do
ninety miles an hour down Oxford Street, no-one noticed.
"Ariane,"
said the daemonic voice. "By your name, you are bidden. Eyes to
ravens, soul to Annis: but the flesh is mine."
"I forget nothing, Aes Sedai," Rand said coldly. "...I said you would be on an equal footing with the Tower emissaries.... They are on their knees, Aes Sedai. Kneel!" ...Taim appeared as close to a smile as Rand had ever seen him. "Kneel and swear to the Lord Dragon," he said softly, "or you will be knelt." As stories do, the tale spread.... Unusually for stories, it was something very close to truth that was most often believed. On a day of fire and blood, a tattered banner waved above Dumai's Wells, bearing the ancient symbol of Aes Sedai. On a day of fire and blood and the One Power, as prophecy had suggested, the unstained tower, broken, bent knee to the forgotten sign. The first nine Aes
Sedai swore fealty to the Dragon Reborn, and the world was changed forever.
Best of all things in New Orleans was the food. Remembering the bitter hungry days at Tara and her more recent penury, Scarlett felt that she could never eat enough of these rich dishes. Gumboes and shrimp Creole, doves in wine and oysters in crumbly patties full of creamy sauce, mushrooms and sweetbreads and turkey livers, fish baked cunningly in oiled paper and limes. Her appetite never dulled, for whenever she remembered the everlasting goobers and dried peas and sweet potatoes at Tara, she felt an urge to gorge herself anew of Creole dishes. "You eat as though each meal were your last," said Rhett. "Don't scrape the plate, Scarlett. I'm sure there's more in the kitchen. You have only to ask the waiter. If you don't stop being such a glutton, you'll be as fat as the Cuban ladies and then I shall divorce you." But she only put
out her tongue at him and ordered another pastry, thick with chocolate
and stuffed with meringue.
My turn. I don't
like to interfere. I grow in a twentieth of a second to eight feet high
and six feet wide, and in colors with atomic definition, I show him
himself; the one thing no one can look at: his death. He obliges me
by losing mastery of his bodily functions; the bodily functions he doesn't
want to function function, and those he does don't. He reaches one hundred
forty-three before he dies, and I revert to the sideboard, looking ceramic.
Other night I went over to Providence read in a line, marathon of poets and fiction writers. Afterwards, as I was sipping a Coke, a young man came up to me, fierce and tall and skinny, his wrists sticking out of his sleeves. He said, "Hypertext. I've been wanting to tell you about it." "Hypertext?" "Your work. I've read everything you've ever published three or four times - at least. I know your work. I could put you in hypertext." There was a girl behind him. She reached past his sleeve, put her hand on mine, said, "Oh yes, we could do it. We could put you in hypertext." She spoke the word with conviction, passion, almost love. "Hypertext?" I spoke it through a blur of bewilderment. "CD-ROM, computers, disks or files, it doesn't matter," the boy said in a rush of intensity. "It's the latest thing. We take one of your stories, and we put you in. I know just the story. It goes all the way through from beginning to end. But all the way through, people can reach in and touch a word. Mouse or keyboard or a touchable screen. Every time you touch a word, a window opens. Behind that word is another story. You touch the word and the story opens. We put one of your stories behind that story. And then maybe, maybe you could write some more and we could put in other things. Every word the reader touches, it opens again." The girl tugged my arm urgently. "It's so beautiful," she said. "After a while it's like a skin of oil on the water. If you look at it from above it's just one thing, water and oil in a spreading shape. But if you looked at it from the side, it would go down and down, layers and layers. All the stories you've ever told. All the pictures you've ever seen. We can put in everything. Hypertext." The boy nodded. I reached for a glass of wine. I took long drink, rubbed my aching back, said, "Yeah, right, I'll think about it." That night I had a dream. I was walking in a museum, and I was old. I was on that cane I had to use the whole length of 1987. My right eye had finally gone completely blind. My left eye was tearing steadily. I saw everything through a scrim of water, oily water. Way way down three or four corridors, around a turn, I hit a wall. My story was on this wall. I stood in front of my wall. I put my hand on it. Words were peeling across the wall, and every word was a brick. I touched one. "Bastard." The brick fell away and a window opened. My mother was standing in front of me. She was saying, "I'm not sick. I would tell you if I was sick, girl. I would tell you." I touched her face and the window opened. She was behind it, flesh cooling, still warm. Hair gone, shadows under her eyes. I was crying. I touched her hand. It was marble, it was brick. It fell away. She was seventeen and she was standing on the porch. He was sitting on the steps. She was smiling at him. She was saying, "You won't treat me bad, will you? You'll love my girls, you?" I touched the brick. It fell away. He was standing there. I was holding my arm. The doctor was saying, "What in God's name happened to this child?" I touched the wall and the brick fell away. My mama had her hand on my neck. She was handing me pictures. She was saying, "I didn't want to know who they were. I don't know what happened. I never wanted to tell you what happened. You make it up for yourself." I put my hand on the photograph and the window opened onto a movie. I was eight years old. Cousins and aunts and strangers were moving across the yard. I was clinging to my mother's neck. I was saying "Mama" in that long, low plea a frightened child makes. She reached for me, put her arms around me. I fell away. She was holding onto her mama's neck, saying the same thing, saying "Mama" in that same cry. My hands met the brick of her flesh. She fell away. My son was climbing up my lap into my arms, putting his arms around my neck. He said, "Mama." The last brick fell down. I was standing there looking up through tears. I was standing by myself in the rubble of my life, at the bottom of every story I had ever needed to know. I was gripping my ribs like a climber holding on to rock. I was whispering the word over and over, and it was holding me up like a loved hand. I can tell you
anything. All you have to believe is the truth.
The Great God Om
waxed wroth, or at least made a spirited attempt. There is a limit to
the amount of wroth that can be waxed one inch from the ground, but
he was right up against it.
"Oh," I said, touching my hair, "it's beautiful. It's beautiful in a way it never was." "And that," he said, "is your own." ...I was slim. I
was slim and tall. And my hair was moonlight. And I wept.
This is the room
of the wolfmother wallpaper. This is the room where the boys slept inside
their blowguns to avoid being bitten by the bats, for whom the girls
sewed tiny velvet suits.
"What about you?" she said at last. "Me?" "Yeah, you. Come on, I told you mine." So I told her, which is a measure of how out of touch I'd become. There was a terrible pain in my head that made all of my thoughts rattle around loose, I didn't know where anything was, and I was so dry I was afraid I'd crack if I moved. No, let's be honest. I was too far gone for witty descriptions. Drink the damn water, I told myself. Drink it now, get out of here, and you can kick it later. I wasn't so fuzzy-minded that I couldn't spot the two basic errors in that sentence. I told Caramel almost all of it. I told her about the stupid olives, I told her about my mother watching me out of the corner of her eye when she thought I didn't see. Believe me, you can live with getting beat up in the parking lot at school dances. You can put up with opening your locker and finding a dead cat in it. You can even bear it when the next-door neighbor, usually distant but kind, gets drunk one night and tries to run you down with his car. But when you realize that your mother never touches you except when she has to.... I think I was semiconscious some of the time. I discovered that Caramel was holding my hand at one point, and couldn't remember when she'd first taken it. I didn't tell her all about my early life in Bordertown. I told her I did some pretty despicable things, and left it at that. Safe enough, since I know I've forgotten many of them. The river will do that. It does make you feel strong and smart, but only because it takes away all the things you've ever measured strength and smarts by. Everything, even your own well-being, is set at a distance and devalued. You can do the most appalling things and forget them a moment later, because they simply aren't significant. And then even the river begins to slip away and forsake you, and you need more and more of it to make you strong and smart, to make you forget your freakish talent that's the real cause of your fall, not the river, not your own asshole self-pity. That much I remember. And I remember not being allowed to sleep, being stuck under cold running water until I was awake enough to scream and claw, being made to walk, walk, walk with a fierce voice alternately cursing me and bursting into tears. If we didn't get out of there soon, I would drink that water, I would take my faithless mistress back. In the dark of that room where magic never came, I was certain that this time no one would be there to make sure I kept walking. I should have told her about some of the good things. I didn't. I fell asleep. ....It was Tick-Tick,
you see, who wouldn't let me quit walking and die all those years ago.
...I did not know
the song.... It had something to do with lemon trees, or orange trees,
I forget, that is all I remember, and for me that is no mean feat, to
remember it had something to do with lemon trees, or orange trees, I
forget, for of all the other songs I have ever heard in my life, and
I have heard plenty, it being apparently impossible, physically impossible
short of being deaf, to get through this world, even my way, without
hearing singing, I have retained nothing, not a word, not a note, or
so few words, so few notes, that, that what, that nothing, this sentence
has gone on long enough.
Where I was born
- Greenville, South Carolina - smelled like nowhere else I've ever been....
That country was beautiful, I swear to you, the most beautiful place
I've ever been. Beautiful and terrible. It is the country of my dreams
and the country of my nightmares: a pure pink and blue sky, red dirt,
white clay, and all that endless green - willows and dogwood and firs
going on for miles.
I learned a new expression today: "protein window." Todd told it to me. Apparently, after
you bodybuild, you have a two-hour time window in which your body can
suck up amino acids. This is your protein window. I was talking to him
and he said, "Man, I'd like to talk some more, but my protein window
is closing," and he ran off to the kitchen and ate a chicken. What
a decade this is.
Chartreuse glows
in the dark, and if you drink enough of it, your eyes will turn bright
green.
Two hours later
I get up and I look at myself in the mirror. And there, on that chest
that was just a chest, on those shoulders that were just shoulders,
is a beautiful, undulant black labyrinth of slender, hooked lines. It's
incredibly crisp, the way new tattoos are, and the antibiotic ointment
makes it shiny. This is my body, and it's been transfigured.... I'm
lithe and I'm powerful and I'm wild. This tattoo has turned me into
a jungle thing, into a head-hunting Dayak motherfucker.... Four hours
under a tattooist's needle and for the first time in my life I can look
in the mirror and actually like what I see.
The captain stared down. The crew was assembling on deck, looking up at him with anxious eyes. He looked down further. In front of the crew the ship's rats had assembled. There was a tiny robed shape in front of them. It said, SQUEAK. He thought: even
rats have a Death....
She's seven hundred
years from home, Dunworthy thought, in a century that didn't value women
enough to even list their names when they died.
She kissed me gentle, kissed me slow, kissed me like Grace Kelly, a porcelain princess, a lace-curtain lesbian. I told her, Don't
touch me that way. Don't come at me with that sour-cream smile. Come
at me as if I were worth your life.... Take me like a turtle whose shell
must be cracked, whose heart is ice, who needs your heat. Love me like
a warrior, sweat up to your earlobes and all your hope between your
teeth. Love me so I know I am at least as important as anything you
have ever wanted.
...She lifted her head and kissed him on the cheek. "How many years in a row now?" she asked, knowing the answer very well. "Together at Carnival? I am aggrieved and affronted that the nights are etched on my heart while you can't even remember. Four, now, my dear. Does that make us a tradition?" "Would you like to be one?" she asked. His hand had moved upwards, stroking the nape of her neck. He had a gentle touch; he was a gentle man. "I would like to know you and be your friend for the rest of my life," said Aurelian quietly. His dark head came down and they kissed. Feeling a physical
sense of release, and a genuine comfort on a night when she needed exactly
that, Lisseut slid slowly back down on the bed and laced her fingers
through his black, thick hair, pulling him down to her. They made love
as they had before, three years running on this night... with tenderness
and some laughter, and an awareness of shaping a still place together
amid the wildness outside and the music below and the wheeling of the
summer stars about the axis of the year.
"But it looks
so awful, and it smells - "
Then, as the simple words of interment were spoken, as the atmosphere planes dipped in tribute over the open grave, Helva found voice for her lonely farewell. Softly, barely audible
at first, the strains of the ancient song of evening and requiem swelled
to the final poignant measure until black space itself echoed back the
sound of the song the ship sang.
She bit deep into my neck, and all the blood in my body felt like it had turned to fishhooks, being pulled towards my throat. I had never been in so much pain. Absurdly, my mind was a million miles away, humming that stupid Hall and Oates tune I'd heard when I first heard her. My eyes were locked-open, and out of the alley, the only thing I could see was the lit neon sign in the window of the bar I'd worked at. I'd fogotten to turn it off. "HIGH LIFE ON TAP" was the last thought my living brain ever had. The sign seemed to pull away from me, and the last glimmer of hope went with it, swallowed by blackness. I knew I was dead. And then a substance
sweeter than sex and wine and vented rage splattered across the roof
of my mouth, and I swallowed it out of reflex. It went down like a thick
draught of fifty-year-old bourbon whiskey, and somehow, it revived me.
I drank more, and as I did, I felt it pulse and spread from my stomach
into my system with the same prickling pain of your legs coming back
after they've been asleep. Every fiber in my body tingled with it, opened
to it, like the blossoming of a thousand flowers simultaneously. How
can I describe what it felt like, what it tasted of, to those who haven't
known it? It tasted like.... Freedom.
She reminded me
of a certain kind of rose she grew in the garden, called Pristine. It
was white with a trace of pink around the outside, and when you picked
it, the petals all fell off.
When Ariane came in with the tea, Sylvie was crouched splayed on her bed, amid splinters of glass, hunting brilliant nervous droplets of mercury over the sheets with a spoon. The atomies jiggled in mockery, assailing her shifting knees, elusive and importunate as fairies. They beaded like breath on the fibers of the blanket. They spangled and fled. "Alien marbles," she said, chivvying. "I smashed the thermometer." "What about the glass?" "Oh, never mind that. I could breathe this stuff. My hair could fall out." She was beaming. "Aren't they neat? All the little bojangles, all over. Blobs. Whoops! Gotcha." "You'd go mad," said Ariane. "Like the Hatter. Over there, by the pillow, a whole invading galaxy. The Huns of Elfland, wildly rolling." Sylvie chased one,
two, seven bits, over the fuzzy sheet. They were tarnished now, saturnine.
"I hate dirty mercury." Grimly she tipped the last droplet
into a phial. She held it up. Then heedless, deliberate, ecstatic, she
decanted the bright shivering creature on her hand.
He's got long orange
hair in spikes, as if he stuck a number of large shocked orange starfishes
on his head.
When he looked up, Alec was smiling, his eyes sharp and green with wicked pleasure. "All right," Alec drawled, "I will." And he slid the ruby onto his forefinger. It glowed there like a live thing, an icon for the hand that bore it. They were a noble's hands, now, a foreign prince's, rich and strange. Against the transparent skin, the high-bred bones, Alec's coarse clothing and scuffed boots faded to nothing. "That's good," Richard said, pleased with the effect. "It's a shame to keep them all in a box. I never wear them; this way I get to look at them." "They like to be looked at," Alec said. "I can feel them purring with delight, showy little bastards." "Well, let's take them for a walk - not that anyone will notice them, next to my new clothes." The two men were
noticed all the way through Riverside....
Even when it started to snow she did not lose her sense of direction. Her feet grew numb, but she did not worry about the distance. The heavy winds couldn't blow her off course. She continued. Even when her heart clenched and her skin turned crackling cold it didn't matter, because the pure and naked part of her went on. The snow fell deeper
that Easter than it had in forty years, but June walked over it like
water and came home.
A place knows who
you are. I don't mean simply the people who live there, but the place
itself. If you go walking in the old neighborhoods, the streets or fields
where you grew up, it comes back to you. Those old haunts remind you
of the stories of who you were. Which makes it easier to figure out
who you are.
Calan was amazed. "I didn't know you could sword fight." The actor seemed
just as astounded. "I can't," he whispered, "I just adopted
a character who could."
The other people
I like are the ones who are being driven to find a tune that has been
troubling them, distracting them, a tune that they can hear in their
breath when they run for a bus, or in the rhythm of their windshield
wipers when they're driving home from work. Sometimes something banal
and and obvious is responsible for the distraction: they have heard
it on the radio or at a club. But sometimes it has come to them as if
by magic. Sometimes it has come to them because the sun was out, and
they saw someone who looked nice, and they suddenly found themselves
humming a snatch of a song they haven't heard for fifteen or twenty
years; once, a guy came in because he had dreamed a record, the
whole thing, melody, title, and artist. And when I found it for him
(it was an old reggae thing, "Happy Go Lucky Girl" by the
Paragons), and it was more or less exactly as it had appeared to him
in his sleep, the look on his face made me feel as though I was not
a man who ran a record shop, but a midwife, or a painter, someone whose
life is routinely transcendental.
I hung the cartoon
that Paul Trout had made of me over my bed. I never let anyone touch
me. I wondered where he was now, whether I would ever hear from
him again. Whether someone would love him someday, show him what beauty
meant.
Harry was faster than Higgs - he could see the little round ball, wings fluttering, darting up ahead - he put on an extra spurt of speed - WHAM! A roar of rage echoed from the Gryffindors below - Marcus Flint had blocked Harry on purpose, and Harry's broom spun off course, Harry holding on for dear life. "Foul!" screamed the Gryffindors. Madam Hooch spoke angrily to Flint and then ordered a free shot at the goal posts for Gryffindor. But in all the confusion, of course, the Golden Snitch had disappeared from sight again. Down in the stands, Dean Thomas was yelling, "Send him off, ref! Red card!" "What are you talking about, Dean?" said Ron. "Red card!" said Dean furiously. "In soccer you get shown the red card and you're out of the game!" "But this isn't soccer, Dean," Ron reminded him. Hagrid, however, was on Dean's side. "They oughta change the rules. Flint coulda knocked Harry outta the air." Lee Jordan was finding it difficult not to take sides. "So - after that obvious and disgusting bit of cheating - " "Jordan!" growled Professor McGonagall. "I mean, after that open and revolting foul - " "Jordan, I'm warning you - " "All right,
all right. Flint nearly kills the Gryffindor Seeker, which could happen
to anyone, I'm sure, so a penalty to Gryffindor taken by Spinner, who
puts it away, no trouble, and we continue play, Gryffindor still in
possession."
"Why do you love me?" I chuckled. "You want me to count the ways?" She didn't say anything, just watched me. "I love you, Ange, because... I don't know. Because I always have. Because you make me laugh. A lot. Because..." "What?" ..."Because since you left I have these dreams that you're sleeping beside me. And I wake up and I can still smell you, and I'm still half dreaming, but I don't know it, so I reach for you. I reach across to your pillow, and you're not there. And I gotta lie there at five in the morning, with the birds outside and you not there and your smell just fading away. It fades and there's - " I cleared my throat. "There's nothing but me left there. And white sheets. White sheets and those fucking birds and it hurts, and all I can do is close my eyes and lie there and wish I didn't feel like dying." Her face was very still, but her eyes had picked up a sheen like a thin film of glass. "That's not fair." She dabbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. "Nothing's
fair," I said.
This is the room
where Jezebel frescoed her eyelids with history's tragic glitter, where
Delilah practiced for her beautician's license, the room in which Salome
dropped the seventh veil while dancing the dance of ultimate cognition,
skinny legs and all. |