Great Throughts Treasury

"He would have died soon, but more painfully. Anyway, it was Urban Bloodshed Limitation. First rule: limit bloodshed by making sure that none of your own gets spilled."

"He was twisted as a pretzel, he was a tinfoil-halo shit-nosed frog-stomping king rat asshole, but he wasn't stupid."

"He?s a young man, my own age or a little older, which is young for a man although not for a woman, as at my age a woman is an old maid but a man is not an old bachelor until he?s fifty, and even then there?s still hope for the ladies, as Mary Whitney used to say."

"He?d developed a strangely tender feeling towards such words, as if they were children abandoned in the woods and it was his duty to rescue them."

"He'd wanted to track down and personally injure anyone who had ever done harm to her or made her unhappy. He'd tortured himself with painful knowledge: every white-hot factoid he could collect he'd shove up under his fingernails. The more it hurt, the more--he was convinced--he loved her."

"Helen of Troy Does Counter Dancing: The world is full of women who'd tell me I should be ashamed of myself if they had the chance. Quit dancing. Get some self-respect and a day job. Right. And minimum wage, and varicose veins, just standing in one place for eight hours behind a glass counter bundled up to the neck, instead of naked as a meat sandwich. Selling gloves, or something. Instead of what I do sell. You have to have talent to peddle a thing so nebulous and without material form. Exploited, they'd say. Yes, any way you cut it, but I've a choice of how, and I'll take the money. I do give value. Like preachers, I sell vision, like perfume ads, desire or its facsimile. Like jokes or war, it's all in the timing. I sell men back their worst suspicions: that everything's for sale, and piecemeal. They gaze at me and see a chain-saw murder just before it happens, when thigh, ass, inkblot, crevice, tit, and nipple are still connected. Such hatred leaps in them, my beery worshipers! That, or a bleary hopeless love. Seeing the rows of heads and upturned eyes, imploring but ready to snap at my ankles, I understand floods and earthquakes, and the urge to step on ants. I keep the beat, and dance for them because they can't. The music smells like foxes, crisp as heated metal searing the nostrils or humid as August, hazy and languorous as a looted city the day after, when all the rape's been done already, and the killing, and the survivors wander around looking for garbage to eat, and there's only a bleak exhaustion. Speaking of which, it's the smiling tires me out the most. This, and the pretense that I can't hear them. And I can't, because I'm after all a foreigner to them. The speech here is all warty gutturals, obvious as a slam of ham, but I come from the province of the gods where meanings are lilting and oblique. I don't let on to everyone, but lean close, and I'll whisper: My mother was raped by a holy swan. You believe that? You can take me out to dinner. That's what we tell all the husbands. There sure are a lot of dangerous birds around. Not that anyone here but you would understand. The rest of them would like to watch me and feel nothing. Reduce me to components as in a clock factory or abattoir. Crush out the mystery. Wall me up alive in my own body. They'd like to see through me, but nothing is more opaque than absolute transparency. Look - my feet don't hit the marble! Like breath or a balloon, I'm rising, I hover six inches in the air in my blazing swan-egg of light. You think I'm not a goddess? Try me. This is a torch song. Touch me and you'll burn."

"He'll find out somehow, because journeys end in lovers meeting."

"Her body feels different, no longer taut and sinewy but sponge-like fluid. Saturated. It has a different energy, a deep orangy-like pink, like the inside of a hibiscus."

"Her glass wings are gone."

"Here the children have a custom. After the celebration of evil they take those vacant heads that shone once with such anguish and glee and throw them over the bridge, watching the smash, orange, as they hit below, We were standing underneath when you told it. People do that with themselves when they are finished, light scooped out. He landed here, you said, marking it with your foot. You wouldn't do it that way, empty, you wouldn't wait; you would jump with the light still in you."

"Here is a handful of shadow I have brought back to you: this decay, this hope, this mouthful of dirt, this poetry."

"Her face might be kindly if she would smile. But the frown isn't personal: it's the red dress she disapproves of, and what it stands for. She thinks I may be catching, like a disease or any form of bad luck."

"Her metaphors for her children included barnacles encrusting a ship and limpets clinging to a rock."

"Here's a health to our Captain, so gallant and free Whether stuck on a rock or asleep 'neath a tree or rolled in the arms of some nymph of the sea Which is where we would all like to be, man!"

"Here and there are worms, evidence of the fertility of the soil, caught by the sun, half dead; flexible and pink, like lips."

"He's got his cigarette going. He offers her one; this time she takes it. Brief match-flare insider their cupped hands. Red finger-ends. She thinks, Any more flame and we'd see the bones. It's like X-rays. We're just a kind of haze, just colored water. Water does what it likes. It always goes downhill."

"He's just a contact of hers, which is not the same as a friend. While she was in the hospital she decided that most of her friends were really just contacts."

"He's heard Unitarianism called a featherbed for falling Christians, but his mother doesn't seem like a woman who has fallen anywhere. (Where is the featherbed for falling Unitarians, he wonders? Such as himself.)"

"He's lost something, some illusion I used to think was necessary to him. He's come to realize he too is human. Or is this a performance, for my benefit, to show me he's up-to-date? Maybe men shouldn't have been told about their own humanity. It's only made them uncomfortable. It's only made them trickier, slier, more evasive, harder to read."

"His mouth is on me, his hands, I can't wait and he's moving, already, love, it's been so long, I'm alive in my skin, again, arms around him, falling and water softly everywhere, never-ending."

"His father was self-made, but his mother was constructed by others, and such edifices are notoriously fragile."

"His view of the world featured swift disasters set against a background of lurking doom, my cooking did nothing to contradict it."

"History (that list of ballooning wishes, flukes, bent times, plunges and mistakes 0clutched like parachutes) is rolling itself up in your head at one end unrolling at the other."

"His drawings were not originals then, only copies. He must have been doing them as a sort of retirement hobby, he was an incurable amateur and enthusiast; if he'd become hooked (on these rock paintings) he would have combed the area for them, collecting them with his camera, pestering experts by letter whenever he found one; an old man's delusion of usefulness."

"History is a construct... Any point of entry is possible and all choices are arbitrary. Still there are definitive moments... We can look at these events and say that after them things were never the same again."

"Homo sapiens don?t seem able to cut himself off at the supply end. He?s one of the few species that doesn?t limit reproduction in the face of dwindling resources. In other words - and up to a point, of course - the less we eat, the more we fuck.? ?How do you account for that?? said Jimmy. ?Imagination,? said Crake, ?Men can imagine their own deaths, they can see them coming, and the mere thought of impending death acts like an aphrodisiac. A dog or a rabbit doesn?t behave like that. Take birds - in a lean season they cut down on the eggs, or they don?t mate at all. They put their energy into staying alive themselves until times get better. But human beings hope they can stick their souls into someone else, some new version of themselves, and live on forever.? ?As a species we?re doomed by hope then?? ?You could call it hope. That, or desperation.? ?But we?re doomed without hope, as well,? said Jimmy. ?Only as individuals,? said Crake cheerfully. ?Well, it sucks.? ?Jimmy, grow up.? Crake wasn?t the first person who ever said that to Jimmy."

"Home is where the heart is, I thought now, gathering myself together in Betty's Luncheonette. I had no heart any more, it had been broken; or not broken, it simply wasn't there anymore. It had been scooped neatly out of me like the yolk from a hard-boiled egg, leaving the rest of me bloodless and congealed and hollow."

"How can one live with such a heart??"

"How could I be sleeping with this particular man... Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste."

"How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next?if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions?you'd be doomed. You'd be as ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to."

"How easy it is, treachery. You just slide into it."

"How I would like to have them back, those pointless afternoons - the boredom, the aimlessness, the unformed possibilities."

"How dare she be anything he was annoyed with her for not being?"

"How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all. What an available temptation."

"How old do you have to get before wisdom descends like a plastic bag over your head and you learn to keep your big mouth shut? Maybe never. Maybe you get more frivolous with age."

"How much needless despair has been caused by a series of biological mismatches, a misalignment of the hormones and pheromones? Resulting in the fact that the one you love so passionately won't or can't love you. As a species we're pathetic that way: imperfectly monogamous."

"How furious she must be, now that she's been taken at her word."

"How much misery? how much needless despair has been caused by a series of biological mismatches, a misalignment of the hormones and pheromones? Resulting in the fact that the one you love so passionately won?t or can?t love you. As a species we?re pathetic in that way: imperfectly monogamous. If only we could pair-bond for life, like gibbons, or else opt for total-guilt free promiscuity, there?d be no more sexual torment. You?d never want someone you couldn?t have? ??But think what we?d be giving up? we?d be human robots? there?d be no free choice.? ?we?re human robots anyway, only we?re faulty ones."

"How shrunk, how dwindled, in our times Creation's mighty seed - for Man has broken the Fellowship with murder, lust, and greed."

"How were we to know we were happy?"

"Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly. Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God."

"However, there are all sorts of behaviors in the Bible that might be called mad now, but aren't designated as insanity by the text itself. People see visions ? of angels going up and down ladders, of fiery chariots ? and, like Moses, who hears a bush talking, and Balaam the prophet who has a conversation with his donkey, they hear voices of those who cannot be said to be present in any usual sense of the word. They also speak in tongues, as the disciples do at Pentecost. Like madness, the visions, the voices and the speaking in tongues are due to external and usually divine agencies. In a world so permeated with supernatural powers, there are no accidents, and in one so riddled with prophets ? who went into a frenzy while prophesying ? many more kinds of behavior were accepted as normal, at least for a prophet or an inspired person, than would be the case now. John the Baptist, dressed in animal skins and wandering around in the wilderness denouncing his social superiors, was not thought of as a de-institutionalized street person who's gone off his medications, but as a saint. And this was the pattern for mediaeval views of aberrant behavior ? if you were acting crazy it was a divine punishment, or else you were possessed, by powers either divine or demonic ? perhaps aided, in the latter case, by witches."

"Human tool-makers always make tools that will help us get what we want, and what we want hasn't changed for thousands of years because as far as we can tell the human template hasn't changed either. We still want the purse that will always be filled with gold, and the Fountain of Youth. We want the table that will cover itself with delicious food whenever we say the word, and that will be cleaned up afterwards by invisible servants. We want the Seven-League Boots so we can travel very quickly and the Hat of Darkness so we can snoop on other people without being seen. We want the weapon that will never miss, and the castle that will keep us safe. We want excitement and adventure; we want routine and security. We want to have a large number of sexually attractive partners, and we also want those we love to love us in return, and be utterly faithful to us. We want cute, smart children who will treat us with the respect we deserve. We want to be surrounded by music, and by ravishing scents and attractive visual objects. We don't want to be too hot or too cold. We want to dance. We want to speak with the animals. We want to be envied. We want to be immortal. We want to be gods."

"Hunger is the best sauce."

"I admired my mother in some ways, although things between us were never easy. She expected too much from me, I felt. She expected me to vindicate her life for her, and the choices she'd made. I didn't want to live my life on her terms. I didn't want to be the model offspring, the incarnation of her ideas. We used to fight about that. I am not your justification for existence, I said her to once."

"Humanity is so adaptable... Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations."

"I already told you, said Adam. There is no need to swear. Sorry, it just fucking slipped out, said Zeb."

"I almost gasp: he's said a forbidden word. Sterile. There is no such thing as a sterile man anymore, not officially. There are only women who are fruitful and women who are barren, that's the law."

"I always remembered what she looked like, the dried apple face, the silvery gray hair, the snapping blue eyes."

"I always thought eating was a ridiculous activity anyway. I'd get out of it myself if I could, though you've got to do it to stay alive, they tell me."