Great Throughts Treasury

"She left her keys in the teeth of the lock where they would dangle all day."

"So much that seems harmless in daylight turns imposing in the dark. What else, you had to wonder, was only a trick of light?"

"Some say that love is the sweetest feeling, the purest form of joy, but that isn't right. It's not love--it's relief."

"Some say that the slowdown affected us in a thousand ways imperceptible, since the life expectancy of the bulbs until the time it took to melt ice and boil water or the rate at which they multiply and die human cells. Some say that our body aged more slowly in the days immediately after the start of the downturn, the dead death died slower and took longer babies born. There is some evidence that menstrual cycles were lengthened slightly in those first two weeks."

"Something similar had happened once to the bees. This was only a few years before the slowing began. Millions of honeybees had died. Hives found abandoned, inexplicably empty. Whole colonies had vanished in the breeze. No one ever did conclusively pinpoint the cause of the collapse."

"Sometimes death is proof of life. Sometimes decay points out a certain verve."

"The natural days had lengthened to sixty hours of darkness nearly two days and then two days of light."

"The only thing you have to do in this life is die, said Mrs. Pinsky... everything else is a choice."

"Sometimes the saddest stories take the fewest words."

"Sometimes the saddest stories are those that require fewer words: I did not know anything about Seth Moreno."

"The real catastrophes are always different-unimaginable, unprepared for, unknown."

"The damage was done, and had come to believe that we were the extinguished. But perhaps the disc that informs them move on. We resist, even though most experts predicted that we had only a few years. Continue telling stories and falling in love. Quarreling and forgiving. Continued to birth babies. We retain the hope that the world might recover."

"This had become a game of ours. We were serious kids made ??more so by the times."

"They say that humans can read each other in a hundred subtle ways, that we can detect messages in the subtlest movements of a body, in the briefest expressions of a face, but somehow, on that day, I had communicated with amazing efficiency the exact opposite of what I most wanted in the world."

"The sun had developed a new and disturbing ability: we had burned through clothing."

"This morning the sound of crickets was deafening, the chirping of many new animals in the dark, had multiplied since the slowdown began. Like other insects. Now there were so few birds, there thrived smaller agencies. Each time there were more spiders in our roofs. In poking bathroom drains beetles. We had to stop one of soccer practice when millions of ladybugs landed both on the field. Even beauty in abundance can be gruesome."

"This was middle school, the age of miracles, the time when kids shot up three inches over the summer, when breasts bloomed from nothing, when voices dipped and dove. Our first flaws were emerging, but they were being corrected. Blurry vision could be fixed invisibly with the magic of the contact lens. Crooked teeth were pulled straight with braces. Spotty skin could be chemically cleared. Some girls were turning beautiful. A few boys were growing tall."

"We were living in a new seriousness, so imperceptible that we hardly noticed, but our body was subject to his dominion. The following weeks, as the days continued stretching, football players found that the ball did not fly as far as before slipping baseball hitters more easily. Each time it cost me more effort to send the ball across the field with a kick. The pilots eventually stop flying. All fell to the ground more quickly."

"What I understood so far about this life was there were the bullies and the bullied, the hunters and the hunted, the strong and the strong stronger and the weak."

"We were like wanderers in a desert, blessed with a rare downpour, but unable to store the rain."

"We were, on that day, no different from the ancients, terrified of our own big sky."

"Who knows how fast a second-guess can travel? Who has ever measured the exact speed of regret?"

"What went on in that head of his? I would soon come to understand that i gave voice to only a fraction of the thoughts that swam behind his eyes. It was not nearly so clean and smooth in there as it seemed. Other lives were houses in that mind, parallel worlds. Maybe we're all built a little that way. But most of it us drop hints. Most of us leave clues. My father was more careful."

"With a little persuasion, any familiar thing can turn abnormal in the mind. Here?s a thought experiment. Consider this brutal bit of magic: A human grows a second human in a space inside her belly; she grows a second heart and a second brain, second eyes and second limbs, a complete set of second body parts as if for use as spares, and then, after almost a year, she expels that second screaming being out of her belly and into the world, alive. Bizarre, isn?t it?"