Great Throughts Treasury

"The World: You know the saddest thing, she said. The saddest thing is that we're you. I said nothing. In your fantasies, she said, my people are just like you. Only better. We don't die or age or suffer from pain or cold or thirst. We're snappier dressers. We possess the wisdom of the ages. And if we crave blood, well, it is no more than the way you people crave food or affection or sunlight - and besides, it gets us out of the house. Crypt. Coffin. Whatever. And the truth is? I ask her. We're you, she said. We're you with all your fuckups and all the things that make you human - all your fears and lonelinesses and confusions... none of that gets better. But we're colder than you are. Deader. I miss daylight and food and knowing how it feels to touch someone and care. I remember life, and meeting people as people and not just as things to feed on or control, and I remember what it was to feel something, anything, happy or sad or anything... And then she stopped. Are you crying? I asked. We don't cry, she told me. Like I said, the woman was a liar."

"The young woman was crying, in the way that grownups cry, keeping it inside as much as they can, and hating it when it still pushes out at the edges, making them ugly and funny-looking on the way."

"Then he smiled, like a cat who had just been entrusted with the keys to a home for wayward but plump canaries."

"Then she looked at the man on the tree and she smiled wryly. They just aren't as interesting naked, she said. It's the unwrapping that's half the fun. Like with gifts, and eggs."

"The woman was very pretty. She had shortish honey-blonde hair,"

"The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges."

"The whole big, complicated world was simple and graspable and easy to unlock. I would stay here for the rest of time in the ocean which was the universe which was the soul which was all that mattered. I would stay here forever."

"There are accounts that, if we open our hearts to them, will cut us too deeply."

"There are four simple ways for the observant to tell Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar apart: first, Mr. Vandemar is two and a half heads taller than Mr. Croup; second, Mr. Croup has eyes of a faded china blue, while Mr. Vandemar's eyes are brown; third, while Mr. Vandemar fashioned the rings he wears on his right hand out of the skulls of four ravens, Mr. Croup has no obvious jewelry; fourth, Mr. Croup likes words, while Mr. Vandemar is always hungry. Also, they look nothing at all alike."

"There are clouds between us and them, pointed out Isten of the Hungarians. He had a fine black mustache, a large, dusty black hat, and the grin of a man who makes his living selling aluminum siding and new roofs and gutters to senior citizens but who always leaves town the day after the checks clear whether the work is done or not."

"There are a hundred things she has tried to chase away the things she won't remember and that she can't even let herself think about because that's when the birds scream and the worms crawl and somewhere in her mind it's always raining a slow and endless drizzle. You will hear that she has left the country, that there was a gift she wanted you to have, but it is lost before it reaches you. Late one night the telephone will sign, and a voice that might be hers will say something that you cannot interpret before the connection crackles and is broken. Several years later, from a taxi, you will see someone in a doorway who looks like her, but she will be gone by the time you persuade the driver to stop. You will never see her again. Whenever it rains you will think of her."

"There are no whores in Scaithe?s Ebb, or none that consider themselves as such, although there have always been many women who, if pressed, would describe themselves as much-married, with one husband on this ship here every six months, and another husband on that ship, back in port for a month or so every nine months. The mathematics of the thing have always kept most folk satisfied; and if ever it disappoints and a man returns to his wife while one of her other husbands is still in occupancy, why, then there is a fight ? and the grog shops to comfort the loser. The sailors do not mind the arrangement, for they know that this way there will, at the least, be one person who, at the last, will notice when they do not come back from the sea, and will mourn their loss; and their wives content themselves with the certain knowledge that their husbands are also unfaithful, for there is no competing with the sea in a man?s affections, since she is both mother and mistress, and she will wash his corpse also, in time to come, wash it to coral and ivory and pearls."

"Then, one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...you give them a piece of you. They don't ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore."

"There are a number of paths that lead to this place. I have been avoiding them for some small time, now."

"There are new gods growing in America, clinging to growing knots of belief: gods of credit card and freeway, of Internet and telephone, of radio and hospital and television, gods of plastic and of beeper and of neon. Proud gods, fat and foolish creatures, puffed up with their own newness and importance. They are aware of us, they fear us, and they hate us, said Odin. You are fooling yourselves if you believe otherwise."

"There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong."

"There are places that we are welcomed, said Triolet, and places where we are regarded as a noxious weed, or as a disease, something immediately to be quarantined and eliminated. But where does contagion end and art begin?"

"There are sneaking, creeping, crumpling noises coming from inside the walls."

"There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts."

"There are little pockets of old time in London, where things and places stay the same, like bubbles in amber, she explained. There?s a lot of time in London, and it has to go somewhere?it doesn?t all get used up at once. I may still be hung over, sighed Richard. That almost made sense."

"There are some dogs which, when you meet them, remind you that, despite thousands of years of man-made evolution, every dog is still only two meals away from being a wolf. These dogs advance deliberately, purposefully, the wilderness made flesh, their teeth yellow, their breath a-stink, while in the distance their owners witter, "He's an old soppy really, just poke him if he's a nuisance," and in the green of their eyes the red campfires of the Pleistocene gleam and flicker."

"There are some people who keep track of every day and every hours, and there are people who don't, and Coraline's parents were solidly in the second camp."

"There are those who have suggested that the tendency of a cat to play with its prey is a merciful one."

"There are three things, and three things only, that can lift the pain of mortality and ease the ravages of life, said Spider. These things are wine, women and song... Curry?s nice too pointed out Fat Charlie"

"The young man shivered. He rolled the stock themes of fantasy over in his mind: cars and stockbrokers and commuters, housewives and police, agony columns and commercials for soap, income tax and cheap restaurants, magazines and credit cards and streetlights and computers... 'It is escapism, true,' he said, aloud. 'But is not the highest impulse in mankind the urge toward freedom, the drive to escape?"

"There are some as are what they are. And there are some as aren't what they seem to be. And there are some as only seem to be what they seem to be."

"There are stories that are true, in which each individual's tale is unique and tragic, and the worst of the tragedy is that we have heard it before, and we cannot allow ourselves to feel it to deeply. We build a shell around it like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function, day in, day out, immune to others' pain and loss. If it were to touch us it would cripple us or make saints of us; but, for the most part, it does not touch us. We cannot allow it to."

"There are stories within stories, whispered in the quiet of the night, shouted above the roar of the day, and played out between lovers and enemies, strangers and friends. But all are fragile things made of just twenty-six letters arranged and re-arranged to form tales and imaginings which will dazzle your senses, haunt your imagination and move you to the very depths of your soul."

"There doesn't have to be any of that business with one third of the seas turning to blood or anything, said Aziraphale happily. When it came, the voice sounded slightly annoyed. Why not? it said. Aziraphale felt an icy pit opening under his enthusiasm, and tried to pretend it wasn't happening. He plunged on: Well, you can simply make sure that- We will win, Aziraphale. Yes, but- The forces of darkness must be beaten. You seem to be under a misapprehension. The point is not to avoid the war, it is to win it. We have been waiting a long time, Aziraphale."

"There is a madness, yes, this is true. Few mortals possess it, the willingness to step away from the protection of sanity. To walk into the wild wood of madness..."

"There is nothing to be frightened of, said the Rajah. Very few tigers are man-eaters. But I am, said the tiger. You might be lying, said the Rajah. I might be, said the tiger. But I'm not."

"There is a proverbial saying chiefly concerned with warning against too closely calculating the numerical value of un-hatched chicks."

"There is nothing down here,' said the pale thing indistinctly. 'Nothing but dust and damp and forgetting."

"There was a girl, and her uncle sold her. Put like that it seems so simple. No man, proclaimed Donne, is an island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived and then by some means or other, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes- forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'll mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection) but still unique. Without individuals we see only numbers, a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, casualties may rise to a million. With individual stories, the statistics become people- but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child's swollen, swollen belly and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, this skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted distended caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies' own myriad squirming children? We draw our lines around these moments of pain, remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearl-like, from our souls without real pain. Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives. A life that is, like any other, unlike any other. And the simple truth is this: There was a girl, and her uncle sold her."

"There is something about riding a unicorn, for those people who still can, which is unlike any other experience: exhilarating, and intoxicating, and fine."

"There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife."

"There was a birthday present waiting to be read, a boxed set of the Narnia books, which I took upstairs. I lay on the bed and lost myself in the stories. I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyway."

"There was a hysteria in there, certainly, but there was also the exhaustion of someone who had managed, somehow, to believe several dozen impossible things in the last twenty-four hours, without ever getting a proper breakfast."

"There was a smile dancing on his lips, although it was a wary smile, for the world is a bigger place than a little graveyard on a hill; and there would be dangers in it and mysteries, new friends to make, old friends to rediscover, mistakes to be made and many paths to be walked before he would, finally, return to the graveyard or ride with the Lady on the broad back of her great grey stallion."

"There was a skyness to the sky and a nowness to the world that he had never seen or felt or realized before."

"There was a small knothole in one of the boards, and Coraline spent an afternoon dropping pebbles and acorns through the hole and waiting, and counting, until she heard the plop as they hit the water."

"There was a table laid with jellies and trifles, with a party hat beside each place, and a birthday cake with seven candles on it in the center of the table. The cake had a book drawn on it, in icing. My mother, who had organized the party, told me that the lady at the bakery said that they had never put a book on a birthday cake before, and that mostly for boys it was footballs or spaceships. I was their first book."

"There was a tale he had read once, long ago, as a small boy: the story of a traveler who had slipped down a cliff, with man-eating tigers above him and a lethal fall below him, who managed to stop his fall halfway down the side of the cliff, holding on for dear life. There was a clump of strawberries beside him, and certain death above him and below. What should he do? went the question. And the reply was, Eat the strawberries. The story had never made sense to him as a boy. It did now."

"There was something about being in the vicinity of Grahame Coats that always made Fat Charlie (a) speak in clich‚s and (b) begin to daydream about huge black helicopters first opening fire upon, then dropping buckets of flaming napalm onto the offices of the Grahame Coats agency. Fat Charlie would not be in the office in those daydreams. He would be sitting in a chair outside a little cafe on the other side of Aldwych, sipping a frothy coffee and occasionally cheering at an exceptionally well-flung bucket of napalm."

"There was nowhere they could have gone and they went there anyway."

"There was no moon but the night sky was a riot of crisp and glittering autumn stars. There were streetlights too and lights on buildings and on bridges which looked like earthbound stars and they glimmered repeated as they were reflected with the city in the night water of the Thames. It?s fairyland thought Richard."

"There was reality and there was reality; and some things were more real than others."

"There was something empty at the bottom of all her words."

"There was something sly about his smile, his eyes so black and sharp, his rufous hair. Something that sent her early to their trysting place, beneath the oak, beside the thorn-bush, something that made her climb the tree and wait. Climb a tree, and in her condition. Her love arrived at dusk, skulking by owl-light, carrying a bag, from which he took a mattock, shovel, knife. He worked with a will, beside the thorn-bush, beneath the oaken tree, he whistled gently, and he sang, as he dug her grave, that old song... shall I sing it for you, now, good folk?"

"There must be a Hell. A place for demons. A place for the damned. Hell is Heaven's reflection. Heaven's shadow. They define each other. There must be a Hell for without Hell, Heaven has no meaning. --Remiel"