Great Throughts Treasury

"George R.R. Martin is not your bitch."

"Go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here."

"Go back? I don?t know. I think hell?s something you carry around with you. Not somewhere you go. They?re doing the same things they always did. They?re doing it to themselves. That?s hell."

"Give me boredom. At least I know where I'm going to eat and sleep tonight."

"Going off the grid is always good for me. It's the way that I've started books and finished books and gotten myself out of deadline dooms and things."

"Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end."

"Gods are great, said Atsula, slowly, as if she were imparting a great secret. But the heart is greater. For it is from our hearts they come, and to our hearts they shall return..."

"God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of the players, (i.e., everybody), to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time."

"Go get your heart broken."

"Goodbyes are overrated."

"Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world."

"Google can bring you back 100,000 answers, a librarian can bring you back the right one."

"Growing up, I took so many cues from books. They taught me most of what I knew about what people did, about how to behave. They were my teachers and my advisers."

"Great, big, serious novels always get awards. If it's a battle between a great, big, serious novel and a funny novel, the funny novel is doomed."

"Have you ever got everything you ever wanted? And then realized it wasn't what you wanted at all?"

"Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life.... You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love."

"Hasn't there always been a moon? Bless you. Not in the slightest. I remember the day the moon came. We looked up in the sky--it was all dirty brown and sooty gray here then, not green and blue..."

"Have you ever had one of those days when something just seems to be trying to tell you somebody?"

"Have you ever spent days and days and days making up flavors of ice cream that no one's ever eaten before? Like chicken and telepone ice cream? Green mouse ice cream was the worst. I didn't like that at all."

"He died alone,' said Pious Dundas, old as Methuselah, unblinking. 'It don't matter a rat's ass whether there was anyone with him or not. He died alone."

"He entertained these thoughts awkwardly, as a man entertains unexpected guests. Then, as he reached his objective, he pushed these thoughts away, as a man apologizes to his guests, and leaves them, muttering something about a prior engagement."

"He couldn?t see why people made such a fuss about people eating their silly old fruit anyway, but life would be a lot less fun if they didn?t. And there was never an apple, in Adam?s opinion, that wasn?t worth the trouble you got into for eating it."

"Have you thought about what it means to be a god? asked the man. He had a beard and a baseball cap. It means you give up your mortal existence to become a meme: something that lives forever in people's minds, like the tune of a nursery rhyme. It means that everyone gets to re-create you in their own minds. You barely have your own identity any more. Instead, you're a thousand aspects of what people need you to be. And everyone wants something different from you. Nothing is fixed, nothing is stable."

"He felt her heart beating against his chest. The moment began to transmute, and he wondered if there was something he should do. He wondered if he should kiss her. He wondered if he wanted to kiss her, and he realized that he truly didn't know."

"He goes his way. We travel a spiral. The quickest way is sometimes the longest."

"He had a hundred arms that broke into a hundred thousand fingers, and all of his fingers reached up into the sky. The weight of the sky was heavy on his shoulders."

"He had heard about talking to plants in the early seventies, on Radio Four, and thought it was an excellent idea. Although talking is perhaps the wrong word for what Crowley did. What he did was put the fear of God into them. More precisely, the fear of Crowley. In addition to which, every couple of months Crowley would pick out a plant that was growing too slowly, or succumbing to leaf-wilt or browning, or just didn't look quite as good as the others, and he would carry it around to all the other plants. Say goodbye to your friend, he'd say to them. He just couldn't cut it. . . Then he would leave the flat with the offending plant, and return an hour or so later with a large, empty flower pot, which he would leave somewhere conspicuously around the flat. The plants were the most luxurious, verdant, and beautiful in London. Also the most terrified."

"He had had a severe shock some weeks earlier, when, having narrowly failed to capture a large grey-brown hare for his dinner, it had stopped at the edge of the forest, looked at him with disdain, and said, 'Well, I hope you're proud of yourself, that's all,' and had scampered off into the long grass"

"He had gone beyond the world of metaphor and simile into the place of things that are, and it was changing him."

"He is holding a book. Inside the book is the Universe."

"He knew everything about big Mike Ainsel in this moment, and he liked Mike Ainsel. Mike Ainsel had none of the problems that Shadow had. Ainsel had never been married. Mike Ainsel had never been interrogated on a freight train by Mr. Wood an Mr. Stone. Televisions did not speak to Mike Ainsel (You want to see Lucy's tits? asked a voice in his head)"

"He left the drapes open, watched the lights of the cars and of the fast food joints through the window glass, comforted to know there was another world out there, one he could walk to anytime he wanted."

"He loved me. I do not doubt that. In hindsight, I do not believe that I loved him. I simply felt his love for me, burning and all-consuming, and reflected it back, as the cold light of the moon reflects the light of the sun. I did not know that at the time. I thought I loved him."

"He ordered a family pack of chicken, and sat and finished it off without any help from anyone else in his family."

"He said nothing. It seemed the smartest thing to say."

"He heard long ago, in a dream, that one day in every century Death takes on mortal flesh, better to comprehend what the lives she takes must feel like, to taste the bitter tang of mortality: that this is the price she must pay for being the divider of the living from all that has gone before, all that must come after."

"He had kissed her good night that night, and she had tasted like strawberry daiquiris, and he had never wanted to kiss anyone else again."

"He had noticed that events were cowards: they didn't occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and leap out at him all at once."

"He had read books, newspapers and magazines. He knew that if you ran away you sometimes met bad people who did bad things to you; but he had also read fairy tales, so he knew that there were kind people out there, side by side with the monsters."

"He thought about going out and buying a Sunday paper but decided not to. Arnold Stockton, Jessica?s boss, a many-chinned, self-made caricature of a man, owned all the Sunday papers that Rupert Murdoch had failed to buy. His own papers talked about him, and so did the rest. Reading a Sunday paper would, Richard suspected, probably end up reminding him of the dinner had failed to attend on Friday night. So instead Richard had a long hot bath and a number of sandwiches, and several cups of tea. Do you know why dead people only go out at night, puppy? Because it's easier to pass for real, in the dark. And I don't want to have to pass. I want to be alive."

"He sighed. It was a long sigh, weary and worldly-wise. The kind of sigh you could picture God heaving after six days of hard work and looking forward to some serious cosmic RandR, only to be handed a report by an angel concerning a problem with someone eating an apple."

"He shivered. His coat was thin, and it was obvious he would not get his kiss, which he found puzzling. The manly heroes of the penny dreadfuls and shilling novels never had these problems getting kissed."

"He stared up at the stars: and it seemed to him then that they were dancers, stately and graceful, performing a dance almost infinite in its complexity."

"He started to list the coin vanishes he had mastered, which reminded him of the coin he had tossed into Laura's grave, and then, in his head, Audrey was telling him that Laura had died with Robbie's cock in her mouth, and once again he felt a small hurt in his heart."

"He tugged on an imaginary rope, somewhere on the level of his ear, and then jerked his neck to one side, tongue protruding, eyes bulging. As quick pantomimes went, it was disturbing. And then he let go of the rope and smiled his familiar grin."

"He spun around. She was leaning against the doorframe, like an attractive yawn on legs."

"He told me not to seek revenge, but to seek the Buddha,' said the fox spirit, sadly. 'Wise counsel,' said the fox of dreams. 'Vegeance can be a road that has no ending. You would be wise to avoid it. And...?' 'I shall seek the Buddha,' said the fox, with a toss of her head. 'But first I shall seek revenge."

"He stared down at the golden curls of the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of This World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan, and Lord of Darkness. You know, he concluded, after a while, I think he actually looks like an Adam."

"He tried to listen to the conversations going on at the table and he found that he could no longer concentrate on what anyone was saying and which was worse that he was not interested in any of what he was able to hear."

"He was alone in the darkness once more, but the darkness became brighter and brighter until it was burning like the sun."