Great Throughts Treasury

"Because you are never here but always there, I forget not you but what you look like You drift down the street in the rain, your face dissolving, changing shape, the colors running together. My walls absorb you, breathe you forth again, you resume yourself, I do not recognize you. You rest on the bed watching me watching you. We will never know each other any better than we do now"

"Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring."

"Before, I was not a witch."

"Because you may think a bed is a peaceful thing, Sir, and to you it may mean rest and comfort and a good night's sleep. But it isn't so for everyone; and there are many dangerous things that may take place in a bed."

"Below me, in the foundations of the house, I could hear the clothes I'd buried there growing themselves a body."

"Being socially retarded is like being mentally retarded, it arouses in others disgust and pity and the desire to torment and reform."

"Besides, who would think of marrying a mothball? A question my mother put to me often, later, in other forms."

"Better not to invent her in her absence. Better to wait until she's actually here. Then he can make her up as she goes along."

"Better never means better for everyone, he says. It always means worse, for some."

"Blondes are like white mice, you only find them in cages. They wouldn?t last long in nature. They?re too conspicuous."

"Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted."

"Betty's now have a patio garden, where the tourists can sit in the sun and fry to a crisp; it's in the back, that little square of cracked cement where they used to keep the garbage cans. They offer tortellini and cappuccino, boldly proclaimed in the window as if everyone in town just naturally knows what they are. Well, they do by now; they've had a try, if only to acquire sneering rights."

"Books and characters in books, pictures and elements in pictures?they all have families and ancestors, just like people."

"Bless you. Be careful. Anyone intending to meddle with words needs such blessing, such warning."

"But hatred and viciousness are addictive. You can get high on them. Once you've had a little, you start shaking if you don't get more."

"Books are frozen voices, in the same way that musical scores are frozen music. The score is a way of transmitting the music to someone who can play it, releasing it into the air where it can once more be heard. And the black alphabet marks on the page represent words that were once spoken, if only in the writer?s head. They lie there inert until a reader comes along and transforms the letters into living sounds. The reader is the musician of the book: each reader may read the same text, just as each violinist plays the same piece, but each interpretation is different."

"But how else can we live, these days, except in the midst of ruin?"

"But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another."

"But I have already told the beginning, so right now it's the middle. And Zeb is in the middle of the story about Zeb. He is in the middle of his own story. I am not in this part of the story; it hasn't come to the part with me. But I'm waiting, far off in the future. I'm waiting for the story of Zeb to join up with mine. The story of Toby. The story I am in right now, with you."

"But I leave myself in your hands. What choice do I have? By the time you read this last page, that- if anywhere- is the only place I will be."

"But if Crake wanted her to stay longer on any given night, do it again maybe, she'd make some excuse?jet lag, a headache, something plausible. Her inventions were seamless, she was the best poker-faced liar in the world, so there would be a kiss goodbye for stupid Crake, a smile, a wave, a closed door, and the next minute there she would be, with Jimmy."

"But if you happen to be a man, sometime in the future, and you?ve made it this far, please remember: you will never be subject to the temptation or feeling you must forgive, a man, as a woman. It?s difficult to resist, believe me. But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest."

"But in life, a tragedy is not one long scream. It includes everything that led up to it. Hour after trivial hour, day after day, year after year, and then the sudden moment: the knife stab, the shell burst, the plummet of the car from a bridge."

"But in the closeness of the sewing room, Simon can smell her as well as look at her. He tries to pay no attention but her scent is a distracting undercurrent. She smells like smoke; smoke, and laundry soap, and the salt from her skin; and she smells of the skin itself, with its undertone of dampness, fullness, ripeness - what? Ferns and mushrooms; fruits crushed and fermenting."

"But its love that does us in."

"But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men."

"But it seems she?d wanted children after all, because when she was told she?d been accidentally sterilized she could feel all the light leaking out of her."

"But in the end, back she comes. There's no use resisting. She goes to him for amnesia, for oblivion. She renders herself up, is blotted out; enters the darkness of her own body, forgets her name. Immolation is what she wants, however briefly. To exist without boundaries."

"But maybe, underneath, she loves him too much. Maybe it's her excessive love that pushes him away."

"But maybe he was destructive by nature since he messed up every girl he touched."

"But my dreaming self refuses to be consoled. It continues to wander, aimless, homeless, alone. It cannot be convinced of its safety by any evidence drawn from my waking life."

"But now I am one."

"But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot."

"But reality has too much darkness in it. Too many crows."

"But nothing i ever gave was good for you; it was like white bread to goldfish. they cram and cram, and it kills them, and they drift in the pool, belly-up, making stunned faces and playing on our guilt as if their own toxic gluttony was not their own fault there you are, still outside the window, still with your hands out, still pallid and fish-eyed, still acting stupidly innocent and starved."

"But some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling."

"But the adjectives change, said Jimmy. Nothing?s worse than last year?s adjectives."

"But they had a money value: they represented a cash profit to others. They must have sensed that--sensed that they were worth something."

"But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest."

"But thoughtless ingratitude is the armor of the young; without it, how would they ever get through life? The old wish the young well, but they wish them ill also: they would like to eat them up, and absorb their vitality, and remain immortal themselves. Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past - the past of others, loaded on their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace."

"But this is wrong; nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from."

"But what is a memorial, when you come right down to it, but a commemoration of wounds endured? Endured, and resented. Without memory, there can be no revenge."

"But we still find the world astounding, we can't get enough of it; even as it shrivels, even as its many lights flicker and are extinguished (the tigers, the leopard frogs, the plunging dolphin flukes), flicker and are extinguished, by us, by us, we gaze and gaze. Where do you draw the line, between love and greed? We never did know, we always wanted more. We want to take it all in, for one last time, we want to eat the world with our eyes."

"By now you must have guessed: I come from another planet. But I will never say to you, take me to your leaders. Even I - unused to your ways though I am - would never make that mistake. We ourselves have such beings among us, made of cogs, pieces of paper, small disks of shiny metal, scraps of colored cloth. I do not need to encounter more of them. Instead I will say, Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths. These are worth it. These are what I have come for."

"But unshed tears can turn rancid. So can memory. So can biting your tongue. My bad nights were beginning. I couldn't sleep."

"But who can remember pain, once it?s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind."

"By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, believe you're there, I believe you into being. Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are. So I will go on. So I will myself to go on."

"Bye-bye love, as in songs. All alone now. It was so sad. Why did such things have to disintegrate like that? Why did longing and desire, and friendliness and goodwill too, have to shatter into pieces? Why did they have to be so thorough-fully over? I could make myself cry even more by repeating the key word: love, alone, sad, over. I did it on purpose."

"Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings...but there?s something dead about it, something deserted."

"Can a single ant be said to be alive, in any meaningful sense of the word, or does it only have relevance in terms of its anthill?"