“Well,' I said. 'I could strip off my clothes and reveal to you that under my jeans and sweatshirt I'm actually wearing a tank top and short-shorts, much like Lara Croft from Tomb Raider...only mine are flame-retardant and covered in glow-in-the-dark dinosaur stickers.'
No one stirred. Not even Christopher, who actually has a thing for Lara Croft.
'I know what you're thinking,' I went on. 'Glow-in-the-dark dinosaur stickers are so last year. But I think they add a certain je ne sais quoi to the whole ensemble. It's true, short-shorts are uncomfortable under jeans and hard to get off in the ladies' room, but they make the twin thigh-holsters in which I hold my high-caliber pistols so easy to get to....'
The oven timer dinged.
'Thank you, Em,' Mr. Greer said, yawning. 'That was very persuasive.”
“Whoa. If high school was suppose to be the best years of my life - at least so far - I was truly destined to have a sucky adulthood.”
“Straight guys only feel three ways about girls . . . First, either they love you, and they show it by writing a song about you, like Gabriel, and asking you out, and everything is nice and fun like it should be. Second, they love you, but they’re scared of their passion for you because it’s so strong, like your boy Christopher, so they stuff it way, way down and ignore you, or do stupid things like make fun of you because they don’t know how to express it any other way, because they’re immature little babies and are too shy to, say, write a song about you. Or third, there’s something wrong with them, and they start out nice and loving and then turn around and do stupid things like sleep with other girls behind your back, like Justin Bay. But we’ll never figure out what went wrong with them, and neither will they, so it’s not worth thinking about. Okay? That’s it. The end.”
Lulu Collins”
“However, because they have no actual interests of their own (or if they do, they squelch them in order to fit in) and merely pursue those that they think will look best on their college apps, they're zombies.”
“I don't do alcohol. Or other people's boyfriends. And don't you forget it.”
“every heterosexual boy—and probably some gay ones, too, so look out, because that’s just going to end in disaster—you ever meet is going to fall madly in love with you. He may not admit it, but it’s true. So you have to take responsibility for that and not do things to encourage him—unless, of course, you want him to fall in love with you. Because it’s cruel to play with boys’ emotions in that way, because no matter what anyone else says, men are the weaker sex.’ Didn’t your mother tell you that?”
“Tashi dice que quiere enfrentarse al pelotón de fusilamiento vestida de rojo. Le recuerdo que su sentencia está siendo apelada. También cabe la esperanza de que los Estados Unidos hagan valer la ciudadanía norteamericana de Tashi. Es igual, quiero ir de rojo, dice, pase lo que pase. Estoy harta del blanco y el negro. Ninguno va primero. El rojo, el color de la sangre de mujer, los precede a ambos.
De modo que cosemos.”
“But then again, impossible never became rumour, did it?”
“If you want something to grow and be so beautiful you could have a nice day just from looking at it, you have to wait.”
“If I longed for destruction it was merely that this eye might be extinguished. I longed for an earthquake, for some cataclysm of nature which would plunge the lighthouse into the sea. I wanted a metamorphosis, a change to fish, to leviathan, to destroyer. I wanted the earth to open up, to swallow everything in one engulfing yawn. I wanted to see the city buried fathoms deep in the bosom of the sea. I wanted to sit in a cave and read by candlelight. (I wanted that eye extinguished so that I might have a change to know my own body, my own desires. I wanted to be alone for a thousand years in order to reflect on what I had seen and heard - and in order to forget. I wanted something of the earth which was not of man's doing, something absolutely divorced from the human of which I was surfeited. I wanted something purely terrestrial and absolutely divested of idea. I wanted to feel the blood running back into my veins, even at the cost of annihilation. I wanted to shake the stone and the light out of my system. I wanted the dark fecundity of nature, the deep well of the womb, silence, or else the lapping of the black waters of death. I wanted to be that night which the remorseless eye illuminated, a night diapered with stars and trailing comets. To be of night, so frighteningly silent, so utterly incomprehensible and eloquent at the same time. Never more to speak or to listen or to think. To be englobed and encompassed and to encompass and to englobe at the same time. No more pity, no more tenderness. To be human only terrestrially, like a plant or a worm or a brook. To be decomposed, divested of light and stone, variable as the molecule, durable as the atom, heartless as the earth itself.”
“In the end, I suspect, being female will do nothing for Sheba, except deny her the grandeur of genuine villainy.”
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