“You count the years until you get a varsity jersey, then you're a hero, an idol, a cocky bastard because in this town you can do no wrong. You win and win and you're the king of your own little world, then poof, it's gone. You play your last game and everybody cries. You can't believe it's over. Then another team comes right behind you and you're forgotten.”
“I'm here to tell you, separate was never equal.”
“We were invincible because we were eighteen and stupid.”
“mentally than the other guy, and you’re tougher mentally because”
“miss him?” Another slow sip. “How can you not miss Rake once you’ve played for him? I see his face every day. I hear his voice. I can smell him sweating. I can feel him hitting me, with no pads on. I can imitate his growl, his grumbling, his bitching. I remember his stories, his speeches, his lessons. I remember all forty plays and all thirty-eight games when I wore the jersey. My father died four years ago and I loved him dearly, but, and this is hard to say, he had less influence on me than Eddie Rake.”
“Would it be possible, he wondered, to stand up before the world and with the utmost conviction spew out lies and nonsense? To say that windmills were knights, that a barber’s basin was a helmet, that puppets were real people? Would it be possible to persuade others to agree with what he said, even though they did not believe him? In other words, to what extent would people tolerate blasphemies if they gave them amusement? The answer is obvious, isn’t it? To any extent. For the proof is that we still read the book. It remains highly amusing to us. And that’s finally all anyone wants out of a book—to be amused.”
“It's one thing to predict [the complete breakdown of civilization]. It's something else again to be right in the middle of it. It's a very humbling thing...for an academic like me to find his abstract theories turning into concrete reality... It was all just so many words to me, really, just a philosophical exercise, completely abstract.”
“What is your name?" she asked.
"Names are like clothes, lady. I have many."
"And which one do you wear tonight?"
The god smiled. She could see he liked her words. He pulled her to him, pressed his wolf lips to hers and said, "My name is Misery, and would you know yet more?"
"Yes," said the girl, breathing in his scent, the scent of something beautiful, strange and burned. "I would know more."
He flicked at her lips with his tongue and whispered, "So is yours.”
“But because you're mind. And I'm yours. And that means I'm tied to you in every way. Good and bad.”
“Wrong decisions, Jakob, are never inevitable. A wise man can always turn back from a precipice.”
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