“We are all part of the same story, each of us different chapters. We may not have the power to choose setting or plot, but we can choose what kind of character we want to be.”
“I think Mad saw in books what I saw in art: the weightless beauty of the universe.”
“My heart was so full, I thought it might explode into the ether, creating some bizarre new solar system whose inhabitants ate only love, drank only hope, and breathed only joy. What a substantial galaxy that would be.”
“I used to think love was bound by numbers: first kisses, second dances, infinite heartbreaks. I used to think numbers outlasted the love itself, surviving in the dark corners of the demolished heart. I used to think love was heavy and hard.
I don’t think those things anymore.”
“I ask, “You ever hear that a person has to go through fire to become who they’re meant to be?”
Mendes sips her coffee, nods. “Sure.”
“I’ve always wanted to be strong, Miss Mendes, I just wish there wasn’t so much fire.”
“Sinking into fiction: the if-only of if-onlys.”
“I often thought the most unfair thing about having Moebius wasn’t Moebius at all, but other people’s inability to define me by anything else.”
“They understood that lasting pain could only be dealt at the root.”
“Music was more than subjective; it was erratic. It was the ship on the horizon that one sailor saw, the other sailor didn’t.”
“Sometimes you tell the truth, and things are better for it. Other times truth hangs in the air like a fog, clouding the pretty lies.”
“I was a little younger than most in my class—Mom said this gave me an edge. I’d finish school sooner, discover the world first, and maybe find whatever great thing I was meant for.”
“Scroll, scroll, scroll, play—now, to disappear completely into an entirely other world.
In that world: every faction left me alone.
In that world: I was not one seven-billionth of the planet’s population.
In that world: I was one-fourth of the planet’s population: it was Dad, the sopranos, and me.
In that world: we soared through the sky and clouds, above it all, not a care in the world, the most miraculous of gaggles, catching the soul of those rare, lovely heart-thinkers.
In that world: my wing was mended.”
“I stare at the many factions of Bundle, and I wonder at the injustice of the world: Vic’s outsides can’t reflect his insides, as much as I want them to. Bundel’s outsides can’t help but reflect his insides, as much as I don’t want them to.”
“Buddha had said to make a light of yourself, and if Laurie had anything to say about it, one day he’d glow.”
“Excuse our appearances. We are taking apart yesterday, to make way for tomorrow”
“well-known."
"You're saying Raynen is behind this?"
"Lad, he cannot help but see you as a threat. And they say he's been distraught of late-unbalanced." He shook his head. "I cannot believe all the problems this Initiation has had. I'm beginning to think it will take a miracle to pull it off. In”
“The almost-35-year-old Terry Schmidt had very nearly nothing left anymore of the delusion that he differed from the great herd of the common run of men, not even in his despair at not making a difference or in the great hunger to have an impact that in his late twenties he'd clung to as evidence that even though he was emerging as sort of a failure the grand ambitions against which he judged himself a failure were somehow exceptional and superior to the common run's - not anymore, since now even the phrase Make A Difference had become a platitude so familiar that it was used as the mnemonic tag in low-budget Ad Council PSAs for Big Brothers/Big Sisters and the United Way, which used Make a Difference in a Child's Life and Making a Difference in Your Community respectively, with B.B./B.S. even acquiring the telephonic equivalent of DIF-FER-ENCE to serve as their Volunteer Hotline number in the metro area.”
“Why do I think these particular books have been popular? Two reasons. First, I think it is because they involve no harsh, garish violence at all. They involve game playing, really. No one is burned or cut or hurt. Certainly no one is killed. Indeed the whole sadomasochistic predicament is presented as a glorified game played out in luxurious rooms and with very attractive people, and involving very attractive slaves. There are endless motifs offered for dominance and submission, for surrender and love. It’s like a theme park of dominance and submission, a place to go to enjoy the fantasy of being overpowered by a beautiful man or woman and delightfully compelled to surrender and feel keening pleasure, without the slightest serious harm. I think it’s authentic to the way many who share this kind of fantasy really feel. I think what makes it work for people is the combination of the very graphic and unsparing sexual details mixed with the elegant fairy-tale world. Unfortunately a lot of hackwork pornography is written by those who don’t share the fantasy, and they slip into hideous violence and ugliness, thinking the market wants all that, when the market never really did. Second, this is shamelessly erotic. It pulls no punches at being what it is. It’s excessive and it is erotica. Before these books, a lot of women read what were called “women’s romances” where they had to mark the few “hot pages” in the book. I said, well, look, try this. Maybe this is what you really want, and you don’t have to mark the hot pages because every page is hot. Every page is about sexual fulfillment. Every page is meant to give you pleasure. There are no boring parts. Yet it’s very “romantic.” And well, I think this worked.”
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