Ordinary Monsters

Difference, children, is not monstrous. It is nature at work.

All her life she’d known men like this man, men who knew what they knew with such satisfied certainty, who would rather look at a pretty thing and be admired by it than hear it speak,

Every light creates a shadow. You can not have one without the other.

If you live long enough, you cease to be human, you cease to understand anything that fills the human heart. For the heart is made of time, and consumed by time, by the knowledge of its own eventual death, and Berghast could not die.

The boy felt almost like a different person, someone he wished he could find, and talk to, tell him: It's not okay, but it'll get better.

because where else and why not.

Scotland, she thought grimly. You’re in fucking Scotland,

It ain’t suitable for a lady’s sensibilities, now,” he warned, looking at Mrs. Harrogate. “She’ll be all right,” said Alice dryly. “She’s the least sensible lady I ever met.

It was a dead city, a London of stillness and loss, and the streets were labyrinthine and littered with the detritus of lives once-lived.

you waste all this time dreaming of where you came from, cause you know no one comes from nothing. And you tell yourself, if you only knew, then maybe you could see a reason for how you got to be the way you are. Why your life looks like it does. But there isn’t any reason, not really.

Charlie glanced up the street, at the spectres swirling past. They were so beautiful. But something about it didn’t feel right; he didn’t like how easy it was to get lost in them.

Spirits, Dr Berghast had said, were memories, memories and forgettings; these were the faces of a life lived, memories made real, but at the same time never staying, never pausing, without any present to hold on to. There were hundreds of them, thousands maybe, all hovering very still in the street. A city of the dead, Berghast had called it.

One could prepare, and then one could wait. But worry served no purpose.

they didn’t get to choose their lives, and all that happened was chance or fate, with no way of knowing the difference between.

Just because you cannot see it, daughter – her mother would whisper angrily – does not mean it is not there. Well, she’d seen it now. And she believed.

In that moment what she had been and what she would become stretched out before her and behind her in a single long continuous line.

Thing is,” he murmured, “you waste all this time dreaming of where you came from, cause you know no one comes from nothing. And you tell yourself, if you only knew, then maybe you could see a reason for how you got to be the way you are. Why your life looks like it does. But there isn’t any reason, not really.

Sometimes family is what you choose.

Scared is just your head telling your heart to be careful. It’s not a bad thing. It’s what you do with it that matters.

Sometimes the bastards just plain deserve it,” she said fiercely.

Brynt did not go in for coincidences, she believed there was a shape to the world and to its happenings, whether she could see it or not,

That’s not in the Bible,” she said. “You mean Leviathan and Behemoth?” “They’s the ones.” “Those are God’s monsters. God made them.” The deputy looked unsure. “Aw, I don’t think—” “You should.

Justice is just a bucket with a hole in the bottom, as my father used to say.

What governs a life, if not chance?