“What's the point of being a hero when everyone thinks you're a villain?”
“Some people
Are worthy of a bullet straight
to the heart because that is where
cruelty evolves into evil.
Some
humans aren't human at all,
despite how they appear.
Humanity is what lives inside
people,
harbored beneath skin, flesh,
and bone.”
“My grandmother used to say God gives us drought years-years drained of happiness-to prepare us for bounteous times. I'm more than ready for bounty.”
“Right Here.
Beside a living, breathing human
being who cares for me. I can see
it in the cool lagoons of his eyes,
hear it in the timbre of his voice
when he speaks my name.
Right here.
Where the warmth of his skin
tempers the February cold and
the thinnest beam of his inner
light overcomes winter's pall.
He is a candle in the wilderness.
Right here.
Where the omnipresent specter
of death takes flight, awed
by the power of the two of us,
hearts beating in unison, as we
stumble through the darkness
toward one another.”
“Happiness is a bull's-eye, awaiting arrows of pain.”
“Home. What does it mean to me? Will I ever know home again?”
“Love is a pain in disguise, a scorpion lying in wait for just the right moment to strike and inject you with its poison before scuttling off into the shadows.”
“But if there is a hereafter, one my father has been welcomed into, it must be a godless wasteland.”
“I have no right to love you, but I do.”
“Can 'love and obey' possibly go together?”
“It's one thing to crave a shot of adventure, a taste of something new, and quite another to become immersed in the extraordinary, where you're not quite certain if you're safe or stuck in limbo.”
“Some people blunt such pain with dope or booze or a dive into madness, but I don't have such luxuries available to me.”
“Well, what do you think? Avanti?"
"Avanti," cries everyone, and, after a few quick re-tunings of our instruments, and re-initialisings of our hearts, we enter the slow theme-and-variations movement.
How good it is to pay this quintet, to play it, not to work at it - to play for our own joy, with no need to convey anything to anyone outside our ring of recreation, with no expectation of a future stage, of the too-immediate sop of applause. The quintet exists without us yet cannot exist without us. It sings to us, we sing into it, and somehow, through these little black and white insects clustering along five thin lines, the man who deafly transfigured what he so many years earlier had hearingly composed speaks into us across land and water and ten generations, and fills us here with sadness, here with amazed delight.”
“You know shit just got serious when you refuse gooey caramel cupcakes which taste like heaven.”
“I thought about how it was impossible to forget, no matter how hard anyone might try.”
“You’re not going to take advantage of me, are you?” The cushions felt so nice behind her head. It was so nice to lie down. “Novels are always warning young women of the dangers of being taken advantage of by wealthy young men.”
“You are perfectly safe. Emily is here to protect your virtue.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Achilles pauses, looks over his shoulder at the masses of men behind him, turns back, looks past Zeus toward Olympos and the masses of gods in front of him, and then crooks his neck to look up again at towering Zeus.
"Surrender now", says Achilles, "and we'll spare your goddesses' lives so they can be our slaves and courtesans.”
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