The Girl and the Stars

Sometimes all your words are the wrong shape and none of them will fit into the silence left when the conversation pauses.

Each of us plunges through our own existence, punching me-shaped holes through days, through weeks, through conversations. We're none of us one thing or the other; we're legion. There's a different Yaz inside your skull for everyday of your life. We deceive others. We deceive ourselves. We keep secrets that even we don't know and hold beliefs we don't understand. And in that state of profound, fundamental, primal ignorance, we still think we can sculpt the clay of our own selves. We think we know what to cut away, that we understand the consequences of excising greed.

There's a darkness in each of us, afraid to show itself, wrestling with such blunt tools as words and deeds to make itself known to the darkness in another person similarly hidden behind walls of camouflage, disguise, interpretation. Honesty is a knife that we can use to pare away those layers, but one slip, go too deep, and who knows what injuries might be inflicted … The wounds an honest tongue can open sometimes take a lifetime to heal.

It's what you do with time that makes it matter. I'd rather spend a year making new memories than a thousand wandering around in the same old ones.

I’d rather spend a year making new memories than a thousand wandering around in the same old ones.

we are all victims of our childhood, even good ones, for they made us what we are, and it’s a rare person who isn’t disappointed with that.

Omens are difficult and open to interpretation but if the oracle that touches your newborn dies moments later, frothing at the mouth, it is hard even with a mother’s love to think it a good sign.

We are victims of our first friendships. They are the foundations of us. Each anchors us to our past. The blows that drive those nails home are randomly struck, but they echo down all our days even so.

Might we not be creating new and different demons whose most frightening trait is that they truly believe themselves to be angels?

Throw any single life away as if it holds no meaning and how will your own life be valued thereafter?

Yaz shrugged. ‘People get like that if they live long enough to turn grey. They think they’ve seen it all and have answers for everyone. But they’re so distant from living life that they forget that we all have different paths.

I have been young and now I am old and it amazes me how long the journey was and how swift. Everything every elder has ever said to you about getting old is true . . . and none of it will mean anything to you until you have made the journey for yourself.

He told me that we are all victims of our childhood, even good ones, for they made us what we are, and it’s a rare person who isn’t disappointed with that.

When I was last here’ – he swung his arm at the rock and ice – ‘all this was fields.

She hoped that his experiences remained a bad dream and that his youth would help him shrug them off. But Mother Mazai had always said that the hurts done to us as children cast shadows as long as our lives.

When the father handed his infant to the priestess to speak its fortune the child stopped screaming and in its place she began to howl, filling the silence left behind. Omens are difficult and open to interpretation but if the oracle that touches your newborn dies moments later, frothing at the mouth, it is hard even with a mother’s love to think it a good sign. In such cases a second opinion is often sought.

There’s no such thing as magic. If a thing is part of the world, part of how it works, then it’s real and obeys laws just like gravity and electricity do.

THE WORLD TURNS whether we will it or not and everything, longed for or feared, comes to us in time.

She didn't know if the priests' poison was starting to infect her, or if this was just what growing up was - a series of compromises that twisted a child's idealism into something shameful.

Sometimes even the blind must wait and see.

There seemed nothing else to say. Sometimes all your words are the wrong shape and none of them will fit into the silence left when the conversation pauses.