“What's important is the ambition that results from our weakness.”
“A driver had been sent to meet us. He was gray-haired, short, and nimble and introduced himself. "I am Patrick and so is every fourth man in Ireland, and the ones in between are named Sean or Mick or Finn, and I'll be driving you.”
“I wondered If things that might seem frightening could lose their hold over you. I wondered If we find the people we need when we need them. I wondered If we attract our future by some sort of invisible force, or If we are drawn to it by a similar force. I felt I was turning a corner and that change was afoot.”
“Lizzie said that if you imagined you were standing on the moon, looking down on the earth, you wouldn't be able to see the itty-bitty people racing around worrying you wouldn't see the barn falling in or the cow stuck in the pond; you wouldn't see the mean Granger kids squirting mustard on your white dress. You would see the most beautiful blue oceans and green lands, and the whole earth would look like a giant blue-and-green marble floating in the sky. Your worries would seem so small, maybe invisible.”
“Mrs. Mudkin closed her eyes. "We should pray."
"I ain't praying," Crazy Cora said.
Mrs. Mudkin said, "Lord, please bless---"
"I ain't praying."
"--this land and the people who--"
"I ain't praying."
"--have toiled on this earth--"
"Stop that praying."
"I can pray if I want to."
"Then be quiet about it.”
“But I thought about all the things that had to have spun into place in order for us to be alive and for us to be right there, right then. I thought about the few thing we thought we knew and the billions of things we couldn't know, all spinning, whirling our there somewhere.”
“Joe, my guardian and a man of few words, once said about Lizzie, “That girl could talk the ears off a cornfield.”
“Reagan…god. Why is this so hard? He lifts his head, his eyes roaming, searching, wavering. He swallows and sighs, tries again. “I’ve never loved anyone before, Reagan. I don’t know how.”
“You’re doing just fine so far,” I tell him.”
“Not really. My understanding of magic is fairly straightforward. Hit enemies with a sword until they’re dead. If they rise again, hit them again. Repeat as necessary. It worked against Set.”
“Kissing you, wanting you, just being here with you while I’m legally bound to another woman…that’s not what I should be doing. I won’t want to belong to her in any way when my heart is yours.”
“Maybe it is not the destructiveness of the volcano that pleases most, though everyone loves a conflagration, but its defiance of the law of gravity to which every inorganic mass is subject. What pleases first at the sight of the plant world is its vertical upward direction. That is why we love trees. Perhaps we attend to a volcano for its elevation, like ballet. How high the molten rocks soar, how far above the mushrooming cloud. The thrill is that the mountain blows itself up, even if it must then like the dancer return to earth; even if it does not simply descend—it falls, falls on us. But first it goes up, it flies. Whereas everything pulls, drags down. Down.”
“You see,' Gwyn said slowly...'With an Indian boy maybe you can, you know, explore all that stuff. Go kamasutronic, so to speak.'
I nodded, but I was feeling battle fatigue and was now thinking the tip of another thought: Or maybe an Indian boy would get that most of us don't know that stuff. That it was a lot of hype. It was the bindi blondes who were all over this scene, not the holelessly nosed Indian girls.”
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