Rodman Philbrick · 223 pages
Rating: (7.9K votes)
“The only real treasure is in your head. Memories are better than diamonds and nobody can steal them from you”
“Bean finds the best apple in our tree and hands it up to me. "You know what this tastes like when you first bite into it?" she asks.
"No, what?"
"Blue sky."
"You're zoomed."
"You ever eat blue sky?"
"No," I admit.
"Try it sometime," she says. "It's apple-flavored.”
“Do not despair, my friend. Today is theirs, but the future is ours”
“I believe that we have the ability to change our lives using our imaginations. Imagination is a muscle—the more you use it, the stronger it gets.”
“The future is like the moon. You never expect to go there, or think about what it might be like.”
“I don't have any of the answers, son. Never did. All I can do is keep asking the questions. Keep trying to make sense of why people do what they do.”
“I used to belong to a family unit, with a foster mom and dad and my little sister, Bean, but that's over and I don't want to talk about what happened , or how unfair it was. Not yet. The less said about that the better, because if there's one thing I learned from Ryter it's that you can't always be looking backward or something will hit you from the front.”
“I'm thinking maybe letting the latches burn is the right idea. Let everything burn until there's nothing left but ashes and cool rain.”
“I know who the real hero is, and it isn't me or brave Lanaya. It's an old man with a white beard and a walking stick and a heart so big it won't let him stop thinking he can change the world by writing down things in a book no one will ever read.”
“Shut up!" I say, holding my hands to my ears. "Shut up!"
But the stupid gummy won't shut up; he's trying to tell me something important even though I'm covering my ears and I don't want to hear it and I don't want to think about who I am or what's wrong with me or why I'm out here at the edge of the Urb, at the edge of the known world, listening to some old mope who's so crazy, he think about the future when everyone knows that the future doesn't exist.”
“He's a feral child. No mother, no father, no one to care for him or raise him or teach him how to be human. So he's existed much like an animal, without language. He thinks in images, not word."
"How strange," Lanaya, sounding amazed.
Ryter shakes his head sadly. "Not strange, I'm afaraid. His condition is all too common in the latches. And becoming more common every day.”
“How did one rationalize belief with no proof? How could they honestly expect him to have faith in something that taught of miracles and wonders in the far past, but carefully gave excuses for why such things didn’t occur in the present day?”
“Trying is not failure…failing to try is.” I”
“if there’s fire on the mountain or lightning and storm and a god speaks from the sky. That means someone is hearing the outcry and the birth-cry of new life at its term.”
“I am, of course, aware that for over two hundred years scholars have laboured to keep history and theology, or history and faith, at arm’s length from one another. There is a good intention behind this move: each of these disciplines has its own proper shape and logic, and cannot simply be turned into a branch of the other.”
“In 1924 Mao took a Chinese friend, newly arrived from Europe, to see the notorious sign in the Shanghai park, 'Chinese and Dogs Not Allowed'.”
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