The Other Emily

There’s the past, which we might wish desperately that we can change, and there’s now. If we don’t seize the now with all our might, it becomes just another part of the past that we end up wishing we could change.

Life is so fragile and uncertain that every daybreak is a miracle, almost a triumph. That first blush in the sky is all the hope of the world distilled into light. I watch the dark fade, and say to myself, “Okay, I’m still here,” and the more sunrises I see, the more I feel as if I’ll live to see another twenty thousand.

Life is full of mysteries, isn’t it? And maybe we don’t always need to know the answers to them. Each thing we don’t understand is a wall, and we spend our lives throwing ourselves against those walls, with little to show for it in the end. Maybe sometimes it’s just best to accept the limitations of our understanding, accept that some things will be forever beyond our knowledge.

You play everything so close to your vest, it’s like your entire life is one long poker hand.

The world turns and the world changes, but one thing does not change . . . The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.

He said, “Sometimes it takes a lot of distance to be able to fold a piece of your life into a work of fiction.

As he’d stood at the railing, the sun became a wound as it met the sharp horizon line of the sea, and an artery opened in the sky, spilling scarlet light across the west.

The sleeping mind was an inventive if strange playwright.

She finished it: “—all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” David met her eyes. “Love without truth isn’t beautiful. It’s not even love.

There’s a poem by John Keats that I like. Emily liked it, too. It contains two lines that are especially poignant. ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all—

You told me that you learned what love is from her. She knew love is the ultimate beauty. Therefore, love is the ultimate truth of the world. You can’t love me and lie to me, not truly love me. That’s a lesson I learned at the cost of . . . everything. And if you truly love me, you’ll never make me live a lie.

it was human nature often to hope for the wrong thing, while thinking it right.

From Emily’s favorite of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

The maze of Ronny Jessup’s dark erotic dreams of absolute power was also the labyrinth of David Thorne’s nightmares.

Three walls of the study were lined with books, nearly all science fiction—Bradbury, Heinlein, Sturgeon, Dick, Zelazny, Delaney, Scalzi, Gibson—

eager to spend it all on utopian schemes that ensure dystopia.

Enigmas of physics, when deciphered, might produce a sublime light, but the answers to mysteries of human behavior seldom resulted in glorious revelations.

beyond that image conjured by Poe’s famous story, “The Premature Burial,

He bought acetone from an art supply store, bleaching powder from a janitorial supply, and brewed the chloroform himself from acetone by the reaction of chloride of lime

David wondered what kind of dark-minded people wanted items from the abattoir of a rapist-murderer and how Stuart Ulrich knew where to advertise to attract their attention.