Katie Coyle · 262 pages
Rating: (4.5K votes)
“Don't be the kind of person who sees groups instead of people.”
“The best I can hope for is the occasional moment of loose happy freedom—found usually with Harp but once or twice on this trip with Peter—that tells me it’s okay. That if I was put on this earth for any particular reason, it was to experience love and joy, just like anybody else.”
“But Viv, if I've learned anything at all in the last eight years of my life? It's that people just like to tell themselves stories about where they came from. They can't help themselves. They don't trust the world around them--it's too good for them, or not good enough--so they tell themselves stories about it. They tell themselves an old magician who lives up in the sky made them out of clay and put them here until whenever he makes up his mind to take them out again. Your parents didn't like their creation myth, that's all--it had pain in it, and chaos, and their own parents were ashamed. So they told themselves a story that was at least partially true: about two good people who deserved happy lives. And probably at some point they started to believe that story. But the thing is, really, that it doesn't matter. For your parents or anyone else. It doesn't actually matter where we came from, or where we're going, or when. The only thing that matters is what we have to do while we're here and how well we do it.”
“This is car theft. This is running away. This is some punk-rock New Orphans shit. This is not like any Vivian Apple I have ever been before. But this is Vivian Apple at the end of the world.”
“The way we live our lives is not sustainable. I don’t just mean recycling and turning off the faucet while brushing your teeth. I mean the way we treat each other. The way we pick and choose whose lives are important—who we actually treat as human. There is nobody on this earth whose life is not of value.”
“But the thing is, really,” Peter continues, “that it doesn’t matter. For your parents or anyone else. It doesn’t actually matter where we came from, or where we’re going, or when. The only thing that matters is what we have to do while we’re here and how well we do it.”
“It doesn’t actually matter where we came from, or where we’re going, or when. The only thing that matters is what we have to do while we’re here and how well we do it.”
“The group’s camaraderie had a certain level of appeal in a city where a sexually active girl could find herself waking up in a house on fire,”
“Oh, Vivian Apple," Harp says. "You beautiful, crazy bitch.”
“I know Harp doesn’t really regret it either, because it meant she got to scream “FUCK YOU, OLD MAN” at Mr. Knackstedt as we walked out the door.”
“What the Church wanted from you wasn't goodness; it was meekness. And I know because I've been meek for seventeen years. That's what you just called godliness. It's so much easier to be meek--to read the guidelines and submit and obey, instead of actually dealing with chaos, or pain--but that's not what good is.”
“They decided now, talking it over in their tight little two-and-quarter room flat, that most people who call themselves 'truth seekers' - persons who scurry about chattering of Truth as though it were a tangible seperable thing, like houses or salt or bread - did not so much desire to find Truth as to cure their mental itch. In novels, these truth-seekers quested the 'secret of life' in laboratories which did not seem to be provided wtih Bunsen flames or reagents; or they went, at great expense and much discomfort from hot trains and undesirable snakes, to Himalayan monasteries, to learn from unaseptic sages that the Mind can do all sorts of edifying things if one will but spend thirty or forty years in eating rice and gazing on one's navel.
To these high matters Martin responded, 'Rot!' He insisted that there is no Truth but only many truths; that Truth is not a colored bird to be chased among the rocks and captured by its tail, but a skeptical attitude toward life. (260)”
“Of all the songs we Zida'ya sing," she (Aditu) murmured, "the closest to our hearts are those which tell of things lost."
"Perhaps that is because none of us can show something's value until it is gone," said Josua.”
“Lawyers had abolished the simple concept of right and wrong, turning it into degrees of guilt.”
“Sometimes the bigger the apartment, the harder it is to find room to put up an extra person for the night.”
“In my experience, an effective mission statement basically answers one question: How do we intend to win in this business?”
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