“So not every person fits into the little rooms we build to hold them. There are infinite combinations of human and inhuman, male and female, brown and white.”
“She was ugly, was all they'd told her. But she didn't find them beautiful, so what did it matter?”
“Outside of monsters, meat is meat. Science is a powerful teacher. And hunger is a cruel mistress.”
“A creature is what it is, even if it can't show its true face.”
“Could a mare only like mares or stallions, or could a mare like whatever she damn pleased? Maybe she just didn't know enough yet to understand what she was or what she wanted. Or maybe she was lots of things, just as her skin was a mixture of browns. Maybe she didn't have to like anything.”
“People need to be touched and talked to, they need to know somebody else in the world cares.”
“Nettie's one-eyed glare was flat, her patience gone. "I'm the feller that's going to kill you."
"You're not a feller."
"That's not yours to decide.”
“People fear monsters. Monsters fear the Cannibal Owl.” Nettie”
“Because you were raised by ignorant people. They taught you to use things before you understood them. To kill things before you recognized them. To hate things before you knew them. But you'll appreciate a thing better when you know where it comes from, when your hands know the shape of it.”
“Being a person was mighty twisty, and yet she didn’t want to go back to being nothing.”
“Because a shadow was a thing that defined itself, and Nettie didn't have to fit anyone else's shape.”
“Nettie scanned the shed for anything useful, but all she saw were big, clumsy things, like hoes and plows and men.”
“We must take arms each and every day, perhaps knowing that the battle cannot be entirely won, but fight we must, if only a gentle bout. The smallest effort to win means, at the end of each day, a sort of victory. Remember that pianist who said that if he did not pratice every day he would know, if he did not practice for two days, the critics would know, after three days, his audiences would know.
A variation of this is true for writers. Not that your style, whatever that is, would melt out of shape in those few days.
But what would happen is that the world would catch up with and try to sicken you. If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy, or both.”
“Curious, sometimes, how one’s thoughts seemed to swing in a kaleidoscope. It happened to me now. A bewildering shuffling and reshuffling of memories, of events. Then the mosaic settled into its true pattern.”
“I like it when you ask me to come!” he called after me. “I can’t wait to come tonight, Ziggy! Should I come around eight? Or do you want me to come around ten? Maybe I’ll come both times?”
“And yet I could still hear them. As if some part of their essence had evaporated into the air, become a part of this place, ingrained, like the scent of cigarettes and burning sugar, in the woodwork and plaster. Everything was buzzing with that vanished presence, buzzing and singing and laughing louder than ever before, stone and tile and polished wood, all whispering with agitation and excitement; never still, never silent.”
“When there is no love, not only the life of the people becomes sterile but the life of cities.”
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