- No one's easier to ignore than the homeless. You could be Jane Fonda or Robert Redford, but if you're pushing a shopping cart down the avenue at high noon, wearing three layers of soiled clothing and muttering cursewords under your breath--nobody's going to notice you.
- Screw the idea of inventing monsters. Here, we just had to look around.
- "You are permanent, but this life is not," Mr. Whittier would say. "You don't expect to visit an amusement park, then stay forever." No, we're only visiting, and Mr. Whittier knows that. And we're born here to suffer. "If you can accept that," he says, "you can accept anything that happens in the world." The irony is, if you can accept that--you'll never again suffer. Instead, you'll run toward torture. You'll enjoy pain.
- Being born, it's as if you go inside a building. You lock yourself inside any building long enough, you forget how the outside looked. Without a mirror, you'd forget your own face.
- "Consider that the earth is a processing plant, a factory. Picture a tumbler used to polish rocks: A rolling drum filled with water and sand. Consider that your soul is dropped in as an ugly rock, some raw material or a natural resource, crude oil, mineral ore. And all conflict and pain is just the abrasive that rubs us, polishes our souls, refines us, teaches and finishes us over lifetime after lifetime. Then consider that you've chosen to jump in, again and again, knowing this suffering is your entire reason for coming to earth. [...] The only alternative is, we're all just eternally stupid."
- Your whole life, she says, you're searching for disaster--you're auditioning disasters--so you'll be well rehearsed when the ultimate disaster finally arrives. "For when you die," Mrs. Clark says.
- The difference between how you look and how you see yourself is enough to kill most people. Maybe the reason vampires don't die is because they never see themselves in photographs or mirrors.
- "This is going to sound terrible," Comrade Snarky says. Her fingers release the skin, and then half her face turns back into shadowy sags and wrinkles. "I used to see photographs of those people behind barbed wire in death camps," she says. "Those living skeletons. And I always thought: 'Those people could wear anything.'"
feb 16 2014 ∞
feb 16 2014 +