- If you didn't have a death sentence, he decided, then prison was, at best, only a temporary reprieve from life, for two reasons. First, life creeps back into prison. There are always places to go further down, even when you've been taken off the board; life goes on, even if it's life under a microscope or life in a cage. And second, if you hang in there, some day they're going to have to let you out.
-
- "Changes are coming," said the buffalo without moving its lips. "There are certain decisions that will have to be made."
- Firelight flickered from we cave walls.
- "Where am I?" Shadow asked.
- "In the earth and under the earth," said the buffalo man. "You are where the forgotten wait." His eyes were liquid black marbles, and his voice was a rumble from beneath the world. He smelled like wet cow. "Believe," said the rumbling voice. "If you are to survive, you must believe."
- "Believe what?" asked Shadow. "What should I believe?"
- He stared at Shadow, the buffalo man, and he drew himself up huge, and his eyes filled with fire. He opened his spit-flecked buffalo mouth and it was red inside with the flames that burned inside him, under the earth."
- "Everything," roared the buffalo man.
- If hell is other people, thought Shadow, then purgatory is airports.
- "Oh, it's the easiest thing in the world to know what people call themselves. A little thought, a little luck, a little memory."
- "Too much talking these days. Talk, talk, talk. This country would get along much better if people learned how to suffer in silence.
- Shadow had heard too many people telling each other not to repress their feeling, to let their emotions out, let the pain go. Shadow thought there was a lot to be said for bottling up emotions. If you did it long enough and deep enough, he suspected, pretty soon you wouldn't feel anything at all.
- "Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed in the end."
-
- She smiled at him, looking suddenly, and for the first time , vulnerable. She patted him on the arm. "You're fucked up, mister. But you're cool"
- "I believe that's what they call the human condition," said Shadow. "Thanks for the company."
- "Some things may change," said Wednesday, abruptly. "People, however...people stay the same. Some grifts last forever, others are swallowed soon enough by the time and by the world.
- "What I say is, a town isn't a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it's got a bookstore, it knows it's not foolin' a soul."
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- There is a secret that the casinos possess, a secret they hold and guard and prize, the holiest of their mysteries. For most people do not gamble to win money, after all, although that is what is advertised, sold, claimed and dreamed. But that is merely the easy lie that allows the gamblers to lie to themselves, the big lie that gets them through the enormous, ever-open, welcoming doors.
- The secret is this: people gamble to lose money. They come to the casinos for the moment in which they feel alive, to ride the spinning wheel and turn with the cards and lose themselves, with the coins, in the slots. They want to know they matter. They may brag about the nights they won, the money they took from the casino, but they treasure, secretly treasure, the times they lost. It's a sacrifice, of sorts.
- But it was a dream, and in dreams, sometimes, you have no choices: either there are no decisions to be made, or they were made for you, long before ever the dream began.
- There are stories that are true, in which each individual's tale is unique and tragic, and the worst of the tragedy is that we have heard it before, and we cannot allow ourselves to feel it too deeply. We build a shell around it like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function, day in, day out, immune to others' pain and loss. If it were to touch us it would cripple us or make saints of us; but, for the most part, it does not touch us. We cannot allow it to.
-
- No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each others' tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island ) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. We know the shape, and the shape does not change. There was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or other, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes—unique in detail, forming patterns we have seen before, but as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod?? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection.)
- We need individual stories. Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, "casualties may rise to a million." With individual stories, the statistics become people—but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child's swollen, swollen belly, and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted, distended caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies' own myriad squirming children?
- We draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearl-like, from our souls without real pain.
- Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.
- A life, which is, like any other, unlike any other.
-
- "I miss you," he admitted.
- "I'm here," she said.
- "That's when I miss you most. When you're here. When you aren't here, when you're just a ghost from the past or a dream from another life, it's easier then."
-
- "I thought this was the world of the dead," said Shadow.
- "No. Not per se. It's more of a preliminary."
- The boat slipped and slid across the mirror-surface of the underground pool. The bird-head of the creature at the prow stared ahead. And then Mr. Ibis said, without moving its beak, "You people talk about the living and the dead as if they were two mutually exclusive categories. As if you cannot have a river that is also a road, or a song that is also a color.
- "You can't," said Shadow. "Can you?" The echoes whispered his words back at hm from across the pool.
- "What you have to remember," said Mr. Ibis, testily, "is that life and death are different sides of the same coin. Like the heads and tails of a quarter."
- "And if I had a double-headed quarter?"
- "You don't. They only belong to fools, and gods."
- People believe, thought Shadow. It's what people do. They believe. And then they will not take reaponsibility for their beliefs; they conjure things, and do not trust the conjurations. People populate the darkness; with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales. People imagine, and people believe: and it is that belief, that rock-solid belief, that makes things happen.
nov 13 2015 ∞
jan 1 2016 +
jan 1 2016 +