Posts tagged quotes
Posts tagged quotes
Stars, too, were time travelers. How many of those ancient points of light were the last echoes of suns now dead? How many had been born but their light not yet come this far? If all the suns but ours collapsed tonight, how many lifetimes would it take us to realize we were alone? I had always known the sky was full of mysteries — but not until now had I realized how full of them the earth was.
‘Stories are important,’ the monster said. ‘They can be more important than anything. If they carry the truth.’
How many times have I told you? Polite persons do not take supper in the nude.
Little boys should never go to bed… they wake up one day older.
I slammed out of the house and started walking, heading nowhere in particular. Sometimes you just need to go through a door.
People always say ‘life is full of choices’, no one ever mentions fear…
I thought about how my great-grandparents had starved to death. I thought about their wasted bodies being fed to incinerators because people they didn’t know hated them. I thought about how the children who lived in this house had been burned up and blown apart because a pilot who didn’t care pushed a button. I thought about how my grandfather’s family had been taken from him and how because of that my dad grew up feeling like he didn’t have a dad. And how I had acute stress and nightmares and was sitting alone in a falling down house and crying hot stupid tears all over my shirt. All because of a seventy year old hurt that had somehow been passed down to me like some poisonous heirloom.
How many slams in an old screen door? Depends how loud you shut it. How many slices in a bread? Depends how thin you cut it. How much good inside a day? Depends how good you live ‘em. How much love inside a friend? Depends how much you give ‘em.
I wish I had a hundred years,” she said, very quietly. “A hundred years I could give to you.
And that is how someone who is unusally susceptible to nightmares, night terrors, the Creeps, the Willies and the Seeing Things That Aren’t Really There talks himself into making one last trip to the abandoned, almost-certainly-haunted house where a dozen or more children met their untimely end.
There was once an invisible man,” the monster continued, though Conor kept his eyes firmly on Harry, “who had grown tired of being unseen.”
Conor set himself into a walk.
A walk after Harry.
“It was not that he was actually invisible,” the monster said, following Conor, the room volume dropping as they passed. “It was that the people had become used to not seeing him.”
“Hey!” Conor called. Harry didn’t turn around. Neither did Sully nor Anton, though thet were still sniggering as Conor picked up his pace.
“And if no one sees you,” the monster said, picking up its pace, too, “are you really there at all?”
“HEY!” Conor called loudly.
The dining hall had fallen silent now, as Conor and the monster moved faster after Harry.
Harry, who had still not turned around.
Conor reached him and grabbed him by the shoulder, twisting him round. Harry pretended to question what had happened, looking hard at Sully, acting like he was the one who’d done it. “Quit messing about,” Harry said and turned away again.
Turned away from Conor.
“And then one day the invisible man decided,” the monster said, its voice ringing in Conor’s ears, “I will make them see me.”
“How?” Conor asked, breathing heavily again, not turning back to see the monster standing there, not looking at the reaction of the room to the huge monster now in the midst, though he was aware of nervous murmurs and a strange anticipation in the air. “How did the man do it?”
Conor could feel the monster close behind him, knew that it was kneeling, knew that it was putting its face up to his ear to whisper into it, to tell him the rest of the story.
He called, “it sent for a monster.
I did love her, of course, but mostly because loving your mom is mandatory, not because she was someone I think I’d like very much if I met her walking down the street.
Once there was a tree, and she loved a little boy.
We cling to our fairy tales until the price for believing in them becomes too high.
War is like a monster,” he says, almost to himself. “War is the devil. It starts and it consumes and it grows and grows and grows.” He’s looking at me now. “And otherwise normal men become monsters, too.
