Brains

“Bobby realized he had never even scratched the surface of what was possible — that the wars and murders reported in the news were barely more than sports news updates, death for show, a screwed-up system of physcial honor that varied only in scale and public accountability; that even the terrorists he’d interviewed had been dabbling in the shallow end of darkness.  They at least wanted people to know what they had done.  They weren’t just doing it for themselves.  Bobby realized this made a difference, and also that if we were all the same species, there was little hope for us, that nothing we ever did in the daytime would bleach out what some of us were capable of at night.  Some aspects of human behavior were inevitable, but this was surely not.  To believe so was to accept that we had no downward limit.  Just because we were capable of art didn’t mean what lay in front of him could be dismissed as aberration, that we could take what we admired and fence that off as human, dismissing the rest as monstrous.  The same hands committed both.  Brains didn’t undermine the savagery.  They made us better at it.”

–Michael Marshall, The Straw Men

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Miracle

“Like at night when you’re driving somewhere, and it’s dark and the lights of the highway are streaming past, and you’re not even talking, and one of you reaches out and holds the other one’s leg for a while. It’s the truest moment in the world…. And all it says is: There you are and here I am, and we’re here together. You get it in airplanes, too, when the lights are out and you’re the last people awake. Or even in the middle of a bad party when your eyes meeet across the room. It’s the only miracle we get, I think.”

–Gabriel Noone
(Armistead Maupin, The Night Listener)

Judgment

“The problem is that ‘Zero Tolerance’ is another way of saying: I’ve got a rule, so I don’t have to think about a particular case.  Zero Tolerance is a poor substitute for judgment.  Better an error made in good faith than one made by the dictat of a bad rule.”

–Dave Rubin

Marriage

“How many years does it take … before the simple stupid weight of accumulating days finally sucks all the wow out of a marriage? How lucky do you have to be for your love to outrace your time?”

–Lisey Landon
(Stephen King, Lisey’s Story)

Stories

“Telling stories to my children that I was, in my turn, told by my parents and grandparents makes me feel part of something special and odd, part of the continuous stream of life itself.”

–Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things

Words

“… silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grow pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.”

–Vida Winter
(Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale)

Stories

“Everybody has a story. It’s like families. You might not know who they are, might have lost them, but they exist all the same. You might drift apart or you might turn your back on them, but you can’t say you haven’t got them.”

–Vida Winter
(Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale)

Words

“There is something about words. In expert hands, deftly manipulated, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.”

–Margaret Lea
(Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale)

Stories

“My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.”

–Vida Winter
(Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale)

Importance

“There’s something more important than the work we do and the roles we play. There’s something more than how we move or where. There’s something about who we touch and why, and it matters more than we can understand or perhaps remember.”

–Katina Choovanski
(Terry Moore, Strangers in Paradise)