Fragile Things

I think...I would rather recollect a life misspent on fragile things than spent avoiding moral debt.

The average daytime speed of a vehicle through the streets of central London has not changed in four hundred years. It’s still under ten miles an hour.

If they think you're a hero, they're wrong. After you die, you don't get to be Beowulf or Perseus or Rama any more. Whole different set of rules. Chess, not checkers. Go, not chess. You understand?

The map was gone, and the mapmaker, but the land lives on.

My grandpa sells condoms to sailors

He punctures the tips with a pin

My grandma does back-street abortions

My God how the money rolls in.

I believe we owe it to each other to tell stories. It’s as close to a credo as I have or will, I suspect, ever get.

I had to go to the store, I had decided, to bring back some apples — and I went past the store that sold apples and I kept driving, and driving. I was going south, and west, because if I went north or east I would run out of world too soon.

But where does contagion end and art begin?

In every way that counted, I was dead. Inside somewhere maybe I was screaming and weeping and howling like an animal, but that was another person deep inside, another person who had no access to the face and lips and mouth and head, so on the surface I just shrugged and smiled and kept moving.

And he still thinks, in the little bit of his head that's still him, that he's not a zombie. That he's not dead, that there's a threshold he hasn't stepped over. But he crossed it long time ago.

“So you were in the nick?” said Smith suddenly.

“Sorry?”

“Prison. Pokey. Porridge. Other words beginning with a P, indicating poor food, no nightlife, inadequate toilet facilities, and limited opportunities for travel.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re not very chatty, are you?”

“I thought that was a virtue.”

New Orleans is a real place, which is more than I can say about most of the cities I’ve lived in, but it’s not a safe place, not a friendly one.

It was cold, in a way that Shadow was starting to become familiar with: colder inside the building than out. He wondered how they did that, if it was a British building secret.

She does not know where any tale waits

before it's told. (No more do I.)

But forty thieves sounds good, so forty

thieves it is. She prays she's bought another clutch of days.

We save our lives in such unlikely ways.

“It can’t make things any worse.”

“If there’s one thing that a study of history has taught us, it is that things can always get worse,” said my friend.