A Tongue Doesn't Have Bones Quotes

There was something wrong with me. The human body doesn't want to get hurt. We're programmed to feel squeamish at the sight of blood. Pain is a careful orchestration of chemical processes so that we keep our body alive. Studies have shown that people born with congenital analgesia -- the inability to feel pain -- bite off the tips of their tongues and scratch holes in their eyes and break bones. We are a wonder of checks and balances to keep running. The human body doesn't want to get hurt. There was something wrong with me, because sometimes I didn't care. There was something wrong with me, because sometimes I wanted it. We fear death; we fear the void; we scrabble to keep our pulses. I was the void. What are you afraid of? Nothing ... I wasn't meant to live, probably. This was why I was wired this way. Biology formed me and then took a look and wondered what the hell it was thinking and put in a mental fail-safe. In case of emergency pull cord.

There was something wrong with me. The human body doesn’t want to get hurt. We’re programmed to feel squeamish at the sight of blood. Pain is a careful orchestration of chemical processes so that we keep our body alive. Studies have shown that people born with congenital analgesia — the inability to feel pain — bite off the tips of their tongues and scratch holes in their eyes and break bones. We are a wonder of checks and balances to keep on running. The human body doesn’t want to get hurt. There was something wrong with me, because sometimes I didn’t care. There was something wrong with me, because sometimes I wanted it. We fear death; we fear the void; we scrabble to keep our pulses. I was the void. What are you afraid of? Nothing. You are not doing this you are not doing this you are not doing this But my eyes were already clawing over the bathroom for ways out. Trust you? I wasn’t meant to live, probably. This was why I was wired this way. Biology formed me and then took a look and wondered what the hell it was thinking and put in a mental fail-safe. In case of emergency pull cord. I was crouching by the wall, breathing into my hands. Victor had told me once that he’d never considered suicide, not even for a second, not even at his darkest moments. It’s the only life we have, he’d said. Even when I was happy, I felt like I was always looking for the edges on life. The seams. I was so perfectly born to die.

Rowan didn’t speak as she turned on her heel and strode to the door. Didn’t speak as she opened it, exited, and shut it behind her with a gentle click. Then he swiveled in his chair and leveled Sean with a dark glare. “What the hell just happened?” “That’s called a strikeout,” Sean said with a grin. “I’ve never seen you crash and burn like that, my friend.” “I know. Embarrassing is what it is. I mean, really.” Rowan tangled his fingers through his hair. “You got a better response than I did.” “Please, I got nothing, same as you.” Rowan offered him a sheepish smile. “I know. But I felt the heat pulsing off you the moment she stepped into the office. Then I saw the fantasies you were weaving about her and decided to throw you a bone. So you want her, huh?” Sean lost his grin but managed to shrug. “Doesn’t matter. Unless you picked up on her weaving fantasies about me?” A sigh. “Sorry. Her mind was a blank slate to me. I didn’t pick up on a single thought, emotion, or desire. It’s like she operates on a completely different frequency than the rest of the world.” She probably did, with all those wires and chips in her head. “Still,” Rowan continued, “we can call Bill and tell him you’re the one who should be—” “Nope.” The word burned his tongue, and he hated himself for saying it, but he didn’t take it back. Success was too important. “I don’t exactly inspire trust in the women I date. The opposite, in fact. Something about me makes people distrust every word and action.” His affiliation with the shadows, with darkness, most likely. They must have sensed it on some level. “You’re better at romancing and I’m better at killing.

Lake Natron resided in northern Tanzania near an active volcano known as Ol Doinyo Lengai. It was part of the reason the lake had such unique characteristics. The mud had a curious dark grey color over where Jack had been set up for observation, and he noted that there was now an odd-looking mound of it to the right of one of the flamingo’s nests. He zoomed in further and further, peering at it, and then realized what he was actually seeing. The dragon had crouched down beside the nests and blended into the mud. From snout to tail, Jack calculated it had to be twelve to fourteen feet long. Its wings were folded against its back, which had small spines running down the length to a spiky tail. It had a fin with three prongs along the base of the skull and webbed feet tipped with sharp black talons. He estimated the dragon was about the size of a large hyena. It peered up at its prey with beady red eyes, its black forked tongue darting out every few seconds. Its shoulder muscles bunched and its hind legs tensed. Then it pounced. The dark grey dragon leapt onto one of flamingoes atop its nest and seized it by the throat. The bird squawked in distress and immediately beat its wings, trying to free itself. The others around them took to the skies in panic. The dragon slammed it into the mud and closed its jaws around the animal’s throat, blood spilling everywhere. The flamingo yelped out its last breaths and then finally stilled. The dragon dropped the limp carcass and sniffed the eggs before beginning to swallow them whole one at a time. “Holy shit,” Jack muttered. “Have we got a visual?” “Oh, yeah. Based on the size, the natives and the conservationists were right to be concerned. It can probably wipe out a serious number of wildlife in a short amount of time based on what I’m seeing. There’s only a handful of fauna that can survive in these conditions and it could make mincemeat out of them.” “Alright, so what’s the plan?” “They told me it’s very agile, which is why their attempts to capture it haven’t worked. I’m going to see if it responds to any of the usual stimuli. So far, they said it doesn’t appear to be aggressive.” “Copy that. Be careful, cowboy.” “Ten-four.” Jack glanced down at his utility belt and opened the pocket on his left side, withdrawing a thin silver whistle. He put it to his lips and blew for several seconds. Much like a dog whistle, Jack couldn’t hear anything. But the dragon’s head creaked around and those beady red eyes locked onto him. Jack lowered the whistle and licked his dry lips. “If I were in a movie, this would be the part where I said, ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this.’” The dragon roared, its grey wings extending out from its body, and then flew straight at him.

Don't believe vegetarians who tell you that meat has no flavor, that it comes from the spices or the marinade. The flavor is already there: earth and metal, salt and fat, blood. My favorite meat is chicken. I can eat a whole bird standing up in the kitchen, straight from the oven, burning my bare hands on its flesh. Anyone can roast a chicken, it is a good animal to cook. Lamb, on the other hand, is much harder to get right. You have to lock in the flavor, rubbing it with sea salt like you are exfoliating your own drying skin, tenderly basting it in its own juices, hour after hour. You have to make small slits across the surface of the leg, through which you can insert sprigs of rosemary, or cloves of garlic, or both. These incisions should run against the grain, in the opposite direction to which the muscle fibers lie. You can tell the direction better when the meat is still uncooked, when it is marbled and raw. It is worth running your finger along those fibers, all the way from one end to the other. This doesn't help with anything. It won't change how you cook it. But it is good to come to terms with things as they are. Preparing meat is always an act of physical labor. Whacking rib eye with a rolling pin. Snapping apart an arc of pork crackling. And there is something inescapably candid about it, too. If you've ever spatchcocked a goose- if you've pressed your weight down on its breastbone, felt it flatten and give, its bones rearranging under your hands- you will know what I am talking about. We are all capable of cruelty. Sometimes I imagine the feeling of a sliver of roast beef on my tongue: the pink flesh of my own body cradling the flesh of something else's. It makes sense to me that there is a market for a vegetarian burger that bleeds.

Eddie: What has four wheels and flies? Blaine: (disapproving) THE TOWN GARBAGE WAGON, AS I HAVE ALREADY SAID. ARE YOU SO STUPID OR INATTENTIVE THAT YOU DO NOT REMEMBER? IT WAS THE FIRST RIDDLE YOU ASKED ME. Eddie: (in his mind) Yes. And what we all missed--because we were fixated on stumping you with some brain-buster out of Roland's past or Jake's book--is that the contest almost ended right there. (to Blaine) You didn't like that one, did you, Blaine? Blaine: (agreeably) I FOUND IT EXCEEDINGLY STUPID. PERHAPS THAT'S WHY YOU ASKED IT AGAIN. LIKE CALLS TO LIKE, EDDIE OF NEW YORK, IS IT NOT SO? Eddie: (smiling and shaking his finger) Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. Or, as we used to say back in the neighborhood, 'You can rank me to the dogs and back, but I'll never lose the hard-on I use to fuck your mother.' Jake: Hurry up! If you can do something, DO IT! Eddie: It doesn't like silly questions. It doesn't like silly games. And we KNEW that. We knew it from Charlie the Choo-Choo. How stupid can you get? Hell, THAT was the book with the answers, not Riddle-De-Dum, but we never saw it. (to Blaine) Blaine: when is a door not a door? Blaine: (clicking his tongue) WHEN IT'S AJAR, OF COURSE. WOULD YOU DIE WITH SUCH STUPID RIDDLES IN YOUR MOUTH?

I need to find out why my grandfather is . . . acting strange.’ ‘Can’t you ask him?’ ‘He won’t tell me!’ ‘Does he throw up a lot?’ ‘I shouldn’t think so. He doesn’t often eat. The occasional curry, once or twice a month.’ ‘He must be pretty thin.’ ‘You’ve no idea.’ ‘Well, then . . . Does he often stare at himself in the mirror and say “Arrgh”? Or stick out his tongue and wonder why it’s gone yellow? You see, it’s possible I might have some measure of influence over people who are hung over. If he’s been drinking a lot, I might be able to find him.’ ‘I can’t see him doing any of those things. I think I’d better tell you . . . My grandfather is Death.’ ‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.’ ‘I said Death.’ ‘Sorry?’ ‘Death. You know . . . Death?’ ‘You mean the robes, the—’ ‘—scythe, white horse, bones . . . yes. Death.’ ‘I just want to make sure I’ve got this clear,’ said the oh god in a reasonable tone of voice. ‘You think your grandfather is Death and you think he’s acting strange?

Do you remember when you told me that you’d bought something ridiculously luxurious, and it was a mango?” he asks. “I was so fucking jealous of you. I wished that I could feel what that was like. I wanted to want something like that. I wanted to have that so badly.” I don’t have answers to any of his problems. I don’t even have solutions to mine. But this one thing? This, I can handle. “Come on,” I say. “Let’s get some mangoes.” We pull off the freeway a few miles later and follow the computer’s directions to a little grocery store. Fifteen minutes later, we’re sitting in a rest stop, cutting our mangoes to bits. “Here,” I tell him. “Trade me. Pretend you’re me. Let me tell you what it was like when I had that mango.” He shuts his eyes obligingly. “I didn’t have a lot of money,” I tell him. “And that meant one thing and one thing only—fried rice.” He smiles despite himself. “Kind of a stereotype, don’t you think?” “Whose stereotype? Rice is peasant food for more than half the world. It’s easy. It’s cheap. You can dress it up with a lot of other things. A little bit of onion, a bag of frozen carrots and peas. A carton of eggs. With enough rice, that can last you basically forever. It does for some people.” “It actually sounds good.” “If you have a decent underlying spice cabinet, you can break up the monotony a little. Fried rice with soy sauce one day. Spicy rice the next. And then curry rice. You can fool your tongue indefinitely. You can’t fool your body. You start craving.” He’s sitting on the picnic table, his eyes shut. “For me, the thing I start craving first is greens. Lettuce. Pea shoots. Anything that isn’t coming out of a bag of frozen veggies. And fruit. If you have an extra dollar or two, you buy apples and eat them in quarters, dividing them throughout the day.” I slide next to him on the table. The sun is warm around us. “But you get sick of apples, too, pretty soon. And so that’s where I want you to imagine yourself: sick to death of fried rice. No respite. No letting up. And then suddenly, one day, someone hands you a debit card and says, ‘Hey. Here’s fifteen thousand dollars.’ No, I’m not going to buy a stupid purse. I’m going to buy this.” I hold up a piece of mango to his lips. He opens his mouth and the fruit slides in. His lips close on my fingers like a kiss, and I can’t bring myself to draw away. He’s warmer than the sun, and I feel myself getting pulled in, closer and closer. “Oh, God.” He doesn’t open his eyes. “That’s so good.” I feed him another slice, golden and dripping juice. “That’s what it felt like,” I tell him. “Like there’s a deep-seated need, something in my bones, something missing. And then you take a bite and there’s an explosion of flavor, something bigger than just the taste buds screaming, yes, yes, this is what I need.” I hand him another piece of mango. He bites it in half, chews, and then takes the other half. “That’s what it felt like,” I say. “It felt like I’d been starving myself. Like I…” He opens his eyes and looks at me. “Like there was something I needed,” I say softly. “Something I’ve needed deep down. Something I’ve been denying myself because I can’t let myself want it.” My voice trails off. I’m not describing the taste of mango anymore. My whole body yearns for his. For this thing I’ve been denying myself. For physical affection. For our bodies joined. For his arms around me all night. It’s going to hurt when he walks away. But you know what? It’ll hurt more if he walks away and we leave things like this, desperate and wanting, incomplete. My voice drops. “It’s like there’s someone I’ve been denying myself. All this time.