Alive Outside Dead Inside Quotes

When he heard that Sanshiro was going to school forty hours a week, his eyes popped. "You idiot! Do you think it would 'satisfy' you to eat what they serve at your rooming house ten times a day?" "What should I do?" Sanshiro pleaded. "Ride the streetcar," Yojiro said. Sanshiro tried to find Yojiro's hidden meaning, without success. "You mean a real streetcar?" he asked. Yojiro laughed uncontrollably. "Get on the streetcar and ride around Tokyo ten or fifteen times. After a while it will just happen by itself- you will become satisfied. "Why?" "Why? Well, look at it this way. Your head is alive, but if you seal it up inside dead classes, you're lost. Take it outside and get the wind into it. Riding the streetcar is not the only way to get satisfaction, of course, but it's the first step, and the easiest.

Everybody tries to protect this vulnerable two three four five six seven eight year old inside, and to acquire skills and aptitudes for dealing with the situations that threaten to overwhelm it... Usually, that child is a wretchedly isolated undeveloped little being. It’s been protected by the efficient armour, it’s never participated in life, it’s never been exposed to living and to managing the person’s affairs, it’s never been given responsibility for taking the brunt. And it’s never properly lived. That’s how it is in almost everybody. And that little creature is sitting there, behind the armour, peering through the slits. And in its own self, it is still unprotected, incapable, inexperienced... And in fact, that child is the only real thing in them. It’s their humanity, their real individuality, the one that can’t understand why it was born and that knows it will have to die, in no matter how crowded a place, quite on its own. That’s the carrier of all the living qualities. It’s the centre of all the possible magic and revelation. What doesn’t come out of that creature isn’t worth having, or it’s worth having only as a tool—for that creature to use and turn to account and make meaningful... And so, wherever life takes it by surprise, and suddenly the artificial self of adaptations proves inadequate, and fails to ward off the invasion of raw experience, that inner self is thrown into the front line—unprepared, with all its childhood terrors round its ears. And yet that’s the moment it wants. That’s where it comes alive—even if only to be overwhelmed and bewildered and hurt. And that’s where it calls up its own resources—not artificial aids, picked up outside, but real inner resources, real biological ability to cope, and to turn to account, and to enjoy. That’s the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they’re suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That’s why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember. But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells—he becomes one of the walking dead, a monster. So when you realise you’ve gone a few weeks and haven’t felt that awful struggle of your childish self—struggling to lift itself out of its inadequacy and incompetence—you’ll know you’ve gone some weeks without meeting new challenge, and without growing, and that you’ve gone some weeks towards losing touch with yourself.

God the horror of watching yourself from the outside as everything you know about yourself gets stripped away and demolished. Not just the loss of power over your body, but power over your mind. Rape in the deepest, most hellish sense of the word. But wait, there's a spark. Inside that hollowed out woman there's a place they can't touch. There's more to me than I thought there was. Something that no one and nothing can take away from me. They can't break me. I won't cease. I'm strong, and I am never going to go away until I've gotten what I came for. I might have been lost for awhile but I was never gone. WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU? With an explosive inhalation I snap upright in bed, and my eyes fly open like coming alive after being dead and interred in a coffin. I AM Mac and I am BACK!

There will always be this emptiness inside you and beside you, where your mom is supposed to be, and only you will know the emptiness. Other people won’t be able to see it. They’ll see you, moving around the world, just like before. You’ll look alive on the outside but be dead on the inside, flicking your wings and watching everyone through the jar.

Almondine To her, the scent and the memory of him were one. Where it lay strongest, the distant past came to her as if that morning: Taking a dead sparrow from her jaws, before she knew to hide such things. Guiding her to the floor, bending her knee until the arthritis made it stick, his palm hotsided on her ribs to measure her breaths and know where the pain began. And to comfort her. That had been the week before he went away. He was gone, she knew this, but something of him clung to the baseboards. At times the floor quivered under his footstep. She stood then and nosed into the kitchen and the bathroom and the bedroom-especially the closet-her intention to press her ruff against his hand, run it along his thigh, feel the heat of his body through the fabric. Places, times, weather-all these drew him up inside her. Rain, especially, falling past the double doors of the kennel, where he’d waited through so many storms, each drop throwing a dozen replicas into the air as it struck the waterlogged earth. And where the rising and falling water met, something like an expectation formed, a place where he might appear and pass in long strides, silent and gestureless. For she was not without her own selfish desires: to hold things motionless, to measure herself against them and find herself present, to know that she was alive precisely because he needn’t acknowledge her in casual passing; that utter constancy might prevail if she attended the world so carefully. And if not constancy, then only those changes she desired, not those that sapped her, undefined her. And so she searched. She’d watched his casket lowered into the ground, a box, man-made, no more like him than the trees that swayed under the winter wind. To assign him an identity outside the world was not in her thinking. The fence line where he walked and the bed where he slept-that was where he lived, and they remembered him. Yet he was gone. She knew it most keenly in the diminishment of her own self. In her life, she’d been nourished and sustained by certain things, him being one of them, Trudy another, and Edgar, the third and most important, but it was really the three of them together, intersecting in her, for each of them powered her heart a different way. Each of them bore different responsibilities to her and with her and required different things from her, and her day was the fulfillment of those responsibilities. She could not imagine that portion of her would never return. With her it was not hope, or wistful thoughts-it was her sense of being alive that thinned by the proportion of her spirit devoted to him. "ory of Edgar Sawtelle" As spring came on, his scent about the place began to fade. She stopped looking for him. Whole days she slept beside his chair, as the sunlight drifted from eastern-slant to western-slant, moving only to ease the weight of her bones against the floor. And Trudy and Edgar, encapsulated in mourning, somehow forgot to care for one another, let alone her. Or if they knew, their grief and heartache overwhelmed them. Anyway, there was so little they might have done, save to bring out a shirt of his to lie on, perhaps walk with her along the fence line, where fragments of time had snagged and hung. But if they noticed her grief, they hardly knew to do those things. And she without the language to ask.

No purer artist exists or has ever existed than a child freed to imagine. [...] To drive children into labour is to slaughter artists, to scour deathly all wonder, the flickering dart of imagination eager as finches flitting from branch to branch – all crushed to serve grown-up needs and heartless expectations. The adult who demands such a thing is dead inside, devoid of nostalgia's bright dancing colours, so smooth, so delicious, so replete with longing both sweet and bitter – dead inside, yes, and dead outside, too. Corpses in motion, cold with the resentment the undead bear towards all things still alive, all things still warm, still breathing. Pity these ones? Nay, never, never so long as they drive on hordes of children into grisly labour, then sup languid of air upon the myriad rewards.

My lips feel warm to the touch My words seem so alive My skin is warm to caress I'll control and hypnotize You've taught me to lie without a trace And to kill with no remorse On the outside I'm the greatest guy Now I'm dead inside!

Not if you’ve been where we have. Forty years ago, in Südwest, we were nearly exterminated. There was no reason. Can you understand that? No reason. We couldn’t even find comfort in the Will of God Theory. These were Germans with names and service records, men in blue uniforms who killed clumsily and not without guilt. Search-and-destroy missions, every day. It went on for two years. The orders came down from a human being, a scrupulous butcher named von Trotha. The thumb of mercy never touched his scales.” “We have a word that we whisper, a mantra for times that threaten to be bad. Mba-kayere. You may find it will work for you. Mba-kayere. It means ‘I am passed over.’ To those of us who survived von Trotha, it also means that we have learned to stand outside our history and watch it, without feeling too much. A little schizoid. A sense for the statistics of our being. One reason we grew so close to the Rocket, I think, was this sharp awareness of how contingent, like ourselves, the Aggregat 4 could be—how at the mercy of small things…dust that gets in a timer and breaks electrical contact…a film of grease you can’t even see, oil from the touch of human fingers, left inside a liquid-oxygen valve, flaring up soon as the stuff hits and setting the whole thing off—I’ve seen that happen…rain that swells the bushings in the servos or leaks into a switch: corrosion, a short, a signal grounded out, Brennschluss too soon, and what was alive is only an Aggregat again, an Aggregat of pieces of dead matter, no longer anything that can move, or that has a Destiny with a shape—stop doing that with your eyebrows, Scuffling. I may have gone a bit native out here, that’s all. Stay in the Zone long enough and you’ll start getting ideas about Destiny yourself.

To drive children into labour is to slaughter artists, to scour deathly all wonder, the flickering dart of imagination eager as finches flitting from branch to branch – all crushed to serve grown-up needs and heartless expectations. The adult who demands such a thing is dead inside, devoid of nostalgia’s bright dancing colours, so smooth, so delicious, so replete with longing both sweet and bitter – dead inside, yes, and dead outside, too. Corpses in motion, cold with the resentment the undead bear towards all things still alive, all things still warm, still breathing. Pity these ones? Nay, never, never so long as they drive on hordes of children into grisly labour, then sup languid of air upon the myriad rewards.

Just because I look like a human being doesn’t mean I am. This body has more genetic material that’s not strictly human than it does material that is human. And it heavily integrates machines as well. My blood is actually a bunch of nanobots in a fluid. I am and every other CDF soldier is a genetically-modified cyborg.” “But you’re still you, right?” Lowen asked. “You’re still the same person you were when you left Earth. Still the same consciousness.” “That’s a question of some contention among us soldiers,” Wilson said, setting his arm back down. “When you transfer over to the new body, the machine that does the transfer makes it at least seem like for an instant you’re in two bodies at once. It feels like you as a person make the transfer. But I think it’s equally possible that what happens is that memories are transferred over to a brain specially prepared for them, it wakes up, and there’s just enough cross talk between the two separate brains to give the illusion of a transfer before the old one shuts down.” “In which case, you’re actually dead,” Lowen said. “The real you. And this you is a fake.” “Right.” Wilson took another sip of his drink. “Mind you, the CDF could show you graphs and charts that show that actual consciousness transfer happens. But I think this is one of those things you can’t really model from the outside. I have to accept the possibility that I could be a fake Harry Wilson.” “And this doesn’t bother you,” Lowen said. “In a metaphysical sense, sure,” Wilson said. “But in a day-to-day sense, I don’t think about it much. On the inside, it sure feels like I’ve been around for ninety years, and ultimately this version of me likes being alive. So.

On the 27th morning, at around 8 a.m. the train left Godhra Station. The karsevaks were loudly chanting the Ram Dhoon. The train had hardly gone a few meters, when it suddenly stopped. Somebody had perhaps pulled the chain to stop the train. Before anybody could know what had happened, we saw a huge mob approaching the train. People were carrying weapons like Gupti, Spears, Swords and such other deadly weapons in their hands and were throwing stones at the train. We all got frightened and somehow closed the windows and the doors of the compartment. People outside were shouting loudly, saying ‘Maro, Kato’ and were attacking the train. A loudspeaker from the Masjid (i.e. Mosque) closeby was also very loudly shouting ‘Maro, Kato, Laden na dushmano ne Maro.’ (“Cut, kill, kill the enemies of Laden”)These attackers were so fierce that they managed to break the windows and close the doors from outside before pouring petrol inside and setting the compartment on fire so that nobody could escape alive. A number of attackers entered the compartment and were beating the karsevaks and looting their belongings. The compartments were drenched in petrol all over. We were terrified and were shouting for help but who was there to help us? A few policemen were later seen approaching the compartment but they were also whisked away by the furious mob outside. There was so much of smoke in the compartment that we were unable to see each other and also getting suffocated. Going out was too difficult, however, myself and Pooja somehow managed to jump out through the windows. Pooja was hurt in her back and was unable to stand up. People outside were trying to hold us to take us away but we could escape and run under the burning train and succeeded in crawling towards the cabin. I have seen my parents and sisters being burnt alive right in front of my eyes.” Luckily, Gayatri was not hurt too badly. “We somehow managed to go up to the station and meet our aunty (Masi). After the compartments were completely burnt, the crowd started withering. We saw that even amongst them were men, women and youngsters like us, both male and female.

If people have no respect for God, no love for their Maker, I would ask the question another way: Why not pillage, rape, persecute and murder? If it feels good, and they can get away with it, why not? If God is dead or does not exist, as these people believe, why are not all things permitted? Why should they restrain themselves? Because it’s just wrong? Because it’s not the way civilized people behave? Because what goes around comes around? Because they’ll end up feeling terrible inside? Within tidy circles of properly socialized and reasonable people, such appeals can seem like they actually have the power to restrain people from doing what they otherwise feel like doing. But in the real world outside the philosophy seminar room, oppressors frankly don’t care that you think it’s just wrong. Who are you, they ask, to foist your random moral intuition on them? Who are you to tell them or the lords of the Third Reich what civilized people should and should not do? If what goes around tends to come around, then there’s no moral problem, only a practical problem of making sure it doesn’t come around to you. They think, Fine, if being brutal makes you feel terrible inside, then don’t do it. But it makes me feel powerful, alive, exhilarated and masterful, so quit whining — unless you want to try to stop me. This description of a dark Nietzschean world of self-will — a vacuum devoid of moral authority or spiritual resources for good — used to sen excessively melodramatic to me. But then I got out more. The world is truly full of brutal oppression because humans have rejected their Maker, the source of all goodness, mercy, compassion, truth, justice, and love.

Another woman catches sight of Fischerle's hump on the ground and runs screaming into the street: 'Murder! Murder!' She takes the hump for a corpse. Further details - she knows none. The murderer is very thin, a poor sap, how he came to do it, you shouldn't have thought it of him. Shot may be, someone suggests. Of course, everyone heard the shot. Three streets off, the shot had been heard. Not a bit of it, that was a motor tyre. No, it was a shot! The crowd won't be done out of its shot. A threatening attitude is assumed towards the doubters. Don't let him go. An accessory. Trying to confuse the trail! Out of the building comes more news. The woman's statements are revised. The thin man has been murdered. And the corpse on the floor? It's alive. It's the murderer, he had hidden himself. He was tring to creep away between the corpse's legs when he was caught. The more recent information is more detailed. The little man is a dwarf. What do you expect, a cripple! The blow was actually struck by another. A redheaded man. Ah, those redheads. The dwarf put him up to it. Lynch him! The woman gave the alarm. Cheers for the woman! She screamed and screamed. A Woman! Doesn't know what fear is. The murderer had threatened her. The redhead. It's always the Reds. He tore her collar off. No shooting. Of course not. What did he say? Someone must have invented the shot. The dwarf. Where is he? Inside. Rush the doors! No one else can get in. It's full up. What a murder! The woman had a plateful. Thrashed her every day. Half dead, she was. What did she marry a dwarf for? I wouldn't marry a dwarf. And you with a big man to yourself. All she could find. Too few men, that's what it is. The war! Young people to-day...Quite young he was too. Not eighteen. And a dwarf already. Clever! He was born that way. I know that. I've seen him. Went in there. Couldn't stand it. Too much blood. That's why he's so thin. An hour ago he was a great, fat man. Loss of blood, horrible! I tell you corpses swell. That's drowned ones. What do you know about corpses? Took all the jewellery off the corpse he did. Did it for the jewellery. Just outside the jewellery department it was. A pearl necklace. A baroness. He was her footman. No, the baron. Ten thousand pounds. Twenty thousand! A peer of the realm! Handsome too. Why did she send him? Should he have let his wife? It's for her to let him. Ah, men. She's alive though. He's the corpse. Fancy dying like that! A peer of the realm too Serve him right. The unemployed are starving. What's he want with a pearl necklace. String 'em up I say! Mean it too. The whole lot of them. And the Theresianum too. Burn it! Make a nice blaze.

What gets you is the knowledge, and it sometimes can fall on you in a clap, that the dead are gone absolutely from this world. As has been said around here over and over again, you are not going to see them here anymore, ever. Whatever was done or said before is done or said for good. Any questions you think of that you ought to’ve asked while you had a chance are never going to be answered. The dead know, and you don’t. And yet their absence puts them with you in a way they never were before. You even maybe know them better than you did before. They stay with you, and in a way you go with them. They don’t live on in your heart, but your heart knows them. As your heart gets bigger on the inside, the world gets bigger on the outside. If the dead had been alive only in this world, you would forget them, looks like, as soon as they die. But you remember them, because they always were living in the other, bigger world while they lived in this little one, and this one and the other one are the same. You can’t see this with your eyes looking straight ahead. It’s with your side vision, so to speak, that you see it. The longer I live, and the better acquainted I am among the dead, the better I see it. I am telling what I know.

She eyed him. “What does that mean?” “You know exactly what it means, McKenna. Women who take on the world and never back down. Women whose hearts have so much love, they give even when that love isn’t returned.” He was reminded of what he had in his vest pocket for her—the thank-you gift for his saddle. The gift had since turned into the peace offering for missing dinner that night, and now represented so much more . . . Now that he knew how much she cared for him. Even though she might not be able to voice it, or even want to admit it to herself. But he would forever remember the moment she looked up outside the doc’s office, thinking he was dead, and found him alive. The timing hadn’t felt right to give it to her then, but it did now. He reached into his pocket. “I’m talking about a woman who faces life with a courage and a persistence that astounds me. Who has endured so much difficulty in her life and yet keeps pushing on with stubborn grace, step-after-step, day-after-day.” He softened his voice. “A woman who, at first, didn’t trust me.” He touched the side of her face. “But a woman who might just be beginning to trust.” Tears glistened in her eyes. “And who makes this man want to spend the rest of his life proving to her that she can.” He held out the box. “Not to mention a woman who makes the best saddles in all the western territory.” Her eyes widened. “You know?” Oh how he wanted to kiss her. And if he was reading her right, she was more than open to the idea. “What did I tell you about looking at a man that way when he couldn’t do anything about it?” She grinned, and he pulled her to him and kissed her. He’d meant for their first kiss to be more tender, slow and gentle, but the way her arms came around him, pulling him closer, the way she responded, deepening the kiss, drove the desire inside him. Their bodies touching, he memorized the curves of her waist, the small of her back, how she felt pressed up against him. The warmth of her hand as she cradled the back of his neck encouraged him further— Remembering where they were, Wyatt drew back. “McKenna!” he whispered. Her eyes were still closed, her lips parted. She was wearing a purple dress today, one he hadn’t seen before. But he liked it, very much. Especially on her. It buttoned up the front, and the lacey curve of the bodice revealed her neckline. The dress wasn’t at all improper, but the thoughts he was having about her right now bordered on being just that. She blinked. “Y-yes?” He smiled and ran a finger over her mouth, and put more distance between them. “You need to open your gift.” She gave him an intimate look. “I thought I already had.” Oh this woman . . . It was a good thing they were in church. She opened the box in her hand, and giggled. He didn’t mind in the least. He’d had about the same reaction when he’d first seen it. The woman in the store in Denver had called it a charm bracelet. But it was the tiny saddle hanging off it—among other miniature trinkets—that had gained his attention. She held up the bracelet and fingered each tiny charm. “I love it! Thank you, Wyatt.

Miss Leighton?" "I'm here." "Why can't I see you?" he asked, greatly confused.  "Why can't I see this fire I feel against my face, or the birds I hear outside, or this room in which I find myself?  Is there something in my eyes?"  His looked around, stunned.  "By God, woman, what has happened to me?" He heard the rustle of her skirts, smelled bayberry as she knelt down beside him and took his suddenly cold hand within her own.  He rubbed his eyes and stared, blinking, into the blackness, trying to see beyond it.  But it was there when he turned his head to the right.  It was there when he turned his head to the left.  It was there when he opened his eyes as wide as they would go and looked where she should be, and it was there no matter where he directed his open, staring gaze.  A deep, involuntary shudder drove through him, and cold sweat broke out all along his spine, turning his insides to ice.  He yanked his hand from hers and reached blindly up and out into the darkness. "There is nothing wrong with your eyes, Charles," she said quietly.  "You fell and hit your head on a rock and were left for dead.  My brother went back after the fighting passed, saw that you were alive, and brought you home to us, thinking you could be saved."  Her voice grew even more gentle.  "The doctor has been visiting every day . . . he warned us that if you ever woke at all, it was likely you might not be able to see . . . that your eyes would be fine, but your brain might not be able to tell what they were seeing.  Does that make sense to you?  It doesn't to me, but then, I'm not a doctor. . ." "No.  No, I cannot accept this . . ." "You had a blood clot beneath your skull, and the doctor said that if he didn't release it, you'd die.  He had to trepan you."  Again, she took his hand, squeezing fingers gone as cold as marble.  "I'm sorry.  We did everything that could be done." "This — this is unreal, it cannot have happened to me, there is no room in my life for this!" "Is there anything I can do?  Anyone I can contact, write a letter to, summon for you?" "No — dear God, no . . ." "Please, calm down," the girl murmured, her hand stroking his shoulder as he stared blindly about him.  "You've had a terrible shock and now you must rest, get your strength back —" "Get my strength back?  For what?  I'm blind, blind, what the hell good am I if I can't see?!

But isn’t that the thing you were recommending?” I asked. “Dying every moment.” “But Henry hadn’t died. That’s the whole point. He’d merely left the clockwork running and gone somewhere else.” “Gone where?” “God knows. Into some kind of infantile burrow in his subconscious, I suppose. Outside, for all to see and hear, was that stupendous clockwork monkey, that undiminished blaze of intellectual power. Inside there lurked the miserable little creature who still needed flattery and reassurance and sex and a womb-substitute—the creature who would have to face the music on Henry’s death-bed. That was still frantically alive and unprepared, by any preliminary dying, totally unprepared for the decisive moment. Well, the decisive moment is over now and whatever remains of poor old Henry is probably squeaking and gibbering in the streets of Los Alamos, or maybe around the bed of his widow and her new husband. And of course nobody pays any attention, nobody gives a damn. Quite rightly. Let the dead bury their dead. And now you want to go.

Mauna Kea Sickness (MKS) left me appearing alive on the outside and feeling dead on the inside.

With tinny drumbeats, the rain pounds the roof My teary eyes compete They can't keep up Breathe Let it go Breathe The vice on my chest tightens its razoring grip I gasp No relief If only tears could soothe the pain Then, I would look upon the tidal waves against these walls without fear Crush and roll me, I'd plead, Mold my body anew But with these tears come no healing, Just death, slow and determined This old girl, this old woman, this old soul lives here inside A tortoise outgrowing this hare's body This youthful skin encasing a crumbling frame I smooth the matted web of curls off my sweaty neck And roll my eyes at the clock How slowly the time squeaks by here in this room, In this comfortless bed I abandon the warmth from under my blanket tower and shiver The draft rattles my spine One by one, striking my vertebrae Like a spoon chiming empty wine glasses, Hitting the same fragile note till my neck shakes the chill away I swipe along the naked floor with a toe for the slippers beneath the bed Plush fabric caresses my feet Stand! Get up With both hands, Gravity jerks me back down Ugh! This cursed bed! No more, I want no more of it I try again My legs quiver in search of my former strength Come on, old girl, Come on, old woman, Come on, old soul, Don't quit now The floor shakes beneath me, Hoping I trip and fall To the living room window, I trudge My joints grind like gravel under tires More pain no amount of tears can soothe away Pinching the embroidered curtain between my knuckles, I find solace in the gloom The wind humming against the window, Makes the house creak and groan Years ago, the cold numbed my pain But can it numb me again, This wretched body and fractured soul? Outside I venture with chants fluttering my lips, Desperate solemn pleas For comfort, For mercy For ease, For health I open the plush throw spiraled around my shoulders And tiptoe around the porch's rain-soaked boards The chilly air moves through me like Death on a mission, My body, an empty gorge with no barriers to stop him, No flesh or bone My highest and lowest extremities grow numb But my feeble knees and crippling bones turn half-stone, half-bone Half-alive, half-dead No better, just worse The merciless wind freezes my tears My chin tumbles in despair I cover myself and sniffle Earth’s scent funnels up my nose: Decay with traces of life in its perfume The treetops and their slender branches sway, Defying the bitter gusts As I turn to seek shelter, the last browned leaf breaks away It drifts, it floats At the weary tree’s feet, it makes its bed alongside the others Like a pile of corpses, they lie Furled and crinkled with age No one mourns their death Or hurries to honor the fallen with thoughtful burials No rage-filled cries echo their protests at the paws trampling their fragile bodies, Or at the desecration by the animals seeking morning relief And new boundaries to mark Soon, the stark canopy stretching over the pitiful sight Will replace them with vibrant buds and leaves Until the wasting season again returns For now, more misery will barricade my bones as winter creeps in Unless Death meets me first to end it

The moon has risen. She sits now, at the same spot where she saw the eagle, waiting, waiting for something to come and take her. Have you ever waited for IT? Wondering whether it will come from outside or inside? Finally past the futile guesses at what might happen...now and then re-erasing brain to keep it clean for the Visit...yes wasn't it close to here? remember didn't you sneak away from camp to have a moment alone with What you felt stirring across the land...it was the equinox...green spring equal nights...canyons are opening up, at the bottoms are steaming fumaroles, steaming the tropical life there like greens in a pot, rank, dope-perfume, a hood of smell...human consciousness, that poor cripple, that deformed and doomed thing, is about to be born. This is the World just before men. Too violently pitched alive in constant flow ever to be seen by men directly. They are meant only to look at it dead, in still strata, transputrefied to oil or coal. Alive, it was a threat: it was Titans, was an overpeaking of life so clangorous and mad, such a green corona about Earth's body that some spoiler HAD to be brought in before it blew the Creation apart. So we, the crippled keepers, were sent out to multiply, to have dominion. God's spoilers. Us. Counter-revolutionaries. IT IS OUR MISSION TO PROMOTE DEATH. The way we kill, the way we die, being unique among the Creatures. It was something we had to work on, historically and personally. To build from scratch up to its present status as reaction, nearly as strong as life, holding down the green uprising. But only nearly as strong.

A virus is a small capsule made of membranes and proteins. The capsule contains one or more strands of DNA or RNA, which are long molecules that contain the software program for making a copy of the virus. Some biologists classify viruses as “life forms,” because they are not strictly known to be alive. Viruses are ambiguously alive, neither alive nor dead. They carry on their existence in the borderlands between life and nonlife. Viruses that are outside cells merely sit there; nothing happens. They are dead. They can even form crystals. Virus particles that lie around in blood or mucus may seem dead, but the particles are waiting for something to come along. They have a sticky surface. If a cell comes along and touches the virus and the stickiness of the virus matches the stickiness of the cell, then the virus clings to the cell. The cell feels the virus sticking to it and enfolds the virus and drags it inside. Once the virus enters the cell, it becomes a Trojan horse. It switches on and begins to replicate.

Apparently someone spotted it inside the game area near the table hockey - is that a goldfish? Mark held up his plastic bag. Inside it, a small orange fish swam around in a circle. "This is the best patrol we've ever done," he said. "I've never been awarded a fish before." Emma sighed inwardly. Mark had spent the past few years of his life with the Wild Hunt, the most anarchic and feral of all faeries. They rose across the sky on all manner of enchanted beings - motorcycles, horses, deer, massive snarling dogs - and scavenged battlefields, taking valuables from the bodies of the dead and giving them in tribute to the Faerie Courts. He was adjusting well to being back among his Shadowhunter family, but there were still times when ordinary life seemed to take him by surprise. HE noticed now that everyone was looking at him with raised eyebrows. He looked alarmed and placed a tentative arm around Emma's shoulders, holding the bag in the other hand. "I have won for you a fish, my fair one," he said, and kissed her on the cheek. It was a sweet kiss, gentle and soft, and Mark smelled like he always did: like cold outside air and green growing things. And it made absolute sense, Emma thought, for Mark to assume that everyone was startled because they were waiting for him to give her his prize. She was, after all, his girlfriend. She exchanged a worried glance with Cristina, whose dark eyes had gotten very large. Julian looked as if he were about to throw up blood. It was only a brief look before he schooled his features back into indifference, but Emma drew away from Mark, smiling at him apologetically. "I couldn't keep a fish alive," she said. "I kill plants just by looking at them." "I suspect I would have the same problem," Mark said, eyeing the fish. "It is too bad - I was going to name it Magnus, because it has sparkly scales." At that, Christina giggled. Magnus Bane was the High Warlock of Brookly, and he had a penchant for glitter. "I suppose I had better let him go free," Mark said. Before anyone could say anything, he made his way to the railing of the pier and emptied the bag, fish and all, into the sea. "Does anyone want to tell him that goldfish are freshwater fish and can't survive in the ocean?" said Julian quietly. "Not really," said Christina. "Did he just kill Magnus?" Emma asked, but before Julian could answer, Mark whirled around.

LaLa holds your hair, just like your mother did when you were sick, but she isn’t the same, she can’t be the same, nothing will ever be the same, because wherever you go? There will always be this emptiness inside you and beside you, where your mom is supposed to be, and only you will know the emptiness. Other people won’t be able to see it. They’ll see you, moving around the world, just like before. You’ll look alive on the outside but be dead on the inside, flicking your wings and watching everyone through the jar.