Bat Eater Quotes

Favorite Quotations. I speak my mind because it hurts to bite my tongue. The worth of a book is measured by what you carry away from it. It's not over till it's over. Imagination is everything. All life is an experiment. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls the butterfly.

But not everyone has dreams. Some people just are, the way that trees and rocks and rivers are just there without a reason, the rest of the world moving around them.

Closing your eyes doesn’t stop monsters from devouring you.

When you’re drowning and someone grabs your hand, you don’t ask them where they’re taking you.

Many people think that death is the end. The ending of pain, of hate, of love. But these things are not so easy to erase. Any kind of wanting leaves a scar. The living are good at forgetting, the years smoothing out memories until all the days of their lives are nothing but rolling planes of sameness. But in Hell, it is always just yesterday that everything was lost. The dead do not forget.

For a product to carry a health claim on its package, it must first have a package, so right off the bat it's more likely to be processed rather than a whole food.

Any kind of wanting leaves a scar.

It’s strange how hate and love can so quietly exist at the same time. They are moon phases, one silently growing until one day all that’s left is darkness.

A secret part of Cora likes the end of the world because it makes her strangeness feel quieter.

There's something peaceful about your worst fear coming true.

There are thousands of gods that open thousands of doors to anyone who knocks. It’s about deciding which doors you want to open.

Cora thinks about the Girl with a Pearl Earring, and the Mona Lisa, and all the beautiful women immortalized in oil paint, and wonders if they said cruel things too, if their words had mattered at all or just the roundness of their eyes and softness of their cheeks, if beautiful people are allowed to break your heart and get away with it.

But now, Cora knows she’s not dying. Dying doesn’t hurt this much. Dying means there’s an endpoint to the pain.

We know that there are many animals on this continent not found in the Old World. These must have been carried from here to the ark, and then brought back afterwards. Were the peccary, armadillo, ant-eater, sloth, agouti, vampire-bat, marmoset, howling and prehensile-tailed monkey, the raccoon and muskrat carried by the angels from America to Asia? How did they get there? Did the polar bear leave his field of ice and journey toward the tropics? How did he know where the ark was? Did the kangaroo swim or jump from Australia to Asia? Did the giraffe, hippopotamus, antelope and orang-outang journey from Africa in search of the ark? Can absurdities go farther than this?

Cora knows that the face of fear is not an abstract what-if. Fear is born in the after, when the world peels back its skin and shows you its raw, pulsing innards, when it forces you to remember its name.

Maybe she wants someone to teach her how to be a human the correct way, the way she never learned. Someone to wake her up and tell her what to eat, what to dream about, what to cry about, who to pray to. Because Cora somehow feels that every choice she’s made has been wrong, that every choice she will ever make will lead her deeper and deeper into a life that feels like a dark, airless box, and when she peers through the slats in the wood she’ll see the pale light of who she might have been, so bright that it blinds her.

This sharp fire feels much better than God’s forgiveness ever could.

There’s no such thing as a hungry ghost, not in Cora’s life, because someone that deeply and irrevocably gone can never come back.

It’s not about my gods or your Auntie Lois’s God being the right one. There are thousands of gods that open thousands of doors to anyone who knocks. It’s about deciding which doors you want to open.

Cora Zeng does not get angry because anger always melts through her fingers until it is a pool of anguish under her feet. There is not enough oxygen inside Cora to keep anger burning. No matter how hard she tries, she can only wield her sharpest thoughts against her own f lesh. She knows, on some level, that most of the problems in her life are her own fault in one way or another. Anger is just one of those thoughts that can never quite sink its teeth into her—she is not solid enough, and its jaws close around nothing at all.

But maybe she wants this monster to have teeth, wants it to be some intangible, hungry darkness that can swallow all her rage like a black hole. She doesn’t want him to have a name, a job, a wife that he holds with the same hands he uses to gut Asian girls like fish. The thought sickens her, the idea that the kind of person who carves people like her open could smile at other people. That he could be loved by other people. Because what does that make Delilah and Yuxi and Zihan and Ai and Officer Wang? Subhuman, bat eaters, garbage to be taken out, people who don’t deserve his humanness. Cora wants him to be a formless ephemeral ball of pure evil, but she knows that he’s not. And she doesn’t care about his redeeming traits but she knows that other people will, that the newspapers will highlight his accomplishments, that the courts will talk about him being a good father or diligent worker or a thousand other things he did that matter infinitely less than what he took from Cora.

So Cora steadies her breath and asks God to make her normal. She opens herself to be God’s parasite instead of Delilah’s, and like always, no one answers.

Many people think that death is the end. The ending of pain, of hate, of love. But these things are not so easy to erase.

But in real life, bodies are delicate.

she isn’t above taking hush money, not in this economy.

Cora wonders at what point a person stops being one singular person and becomes a collection of parts.

there are worse things than leaning a little bit into the crazy parts of you. Isn’t that what artists do, after all?

No one would ever make a game where you only have one chance. But that’s all any of us get. And the worst part is I know I’m losing.

What she doesn’t like is that she can’t find any toilet paper at the end of the world. Apparently

Delilah never seemed the vengeful type. She drifted around life like she was riding a pool float, bumping into obstacles that gently nudged her to a new path but never overturned her into the water.

Cora thinks about a time, before the pandemic, when she truly thought the worst monsters were the ones inside her own head. When she thought people were mostly good, that they would save each other.

All are welcome in God’s house, Auntie Lois says, but she always emphasizes the all, as if God is especially generous for letting someone like Cora in, like there’s something about her that’s inherently unholy.

He says two words, and even though the train is rushing closer, a roaring wave about to knock them off their feet, those two words are perfectly clear, sharp as if carved into Cora’s skin. Bat eater. Cora has heard those words a lot the past two months. The end of the world began at a wet market in Wuhan, they say, with a sick bat. Cora has never once eaten a bat, but it has somehow become common knowledge that Chinese people eat bats just to start plagues.

If you want someone dead, you should have to sink your fingers into their eyes, feel their trachea collapse under your hands, let them scratch your arms and pull your hair and cry and beg. Because if you kill someone, you should want it more than anything you’ve ever wanted before. It shouldn’t be easy.

Sometimes, when it’s really bright outside, it feels like I’m still in one of my games, like I have unlimited lives, everything is scripted, and I’m just pushing buttons and it’s okay if I fuck up—I can go back to my last save. Except I know that’s not true. I only have one life, and that’s fucking terrifying.

There are thousands of monsters in the world—not just the ones in folktales, but the ones in real life who push girls in front of trains—and yet, there are still people who think Cora Zeng is the most fearsome of all. A sharp laugh forces its way out of Cora’s throat. Those people should see what fear truly is. Let them taste their sister’s blood, watch her headless body twitch, hear her windpipe still wheezing for breaths that won’t come, gurgling as the blood drowns down the wrong pipe. Let them remember it every time they close their eyes, whenever they hear the sound of a train, whenever salt stings their lips. Remind them that the same thing could happen to them any day, and then let them talk about what fear really means.

On the fifteenth day of the seventh month, a door opens. The starving dead crawl out, mouths full of dust, and reach for a home that has already forgotten them. Their stomachs scream for food, but their tongues are heavy and dry, their necks as thin as needles. They lick the tears of the living from the dirt, and sometimes, it is enough to sate them. But sometimes, the hunger only yawns wider.

In a paper titled "Broadening the Definition of a Nervous System to Better Understand the Evolution of Plants and Animals," Llinás and Sergio Miguel-Tomé, a colleague at the University of Salamanca, basically argue that it makes no sense to define a nervous system as something only animals can have rather than defining it as a physiological system that could be present in other organisms in a different form. Defining it phylogenetically-meaning assigning it only to one portion of the tree of life-ignores the very real force of convergent evolution, where organisms separately evolved similar systems to deal with similar challenges. It happens all the time in evolution; a classic example is wings. Flight evolved separately in birds, bats, and insects, to very similar effect. Eyes are another example; the eye lens has evolved separately several times.

If the genetic properties of bacteria were applied to larger beings, Margulis wrote, we would live in a science-fiction world where people could grow wings by picking up genes from a bat, or a mushroom could turn green and begin to photosynthesize by picking up genes from a nearby plant. This gives me a clearer way to see how Gianoli's theory could work: instead of imagining a foreign set of bacteria hijacking the boquila's ingrained sense of personal shape, perhaps the bacteria that lives within boquila and determines its developmental expression could simply be picking up errant genetic cues from the bacteria doing the same thing inside other plants. "People and other eukaryotes are like solids frozen in a specific genetic mold," Margulis and Sagan write, "whereas the mobile, interchanging suite of bacterial genes is akin to a liquid or gas." One begins to see the world in bacterial terms-a microcosmic sea of shifting identity and form. Under the surface, our bacterial selves are morphing and changing. We are all in flux. Who is to say where any of us begin and end?

the falcon approached nearer to him, lose his nerve and plummet down in a vain effort to reach mother earth and the sanctuary of his burrow? Field glasses were now out for those who needed them, and up and down the line excited exclamations—in two languages—were running. ‘Oh! He can’t make it.’ ‘Yes he can, he can.’ ‘Only a little way to go now.’ ‘But look, look, the falcon is gaining on him.’ And then, suddenly, only one bird was to be seen against the cloud. ‘Well done! Well done! Shahbash! Shahbash!’ The owl had made it, and while hats were being waved and hands were being clapped, the falcon in a long graceful glide came back to the semul tree from which he had started. The reactions of human beings to any particular event are unpredictable. Fifty-four birds and four animals had been shot that morning—and many more missed—without a qualm or the batting of an eyelid. And now, guns, spectators, and mahouts were unreservedly rejoicing that a ground owl had escaped the talons of a peregrine falcon.

I always listen to you,” Cora says, taken aback. She’d done every damn thing her aunt had ever asked of her. “No,” her aunt says, beginning to unfold the honeycomb of pink paper into a 3D shape. “You hear me, Cora, but you don’t listen to me. There’s a difference.

Fear is born in the after, when the world peels back its skin and shows you its raw, pulsing innards, when it forces you to remember its name. Anyone who has seen the face of fear knows you should damn well be afraid.

Cora should feel angry—she knows that more police wouldn’t have saved Delilah, but all she feels is that the sky is a dome sinking lower and lower, trapping her in a world that she hates but can never escape.

In a strange way, she feels sad for the ghost. Maybe she never wanted to haunt anyone—it wasn’t her fault that death cracked her skull open, made her terrifying and ugly, took away everything that made her human.

In her dreams, the hand is a white spider. Its legs are translucent, its body the color of bones. It latches its fangs into Delilah and her arm falls from her body like a cut of meat. Delilah collapses into parts, a puzzle coming undone, and Cora wonders at what point a person stops being one singular person and becomes a collection of parts. An arm is not a person, so if Delilah is an arm underneath a train and a leg on a subway platform and a head lost in the crevices of the tracks, which part is the real Delilah?

On the last day of the seventh month, a door begins to close. The dead cannot see their way back home, so they follow the lanterns down the river. The names of the dead are painted on the lanterns’ paper skins, and the lost souls chase its light like children after fireflies as they wander back through the gates of hell. When the last lantern is extinguished, the gates swing closed once more, and will not open until next year. No hands can pry the gate open. If you knock, no one will answer.

I have never set something on fire without a good reason

Cora is doing all the right things. She has a new job. She speaks to her coworkers. She tries new hobbies. She is doing all the things normal people do. Yet she still feels like a puppeteer dragging her wooden body through the motions, and maybe she always will. Maybe she can't exist without being her sister's parasite.

The things Cora thinks she knows are too often just bad dreams bleeding into her waking hours.

Every few seconds, a koi fish thumps against the glass of its tank by the living room window. Cora thinks the tank is probably too small for a fish the size of a guinea pig, but it has been with Auntie Zeng longer than Cora has been alive, so she doubts anything will change now. Its name is Tom Hanks because Auntie Zeng thought that was a popular American name in the ’90s, and Cora suspects that one day it will open its mouth and swallow the entire world like a black hole.

Because all Cora could see when she looked at her sister was a seashell polished by the ocean, full of echoes and air on the inside. Delilah needed her beautiful shell because inside of her, there was nothing.

You’re stressed,” he says. “Eat a pineapple cake.” “That’s not how stress works,” Cora says. “I beg to fucking differ,

Harvey is talking about a movie neither she nor Yifei have seen, and Cora thinks the only reason Yifei isn’t interrupting is that it stops Harvey from eating all the dumplings.

It doesn’t feel fucked-up when you’re doing it,” Cora whispers into the rim of her bottle. “Just afterward.

This man is not her father, has no power over her, yet the tone of his voice rattles her bones in a way that feels instinctual, like Cora was born to fear loud men.

Cora imagines if she herself were someone’s one and only source of American culture, how they would find it strange that Americans take such long showers and have such smelly jobs and cry so much.

Anyone who has seen the face of fear knows you should damn well be afraid.

Cora doesn’t like thinking of all the parts that make her up, all the glands and sacks and tendons and flaps. She wants to exist like a Lego person, with one singular body that exists in and of itself, solid, no room for anything inside.

Because even if Cora thought she hated her sister sometimes, even if she hated her even more for dying, she didn’t want her to suffer.

Cora grows smaller at the tone of his voice. She is six years old and Dad is yelling at her for reorganizing his pantry. This man is not her father, has no power over her, yet the tone of his voice rattles her bones in a way that feels instinctual, like Cora was born to fear loud men.

A tiny brown spider makes its way across the pew in front of Cora. She watches it tickle its way across the wood,

If God cannot love Cora unless she forgives, then Cora will die without His love.

We’re sisters, so us being together is inevitable. It doesn’t matter how we feel about it. Just like it doesn’t matter how we feel about the sun setting. It happens anyway.

But everything sloughs off Cora like dead skin because she is not the kind of person who creates things

THE HUNGER THAT COMES AFTER The living think they know hunger when their stomachs spasm

I know that you two don’t want to hear this

Zhongyuan Jie

But not everyone has dreams. Some people just are

It’s strange how hate and love can so quietly exist at the same time. They are moon phases

But there’s no one to hear it because New York is a dead body

all of her words are full of secrets.

THE RETURN On the last day of the seventh month

There’s something peaceful about your worst fear coming true.

Giving the White Spider a face will defang him

Many people think that death is the end. The ending of pain

No, I’m not going to sit back and shut up for twenty bucks an hour,

your mind is a labyrinth and you are lost inside.

Do not let your empathy stop at the borders of your own community.

She’s read about dogs and chimps ripping people’s faces off. Surely angry white men could find a way.

When you’re drowning and someone grabs your hand

I’m sorry,” Cora whispers, tears hitting the trackpad. “I’m so fucking sorry.

Fear is born in the after

What she doesn’t like is that she can’t find any toilet paper at the end of the world.