Cain Novel Quotes

You have to wait for your mind to catch up with whatever it is it’s working on; then you can write a novel.

Lying here with him, I realize love is so much more than silly words or actions. It is all encompassing and unfathomable until experienced. It is darkness intertwined with light, good with evil.

So when introverts assume the observer role, as when they write novels, or contemplate unified field theory- or fall quiet at dinner parties- they’re not demonstrating a failure or a lack of energy. They’re simply doing what they’re constitutionally suited for” (237).

Just for tonight, let's pretend I'm not a priest and you're not crazy. We're just two normal human beings having a good time. Just a man and a woman at a rip-off carnival, living in the moment.

A lot of novelists start late—Conrad, Pirandello, even Mark Twain. When you're young, chess is all right, and music and poetry. But novel-writing is something else. It has to be learned, but it can't be taught. This bunkum and stinkum of college creative writing courses! The academics don't know that the only thing you can do for someone who wants to write is to buy him a typewriter.

I love you with every ounce of my being. You are the music of my soul, my heart, and the love of my life. I am everything with you and nothing without you.

But a man lies to himself, and never more so than he does about a woman.

I like novels where the author proves how terrible military guys are, and how superior sensitive civilians are. I know they’re true to life because I’m a sensitive civilian myself.” He puffed at the cigar, made a mouth of distaste, and threw it into a brass jar half full of sand.

when introverts assume the observer role, as when they write novels, or contemplate unified field theory—or fall quiet at dinner parties—they’re not demonstrating a failure of will or a lack of energy. They’re simply doing what they’re constitutionally suited for.

Lee was tough as hickory, but the tree was old.

Of all the ways to die, I think being pummeled to death by trashy hetero romance novels might be the worst. Or best.

I wish you to place your division across this road, and I wish you to get there,

One of the most humane phrases in the English language—“Only connect!”—was written by the distinctly introverted E. M. Forster in a novel exploring the question of how to achieve “human love at its height.

These words on the screen represented her latest project, an attempt at a series of commercial, discreetly feminist crime novels. She had read all of Agatha Christie at eleven years old, and later lots of Chandler and James M.Cain. There seemed no reason why she shouldn't try writing something in between, but she was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same-you couldn't just soak it up then squeeze it out again. She found herself unable to think of a name for her detective, let alone a cohesive original plot, and even her pseudonym was poor: Emma T. Wilde? She wondered if she was doomed to be one of those people who spend their lives trying things. She had tried being in a band, writing plays and children's books, she had tried acting and getting a job in publishing. Perhaps crime fiction was just another failed project to place alongside trapeze, Buddhism and Spanish. She used the computer's word counter feature. Thirty-five words, including the title page and her rotten pseudonym. Emma groaned, released the hydraulic lever on the side of her office chair and sank a little closer to the carpet.

We know this type of person well from literature, probably because so many writers are sensitive introverts themselves. He “had gone through life with one skin fewer than most men,” the novelist Eric Malpass writes of his quiet and cerebral protagonist, also an author, in the novel The Long Long Dances.

Don’t go thinking I was one of these hellfire-and-brimstone fellers. No, sir. I put more stock in Jesus than Jeremiah. And I never tried to tell a man Jesus really turned that wine into water, not the other way around. Just tried to persuade him that getting hog-drunk and killing his own brother wasn’t Christian.

Teens who are too gregarious to spend time alone often fail to cultivate their talents “because practicing music or studying math requires a solitude they dread.” Madeleine L’Engle, the author of the classic young adult novel A Wrinkle in Time and more than sixty other books, says that she would never have developed into such a bold thinker had she not spent so much of her childhood alone with books and ideas.

influences. I took from Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls that defending the dignity of others is never a lost cause whether you succeed or not. And I thrill to the exhortation in the poem that inspired the novel, to be “part of the main,” to be “involved in mankind.” It’s who we are. The right to life and liberty, to be governed by consent and ruled by laws, to have equal justice and protection of property, these values are the core of our national identity. And it is fidelity to them—not ethnicity or religion, culture or class—that makes one an American. To accept the abolition or abridgement of those rights in other societies should be no less false to Americans than their abridgment in our own society. Human rights are not our invention. They don’t represent standards from which particular cultures or religions can be exempted. They are universal. They exist above the state and beyond history. They cannot be rescinded by one government any more than they can be granted by another. That’s our creed. The authors put it right at the beginning of the manifesto they wrote to declare our independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.

He “had gone through life with one skin fewer than most men,” the novelist Eric Malpass writes of his quiet and cerebral protagonist, also an author, in the novel The Long Long Dances. “The troubles of others moved him more, as did also the teeming beauty of life: moved him, compelled him, to seize a pen and write about them. [He was moved by] walking in the hills, listening to a Schubert impromptu, watching nightly from his armchair the smashing of bone and flesh that made up so much of the nine o’clock news.

No one would choose this sort of painful adolescence, but the fact is that the solitude of Woz’s teens, and the single-minded focus on what would turn out to be a lifelong passion, is typical for highly creative people. According to the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who between 1990 and 1995 studied the lives of ninety-one exceptionally creative people in the arts, sciences, business, and government, many of his subjects were on the social margins during adolescence, partly because “intense curiosity or focused interest seems odd to their peers.” Teens who are too gregarious to spend time alone often fail to cultivate their talents “because practicing music or studying math requires a solitude they dread.” Madeleine L’Engle, the author of the classic young adult novel A Wrinkle in Time and more than sixty other books, says that she would never have developed into such a bold thinker had she not spent so much of her childhood alone with books and ideas. As a young boy, Charles Darwin made friends easily but preferred to spend his time taking long, solitary nature walks. (As an adult he was no different. “My dear Mr. Babbage,” he wrote to the famous mathematician who had invited him to a dinner party, “I am very much obliged to you for sending me cards for your parties, but I am afraid of accepting them, for I should meet some people there, to whom I have sworn by all the saints in Heaven, I never go out.”)

Extroverts tend to tackle assignments quickly. They make fast (sometimes rash) decisions, and are comfortable multitasking and risk-taking. They enjoy “the thrill of the chase” for rewards like money and status. Introverts often work more slowly and deliberately. They like to focus on one task at a time and can have mighty powers of concentration. They’re relatively immune to the lures of wealth and fame. Our personalities also shape our social styles. Extroverts are the people who will add life to your dinner party and laugh generously at your jokes. They tend to be assertive, dominant, and in great need of company. Extroverts think out loud and on their feet; they prefer talking to listening, rarely find themselves at a loss for words, and occasionally blurt out things they never meant to say. They’re comfortable with conflict, but not with solitude. Introverts, in contrast, may have strong social skills and enjoy parties and business meetings, but after a while wish they were home in their pajamas. They prefer to devote their social energies to close friends, colleagues, and family. They listen more than they talk, think before they speak, and often feel as if they express themselves better in writing than in conversation. They tend to dislike conflict. Many have a horror of small talk, but enjoy deep discussions. A few things introverts are not: The word introvert is not a synonym for hermit or misanthrope. Introverts can be these things, but most are perfectly friendly. One of the most humane phrases in the English language—“Only connect!”—was written by the distinctly introverted E. M. Forster in a novel exploring the question of how to achieve “human love at its height.” Nor are introverts necessarily shy. Shyness is the fear of social disapproval or humiliation, while introversion is a preference for environments that are not overstimulating. Shyness is inherently painful; introversion is not.

A woman’s like a cannon herself. Keep her well lubricated, and she’ll not just stand hard use but shine with it. But you cain’t just empty your powder horn in her, then drop her back on the rack to rust! ~Gunner

The problem with selling your soul to the devil is that you always pay twice.

We’ll begin with the books.” I choose a place to start. “Let’s get them back onto the bookcases. Cain, how were they shelved?” “What do you mean?” “Alphabetically?” “Novels and poetry there, and nonfiction and research materials there.” He points out the relevant bookcases. “And, yes, alphabetically by author.” I smile.

We’ll begin with the books.” I choose a place to start. “Let’s get them back onto the bookcases. Cain, how were they shelved?” “What do you mean?” “Alphabetically?” “Novels and poetry there, and nonfiction and research materials there.” He points out the relevant bookcases. “And, yes, alphabetically by author.

Good?” he asks with an arched brow and a smirk on his lips. “I’m speechless.” And it’s the truth. “Kara Caine speechless? What a novel idea. I should feed you more often.” “Yes, please. I’d take a fucking vow of silence for this food.

You’ve seen mine. I want to see yours.” He grinned and rubbed her back. Jennifer choked on the strawberry. “W-What?” she gasped as she held her robe closed tight. “Glasses. I want to see your glasses. What did you think I meant?

Most women don’t have a problem with me being naked. As a matter of fact, most women want me naked.-- Dylan McAthie

You seem to have a talent for sneaking into my bed.” “Hmm, you never seem to remember, either. One of us has a problem.

just as fate would have it, Ryan begins to cry—proving Jesus really will make a way of escape for you to flee fornication or is it sin in general?

If the Lord did it for them, He could do it for me. He is the same God with all the power.

I chuckle to myself as the thought that maybe he gets it from me enters my mind. I shake it off quickly though. This is just my son’s own little thing.

but Jesus help me, I feel like using scriptures to serve my purpose. If there is a time for everything under the sun, surely this is the time I can smack the fire out of Emily.

I can’t worry about her feelings right now because she has disrespected Rachel. I won’t have her coming at my love in front of me, ever.

It’s sad to say, but not every employee of a church is a Christian, and each quarter I terminate those whose purpose is not to spread the Gospel of Christ, which is to be a ministry where the lost can find salvation spiritually and for their natural needs.

Cover him with your son, Jesus Christ’s, precious blood.

The Bible says I’m free to marry. My ex-wife committed adultery and does not want me.

I don’t need parents, a savior, or a fuckin’ knight in shining armor.

Santa hasn’t visited me since I was six. I haven’t exactly been a good girl.

I love you more than you will ever know or understand.

I’ve got you Emma. You’re safe.” Tears illuminated her eyes and clung to her dark lashes. She wrapped her arms around his neck and sobbed, “Help me.” “Let me.

Surprisingly he wasn’t jealous because his brother was kissing the girl he’d loved in high school and had hoped to marry. Instead it was the happiness they shared that he found himself longing for... Will I ever find that kind of happiness?

You are my heaven. I just never knew I’d find it here on Earth.

They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
 I have good intentions, but when a match strikes, fire follows.

Sometimes I trick myself when writing in my notebook; sometimes I end up working on the novel after all, in those pages. And that is the best reason to return to it, that it brings me closer to something I haven't otherwise been able to get to, or that can't get to me. I want to go further into my writing, into my thinking. 'And do I?

LOSE YOURSELF IN FICTION Reading literary fiction requires people to enter characters’ lives and minds – and by doing so, it increases people’s capacity to understand other people’s thoughts and feelings, ... People who read literary fiction performed better on tests of empathy and emotional intelligence afterward. 'You enter the thoughts, heart and mind of another person who’s not like you, and it really does break down barriers,' said Dr. Riess, whose book, 'The Empathy Effect: Seven Neuroscience-Based Keys for Transforming the Way We Live, Love, Work and Connect Across Difference' came out in November. Choose novels with narrators who have lives and backgrounds unlike yours, or who live in a different place or time. Choose diverse authors, too.

Lately, in the curious and widely diffused teaching called the Science of Sociology, it has been asserted that the relations between the members of human society have been, and are, dependent on economic conditions. But to assert this is merely to substitute for the clear and evident cause of a phenomenon one of its effects. The cause of this or that economic condition always was (and could not but be) the oppression of some men by others. Economic conditions are a result of violence, and cannot therefore be the cause of human relations. Evil men – the Cains – who loved idleness and were covetous, always attacked good men – the Abels – the tillers of the soil, and by killing them or threatening to kill them, profited by their toil. The good, gentle, and industrious people, instead of fighting their oppressors, considered it best to submit, partly because they did not wish to fight, and partly because they could not do so without interrupting their work of feeding themselves and their neighbors. On this oppression of the good by the evil, and not on any economic conditions, all existing human societies have been, and still are, based and built.

Harry Tugend had abandoned radio to write films; Allen’s writers were now Arnold Auerbach and Herman Wouk (later famous as the author of The Caine Mutiny and other bestselling novels). Wouk and Auerbach may have been the most rewritten team in radio, for Allen continued to do the script’s final drafts.

An elegant Italian woman, worldly, sophisticated. Francesca. At the end of World War II, she meets and marries an American soldier, moves with him to his small Iowan farm town of good people who bring carrot cakes to their neighbors, look after the elderly, and ostracize those who flout norms by, say, committing adultery. Her husband is kind, devoted, and limited. She loves her children. One day her family leaves town for a week, to show their pigs at a state fair. She's alone in the farmhouse for the first time in her married life. She relishes her solitude. Until a photographer fro National Geographic knocks on the door, asking directions to a nearby landmark... and they fall into a passionate, four-day affair. He begs her to run away with him; she packs her bags. Until, at the last minute, she unpacks them. Partly because she's married, and she has children, and the town's eyes are on them all. But also because she knows that she and the photographer have already taken each other to the perfect and beautiful world. And that now it's time to descend to the actual one. If they try to live in that other world for good, it will recede into the distance; it will be as if they'd never been there at all. She says goodbye, and they long for each other for the rest of their lives. Yet Francesca is quietly sustained by their encounter, the photographer creatively renewed. On his deathbed years later, he sends her a book of images he made, commemorating their four days together. If this story sounds familiar , it's because it comes from The Bridges of Madison County, a 1992 novel by Robert James Waller that sold more than twelve million copies, and a 1995 movie, starring Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood, that grossed $182 million. The press attributed its popularity to a rash of women trapped in unhappy marriages and pining for handsome photographers. But that's not what the story was really about. In the frenzy after the book came out, there were two camps: one that loved it because the couple's love was pure and endured over the decades. The other camp saw this as a copout--that real love is working through challenges of an actual relationship. Which was right?

Kev’s always the adventurer. I’m the relaxer. Which is why me not bringing a good book is extremely upsetting. Maybe when we go to the city for dinner tomorrow, we can find a store for me to buy one. There likely won't be a huge selection. I’m not a picky girl. Any book by Freida McFadden or Stephen King would suffice and, thankfully, their novels are everywhere.

But he’d always been a better tactician than he was a strategist. He won every battle, but on days like today he couldn’t help realizing that he was losing the war.

Now I know why I recognize that spark in her eye—it’s the look Caine used to get when we were cornered, when the thread of our lives spun through our fingers. It’s the closest he ever came to being happy. On the other hand, I do know what Caine would do: attack. Crash their line, somewhere in tight quarters where they couldn’t use their crossbows. Smash through and run like hell

She had believed—when they met, as he courted her, even when they married—that Caine was only an act. She had believed that inside somewhere, within his heart of hearts, he was a fundamentally good and decent man. She had believed that no one could see in him what she saw, until that morning when she knelt with his head on her lap. When she looked down and saw the old man’s head on the cobbles like a discarded ball, ragged shreds of neck below the bloody ruins of its eye, she finally began to suspect that she was wrong about him, and the world was right.

It takes me only a second to link the pinwheel’s forcepattern to the faded Shells of the planks, to forge a sympathetic identity between them and the pinwheel’s vanes. The planks lift off the floor, and when I blow on the pinwheel again, the planks spin.

ushered him into a bedchamber-sized room whose walls and floor were filled with rack after rack of every conceivable style of knife, from bent-blades like khukris to fan-hilted mains gauche, katar-like punching daggers, tanto-style chisel blades, even a few with the foot-long isosceles blade of an Arkansas Toothpick.

I do not stand much on ceremony here, as you may have noticed. Ceremony is for insignificant men who lick others’pretended awe like spittle from their chins. As I was saying, My original intention of simply allowing you to undertake this task has fallen by the wayside because I, Caine, am a man cursed with curiosity. I asked the fatal question: Why you?

His voice rolled out like thunder to match the lightning that shone from his eyes, long sonorous phrases metrical and unpredictable together, a slowly developing and growing rhythm like the plainsong of the elves: a long verse to love, to brotherhood, to hearth and family, the meter seeming to time itself to the beat of Caine’s heart, its sweeping rhythmic power washing away the individual words. Caine couldn’t follow the words, not exactly—they skittered away across the surface of his mind—but they hooked images out of the depths: his mother’s lap warm beneath him, the sweet huskiness in her voice as she read to him from a book spread wide before his uncomprehending eyes, the dry strength of his father’s hand on his arm as he frantically tried to balance on his first bicycle. He found unexpected tears stinging his eyes for what he’d left behind, and for the incredible promise of what he might find ahead.

By this, my heart’s blood, I am baptized a Child of Ma’elKoth. I serve the dream of One Humanity with all my heart. I pledge the service of my body and my eternal spirit to the Justice of Ma’elKoth, the True and Living God, the Father Almighty. By this passage to a new life, I am Reborn. I am Reborn without stain or allegiance save to the Holy Church. I proclaim now and forever that there is no God but Ma’elKoth, and I am his living Child.

The gods who rule us, they hold us back. Even though they are restrained from direct intervention in human affairs by the Covenant of Pirichanthe, they continue to squabble and fight through their priests and followers; they spark no end of conflict, wasting forces that should be used to defend the race. The Aktiri, though—more than four thousand years ago, a small band of desert raiders on their world originated a stunning idea. They decided that their god was the only real god; all others were either figments of the imagination or demons that had duped their followers. After two thousand years, the followers of this One God became evangelical, but not in our sense; they did not merely persuade folk that following their god would bring them greater happiness or better luck. They would not allow any other gods to be worshiped.

To only the spare, resonant music of his own voice, Ma’elKoth danced: a slow and powerful eurythmy of impossible grace, moving with the invincible elegance of a kabuki demon.

This is what I live for. This is why I am what I am. There is purity in violence, in the desperate struggle to pull life from death, that surpasses any philosopher’s sere quest for truth. All bets are off, now, all rules suspended: no more grey-scale wandering through the moral fog of real life—this is elemental, black and white, life and death.

Did you become a god because you wanted to save the race, or do you want to save the race because it gives you an excuse to become a god?

The priest shouted some words in a Kirischan dialect that Caine didn’t speak, and a sudden clap of thunder sounded outside, while within there came a blinding flash of light; when Caine’s vision cleared, the Kirischan priest gleamed with fantastically baroque armor, and he held in both hands a warhammer with a haft nearly as long as he was tall.

There had once been a part of her that had tied her to Hari’s life, that was now cut away; the twinges she felt from it once in a while were only psychological revenants of the amputation.

You’re a contrarian. You have to have your own way, but you define it by what people tell you not to do. The problem is that underneath all your macho crap there’s this sneaking suspicion that everybody else is right. It has nothing to do with principle—you reject authority because it’s fun to break rules. You’re like a little kid, being naughty with a grin on his face.

There was something immensely attractive in his effortless and unlimited confidence; his arrogance was so fully supported by power that it became almost a virtue. Whenever Caine let himself forget why he was here, and what he would have to do, his trepidation dwindled and he found himself drawn to the man; not, perhaps, in the sense of human attraction, of friendship, but rather more in the sense that some men are drawn to the sea, and others to mountains. How could he not like someone who took such obvious joy in simply being alive, in being who he was?

Friarpace is a form of meditation as well as a method for moving fast over uncertain terrain. We bend forward from the hips and hold our backs straight, running flat-footed while bringing our knees straight up toward our chests with each stride. The arms go limp at the sides, not pumped for balance, and the hands are kept curled in three-finger shape. I watch the floor three paces ahead in the muted gleam from a bare crack in my lantern’s cover. I breathe slowly and steadily—three steps in, three steps out—feeling the universal breath like a current that carries me along. A good pacer can run at marathon speed through a woodland and never tire, never stumble on uneven ground, never trip on a root hidden in underbrush, and make very little noise. In abbey school, we’d open each fighting day with a three-mile friarpace into the forest; the gouges and ridges of unevenly cut limestone down here are no danger, even in the dark.

She’d reached an age now to be embarrassed by the adolescent passion of this dream, but she’d never been able to bring herself to leave it behind—she summoned it to comfort her in her darkest hours. She had never even approached an hour so dark as this one.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Thus all progress depends on the unreasonable man.’ ” That’s Shaw!

You must bend all your efforts as you would a bow, with shaft aimed directly at recapturing

I wait, forcing air in and out of my lungs. My soul sings poetry within me.

My father would say: freedom that can be taken away was never real in the first place, and maybe he’s right. Maybe that freedom was always only a figment of my imagination—but it was an illusion I cherished. Shattering an illusion is the insult we never forgive.

God, I’m old. That’s all I can think for long seconds, all I can feel, every god damned day of my life piled onto my back. You have to be young to take shit like this. You have to still be young and adaptable, and full of optimism. You have to still believe in happy endings, to believe that suffering has a point, that death is not a meaningless extinguishing of consciousness. You have to be young enough to still hope that shit happens for a reason.

For an instant I feel her really see me; for just that one precious moment when our eyes meet she’s looking at me, instead of looking at the mental image of me that she carries in her head,

You saw the power,” she said, “but power has nothing to do with being a god. They, the gods, they look at things differently. To join with Chambaraya, all I had to do was see the world the way it does. And when the world looks different, it’s because you’ve become different—you’re not the same person that saw it in the old ways.

And the shuttering night turns slowly to dawn, and I inch toward daylight.

His usual tactics would serve him as well here as they did in hand-to-hand. Attack attack attack—come at your target from every possible direction and press until his defenses overload. Never give him time to recover his balance: never give him time to counter.

Maybe if he stayed outside, circled around them, so to speak, used the patterns themselves as a weapon—those patterns that determined what friends and enemies both expected of him, what they thought he was capable of—he could have it all. Why settle for less than everything?

His voice scaled down from apocalyptic fury to a kind of puzzled anguish, and his glorious eyes filled with gemlike tears. “My people cry out to Me to save them, to ease their suffering. Others plead with their lesser gods, but to whom do I turn? To whom? I have set Myself among the gods, and now there is no one upon whom I can call to bear witness to My pain.

Sometimes, the toughest part of a revolution is deciding to start one.

Sometimes, we destroy simply because we can. Because, when you come right down to it, it’s the kind of fun you just can’t get anywhere else. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t disapprove of that lust. In fact, I’m counting on it.

But when errors and weakness erode the authority of the Administrators, undercastes become surly and shiftless—sometimes goldbricking and malingering to the point of sabotage, to where it actually harms the corporation. This was no myth, no ghost story to frighten Administrator children; Arturo Kollberg had seen it in action. Kollberg was the product of a mixed marriage. His father—a competent if unexceptional Administrator of a Midwestern hospital—had married below himself, had taken to wife one of the Professionals he supervised. Kollberg’s mother had been only a thoracic Surgeon, and the other Administrator pups, cruel as children are the world over, had never let him forget it.

THE MOUNTAIN OF stone and steel that was the San Francisco Studio towered above the broad plain of landing pads and carports. The eagles that circled the mountaintop were the limousines and flying coupes of the Leisurefolk and Investors, soaring through endless loops of holding patterns.

The weather had broken overnight. The rising sun painted the polished Gothic arches of the windows and glittered in the eyes of gargoyles that crouched among the arms of massive flying buttresses. High granite walls—the first line of defense against under-caste intrusion—ringed the entire compound. Outside the iron-toothed mouth of the enormous gate, the hordes of undercastes—the Laborers and Artisans and even some Professionals who were not too proud to mingle—shifted and stamped and flowed toward the wide road, restrained by the linked arms of the red-suited Studio Security force who lined the curbs.

Administrators the world over have two mottoes, two simple principles to guide them in their lives: Deference to Those Above, Respect from Those Below, and: Service. All Administrator children learn early that they are the guardians of society, that they are, in fact, the axis upon which turns the world. Ranked below them are the Professionals, Artisans, and Laborers; ranked above are the Businessfolk, the Investors, and the Leisure-folk. Administrators are the center, the fulcrum, the balance point, and their role is nothing less than the maintenance of civilization. Administrators take the directions of the upcastes and translate them to reality by their direction of the downcastes. Administrators allocate the distribution of Earth’s dwindling resources. Administrators manage the enterprises; Administrators promulgate the regulations; Administrators create the wealth that is the engine of the Earth. Administrators carry the world upon their backs and ask for nothing in return. One of the most basic skills of the Administrator, an essential element of his education, is the maintenance of the dignity of his position. The moral authority of an effective Administrator is so powerful that undercastes—and even lesser Administrators—follow his directives without question; great Administrators have undercastes that actually compete against each other in the performance of their functions, for no other reward than an approving glance and a firm Good job.

By the time he was fifteen, he’d had the world pretty well figured out. His father went crazy, he’d decided, because he kept trying to fool himself. His father’d read books by these guys that he kept ranting about. They told him that the world was one way, and he wanted to believe them, and so when the world showed him that it was something else he couldn’t handle it. He’d pretended so hard that he could no longer separate pretense from reality. Hari swore a private oath he’d never do that. He’d keep his mental balance by looking the world straight in the eye, for exactly what it is; he’d never pretend it was different.

All flows of credit were electronically monitored, but cocaine and other stimulants could be purchased legally by anyone of Professional caste or above; it and other drugs had become the preferred medium of black-market exchange and were absolutely de rigueur for unobtrusive bribes.

Earth and Overworld are the same planet in different universes. Each universe, the whole thing, sort of vibrates in its own way—what they call the Universal Constant of Resonance. Now, it doesn’t really vibrate, that’s just the easiest way to think about it. We go from one to the other by changing our Constant of Resonance to match the other universe. Is everybody confused yet?” (Audience laughs) Now, on the screen, the shot would show him pulling an antique pocket watch from inside his vest; he couldn’t stand to look. Hari’s face burned with humiliation, and he ground his teeth together. He could see it in memory: he held the pocket watch by the end of its chain, its bottom rim touching the palm of his other hand. “Pallas Ril is like the watch, here. My bottom hand represents Earth. See, when the watch is at rest, it’s stable right here on Earth. Now, let’s say that Overworld is a different height, see, a higher level of reality—say halfway between my hands. So, if we want to raise the watch to that level, without moving my hands, there’s two ways we can go about it. One is to shorten the chain, like this.

this current fad for pandering to the egos of Actors had gone too far. Professionals, indeed. If anything, Actors should be Artisans, at most; their trade was a simple exchange of handiwork for money. A true Professional is a member of an elite society with a self-enforced ethical code; a true Professional is accountable for the results of his work.

Like a child feeling a parent’s fist for the first time, he couldn’t quite sort through his emotions: he was hurt and frightened and ashamed and uncertain what to say or what not to say.

Art, he had always said, is done best from dawn to noon, its power rising with the sun; done after noon it becomes decadent and reducing, draining power from the artist to replace what it should get from the fading sun above.

Everyone felt in their secret hearts that the worst was yet to come, and so each fanciful escalation was taken as hard evidence of how bad things would eventually get.

Each was more extreme than the last, as though truth could be found only by topping what people thought they knew.

This came partly from the voluntary discipline of her art; effective thaumaturgy was as precise as mathematics, and like mathematics it required a certain coldness of mind, a detachment.

He stepped out into a rainbow. The door had opened from a mossy stone outcrop onto a broad ledge, two-thirds of the way up the wall of a mist-bottomed canyon. The opposite wall of the narrow canyon seemed close enough to touch. Everywhere he looked there swarmed foliage of unimaginable variety, a vertical rain forest of every conceivable shade of green, shot through with ropes of brilliant flowers and punctuated with the iridescent shimmer of tropical birds that flitted back and forth among the vines. High above the ledge where he stood, another outcropping divided a waterfall, so that a pair of hushing streams fell to either side and a sun-prismed spray filled the air.

The fear, that familiar paralyzing apprehension, would have come from seeing only one chance, one slim opportunity to escape if everything came together just right. A choice between two chances, equally slim, would have been even worse; then she would have been in terror of making a tiny mistake that would cost the lives she had sworn herself to save. Having no chance at all—that allowed her the ice-and-high-mountains freedom to do exactly what she chose, with no attachment to the outcome.

She didn’t have it, and that was all. No spell, no trick, no power she had or had ever held at her command could save them. This knowledge did not bring dismay, though, or fear, or sadness: it had entirely the opposite effect. It brought clarity and perfect freedom: the freedom one can only feel on the very knife edge of death.

this serene confidence that his art is perfect, this release from fear of the outcome, this knowing that any result, even death, has a beauty of its own.

Flow proceeds from life: it powers life and is powered by life, and here in the river, everything lived. As she sought the echo, the field, she seemed to move downward, ever deeper, not in the physical sense of farther under the water, but deeper than the Shells of the carp and the crayfish, deeper than the murky green aura of the trailing weeds, down and down and down, not below but through. . . Through the moss and the algae, through the protozoans, through the bacteria and the most basic molds themselves, she went farther and farther without finding what she sought. Her consciousness expanded, questing outward, following the dimly sensed links back up— Another level of Flow lived here.

The river sang its life, from the freshening trickle of snowmelt in the summer of a geologic age ago, from the bubble of a mountain spring to the soft crackle of corn growing in the night, the crash of an oak toppling with roots undermined by the river’s flow to the roar of a vernal flash flood, the whisper of reeds and the rustle of cattails in the backwaters; birdsong was there, from ducks and geese, herons, kingfishers and cranes; the splashing flutter of fish, the flashes of color in the muscular arc of trout and spawning salmon, the slow patience of a snapping turtle waiting in the mud.