Flies To Wanton Boys Quotes

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.

You belong to the world. Don’t be afraid to be a part of it.

Like flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for sport.

I feel as though I have leapt off this massive cliff and I am still building my wings… Everyone just assumes I know how to fly, but I am pretty sure I am only falling gracefully and hoping to miss the ground.

Making love, sensing how he felt about her in the high tide of passion, seeing herself through his eyes, brought her to an ecstasy beyond words.

Is there a term for when you are only gay for the top half of someone?” “I think that makes you bisect-ual.

We are much too hot to feel the cold.

It’s not like I’m the first siren to ever make it big… Play ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ on a road trip some time and tell me everyone in the car doesn’t stop what they are doing to sing.

There is no harm in being used. We all use one another daily. But were you misused by me? I can think of no one alive who could have performed better under the demands of your fate.

Though her body fit with his like a puzzle piece, his mind was an ever-shifting riddle she felt she could study her whole life and never fully solve. She spent the most time touching him, caressing him, massaging the secrets from his shoulders and embarrassments from his lower back.

[Epilepsy] gave her an adversity to fight against. It had shaped her personality, the need to be careful and secretive, and the ability to see things a bit differently from the neurotypical. She granted that this feeling of having a broken brain that required her to be sensitive, to look always inward to survive, might be why she turned artist.

and others. King Lear’s Gloucester may complain about human fate as “flies to wanton boys,” but it’s Lear’s vanity that sets in motion the dramatic arc of the play. From the Enlightenment onward, the individual occupied center stage.

The art of chess is in knowing which is the most valuable piece in play, then having the courage to sacrifice it for the win.

Though Queen Victoria in England had suggested that makeup was impolite, even vanity, Gideon saw it as yet another weapon. It was not so different from magic.

You will find that we simply provided the noose. You built the gallows, mounted the steps, put your neck in the rope, and jumped.

Words could be quite enough for magic to occur, when the night was warm enough and the moon waxing.

Men could be utter pussycats when they had even a touch of the sniffles.

[His] leaving had stabbed her heart. This organ was not inclined to forgive her for vulnerability.

His mind was a tapestry constantly weaving and unweaving with the dedication of Penelope for her Odysseus.

Like chocolate, she craved sleep and it made her life brighter, but she could do without.

I could either succumb to the nightmares I’ve raised or paint them.

Grammar is like your overarching compulsion. It’s math with words.

[H]er retaliation only made the sin the greater because she could not find words to confess.

There’s always someone stumbling upon the weird and thinking they are the first.

Crimes for a greater good are still crimes.

What marvelous fortune to have lived to see a world that would one day make you.

I was a monster until you dared to treat me as a man.

Instead of the birds of the sky and beast of the field, the gods were more than men because Man needed them to be, for what could the world be if Man were the best of all creatures?

As in most modern narratives, a character’s fate depended on human actions, his and others. King Lear’s Gloucester may complain about human fate as “flies to wanton boys,” but it’s Lear’s vanity that sets in motion the dramatic arc of the play. From the Enlightenment onward, the individual occupied center stage. But now I lived in a different world, a more ancient one, where human action paled against superhuman forces, a world that was more Greek tragedy than Shakespeare. No amount of effort can help Oedipus and his parents escape their fates; their only access to the forces controlling their lives is through the oracles and seers, those given divine vision. What I had come for was not a treatment plan—I had read enough to know the medical ways forward—but the comfort of oracular wisdom.

He never thought he was right. The horror of all that had died under his will had become mundane to him. You see, the first horror is the horror itself. The real horror for him was accepting it as necessary.

She is the sort of person who can do things she doesn’t know yet. There are things you know you know and you know you don’t know and you don’t know you know and you don’t know you don’t know. She may not know what she does know.

Think about the whole Biblical story of Mary. She wakes up and sees something with a lion, eagle, and human face that wants to inseminate her with the Holy Seed. She’s practically a saint just for not killing herself on the spot.

Everything mortal wears a chain with its death on the other end. None of you should escape that you are on earth only a very short time, but you all think you have figured out how to be gods. Tell me the story of the man who sees his death and loves it as much as it loves him.

Like measuring light as a particle or wave makes it what the observer expects, so too does assuming things about reality make it so. I fear the conclusion people gear up for is the wholesale demise of many millions unless this spiritual ennui ceases. How many catastrophes have people expected in the last few decades? How many times have humans expected the End Times?

It’s about Nietzsche’s theory of universal debt. Your parents make it possible for you to believe a far better myth than Santa. They let you think that you, as a kid, don’t owe the world a thing. The world can give you, even if just for a few minutes, utter joy without requiring anything from you. It’s not about consumerism. As far as you know, no one buys you these presents. They come out of nothingness, with fantasies of elves attached. You aren’t required to be grateful to your parents or anything like that. They can give to you and nothing is required in return. When you get old enough, when you have kids, you get to enact this myth for them. It has nothing to do with any fat man in a red suit, no matter what we tell ourselves. It’s about owing nothing, and then realizing that you have to do this job of perpetuating this… this fantasy world, whether you like it or not.

Once again, I had traversed the line from doctor to patient, from actor to acted upon, from subject to direct object. My life up until my illness could be understood as the linear sum of my choices. As in most modern narratives, a character’s fate depended on human actions, his and others. King Lear’s Gloucester may complain about human fate as “flies to wanton boys,” but it’s Lear’s vanity that sets in motion the dramatic arc of the play. From the Enlightenment onward, the individual occupied center stage. But now I lived in a different world, a more ancient one, where human action paled against superhuman forces, a world that was more Greek tragedy than Shakespeare. No amount of effort can help Oedipus and his parents escape their fates; their only access to the forces controlling their lives is through the oracles and seers, those given divine vision. What I had come for was not a treatment plan—I had read enough to know the medical ways forward—but the comfort of oracular wisdom.

He was digging in his garden--digging, too, in his own mind, laboriously turning up the substance of his thought. Death--and he drove in his spade once, and again, and yet again. And all our yesterdays have lighted fools they way to dusty death. A convincing thunder rumbled through the words. He lifted another spadeful of earth. Why had Linda died? Why had she been allowed to become gradually less than human and at last... He shuddered. A good kissing carrion. He planted his foot on his spade and stamped it fiercely into the tough ground. As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kills us for their sport. Thunder again; words that proclaimed themselves true--truer somehow than truth itself. And yet that same Gloucester had called them ever-gentle gods. Besides, thy best of rest is sleep, and that thou oft provok'st; yet grossly fear'st thy death which is no more. No more than sleep. Sleep. Perchance to dream. His spade struck against a stone; he stooped to pick it up. For in that sleep of death, what dreams...?

He fell in with the quiet revolutionaries on campus—those who felt that the disenfranchisement of half the population was ridiculous, those who did not accept that rights were predicated on skin tone—partly because he couldn’t bring himself to avoid tempting trouble. He agreed with all their points, but understood that they were freer to make them purely because they had the money to build a wall around their experiences. That was what people did, wasn’t it? Ignore the majority of experience and actively disengage from those telling them otherwise.

Damn it, Jacob, I’m freezing my butt off.” “I came as fast as I could, considering I thought it would be wise to walk the last few yards.” Isabella whirled around, her smiling face lighting up the silvery night with more ease than the fullest of moons. She leapt up into his embrace, eagerly drinking in his body heat and affection. “I can see it now. ‘Daddy, tell me about your wedding day.’ ‘Well, son,’” she mocked, deepening her voice to his timbre and reflecting his accent uncannily, “’The first words out of your mother’s mouth were I’m freezing my butt off!’” “Very romantic, don’t you think?” he teased. “So, you think it will be a boy, then? Our first child?” “Well, I’m fifty percent sure.” “Wise odds. Come, little flower, I intend to marry you before the hour is up.” With that, he scooped her off her feet and carried her high against his chest. “Unfortunately, we are going to have to do this hike the hard way.” “As Legna tells it, that’s what you’re supposed to do.” “Yeah, well, I assure you a great many grooms have fudged that a little.” He reached to tuck her chilled face into the warm crook of his neck. “Surely the guests would know. It takes longer to walk than it does to fly . . . or whatever . . . out of the woods.” “This is true, little flower. But passing time in the solitude of the woods is not necessarily a difficult task for a man and woman about to be married.” “Jacob!” she gasped, laughing. “Some traditions are not necessarily publicized,” he teased. “You people are outrageous.” “Mmm, and if I had the ability to turn to dust right now, would you tell me no if I asked to . . . pass time with you?” Isabella shivered, but it was the warmth of his whisper and intent, not the cold, that made her do so. “Have I ever said no to you?” “No, but now would be a good time to start, or we will be late to our own wedding,” he chuckled. “How about no . . . for now?” she asked silkily, pressing her lips to the column on his neck beneath his long, loose hair. His fingers flexed on her flesh, his arms drawing her tighter to himself. He tried to concentrate on where he was putting his feet. “If that is going to be your response, Bella, then I suggest you stop teasing me with that wicked little mouth of yours before I trip and land us both in the dirt.” “Okay,” she agreed, her tongue touching his pulse. “Bella . . .” “Jacob, I want to spend the entire night making love to you,” she murmured. Jacob stopped in his tracks, taking a moment to catch his breath. “Okay, why is it I always thought it was the groom who was supposed to be having lewd thoughts about the wedding night while the bride took the ceremony more seriously?” “You started it,” she reminded him, laughing softly. “I am begging you, Isabella, to allow me to leave these woods with a little of my dignity intact.” He sighed deeply, turning his head to brush his face over her hair. “It does not take much effort from you to turn me inside out and rouse my hunger for you. If there is much more of your wanton taunting, you will be flushed warm and rosy by the time we reach that altar, and our guests will not have to be Mind Demons in order to figure out why.” “I’m sorry, you’re right.” She turned her face away from his neck. Jacob resumed his ritual walk for all of thirty seconds before he stopped again. “Bella . . .” he warned dangerously. “I’m sorry! It just popped into my head!” “What am I getting myself into?” he asked aloud, sighing dramatically as he resumed his pace. “Well, in about an hour, I hope it will be me.

As for the Economy, this new embodiment as I called it of Fate or the Gods, this global power that governs the lives of Chinese workers in village factories, Brazilian miners, children working cocoa plantations in West Africa, sex workers in Mumbai, real estate salesmen in Connecticut, sheep-farmers in Scotland or on the Darling Downs, disembodied voices in call centres in Bangalore, workers in the hospitality industry in Cancun or Venice or Fiji, keeping them fatefully interconnected, in its mysterious way, by laws that do exist, the experts assure us, though they cannot agree on what they are- it is too impersonal, too implacable for us to live comfortably with, or even to catch hold of and defy. When we were in the hands of the Gods, we had stories that made these distant beings human and brought them close. They got angry, they took our part or turned violently against us. They fell in love with us and behaved badly. They had their own problems and fought with one another, and like us were sometimes foolish. But their interest in us was personal. They watched over us and were concerned though in moments of willfulness or boredom they might also torment us as “wanton boys” do flies. We had our ways of obtaining their help as intermediaries. We could deal with them. The Economy is impersonal. It lacks manageable dimensions. We have discovered no mythology to account for its moods. Our only source of information about it, the Media and their swarm of commentators, bring us “reports,” but these do not help: a possible breakdown in the system, a new crisis, the descent of Greece, or Ireland or Portugal, like Jove’s eagle, of the IMF. We are kept in a state of permanent low-level anxiety broken only by outbreaks of alarm.

Or on the whim of a deity. As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods.

Santa is like a queen bee. All the elves are his drones, who exist to feed him royal jelly, which I guess would be milk and cookies. If an elf escapes and eats royal cookies, it will turn into another Santa. That’s what all those mall Santas are. They’re trying to start their own festive colonies.

Even in concept, angels are unsettling. They’re like drones, totally mindlessly following the will of God. The only difference between the Heavenly angels and demons is that the demons opted to follow after a different queen bee. So, you have these eyeball speckled, part animal monsters who exist only to worship and obey God. They don’t have a moral compass, they just act.

I don’t think very many people get converted by someone telling them they are terrible. No one I’d want to rub shoulders with in Heaven, anyway.

The dark places will not be instinctively frightening, true, but isn’t it better that children fear boogeymen than pedophiles? Isn’t it better that libraries are filled to the brim with stories and not only words?

[H]e had heard of, but given little credence to, magic. There was always someone talking of folk remedies and charms, but it seemed to him the inclination of fools misunderstanding chance.

When colleges, both within the Hudson Valley and throughout the country, encouraged women to do little beyond attaining their Mrs. degree in Husbandry, Annandale offered rigorous and prestigious degrees irrespective of gender.

Owing to thousands of generations of over-justification bred into them to keep from the maddening awareness of the true composition of the world, people had a tendency to give themselves the freedom to do whatever Shane told them, as long as it did not conflict too much with their self-preservation.

They wouldn’t have understood if they found him crying, when he woke and remembered all at once that he had once had a wife and child, so they never found him this way.

Shane lingered over a sickly sweet bit of doggerel comparing accepting Christ into one’s life with turning a pumpkin into a Jack-o-Lantern. “It sounds like God is seriously going to mutilate you.” Roselyn took the pamphlet from Shane, her eyes flickering over the text. “I always pictured it a bit more like a lobotomy than an evisceration.

I don’t much care for all this talk of God washing away all my dirt. I like a bit of grit around the edges. It gives me character and does a passable job of faking depth, from a distance.

She felt that “truthful” and “honest” were two very different concepts. She could truthfully say that she hadn’t eaten Roselyn’s Chinese leftovers, but that wasn’t honest because it omitted that Eliot did and that Shane did not object.

A college provides a means of accrediting and laundering one’s existence, so that what was may be forgotten under the weight of something far more mundane.

In the beginning, there was nothing. Then, out of the nothing came the Word and the Word was power. Every utterance of the Word gave form to the Void, starting with beings to utter the Word. There was no Adam, no Eve, and no need. What Man named was.

While some dogs existed with the paranoia that the whole world infringed on their property rights and needed furious barking to be reminded of their place, this dog wanted only to find warm places to sleep and enough canned food to eat. Any atavistic memory of wolfdom had been bred out of his ancestors centuries ago.

You get a few of them together and don’t be surprised if pipes and drums appear out of nowhere. It is a sort of magic people believe in…

Other young women were more than kind when it came to teaching him the basics of makeup artistry, but he did not like the idea of foundation, knowing enough alchemy to realize it had historically been made with lead and mercury.

In these books, there were spells and rituals for making a living soul something hungry and desperate like him, but he didn’t find likelihood in any of them. All it told him was that man was terrified of nothing so much as death. Having died, he could think of dozens of things more worth his fear.

She sat in the silence that resulted in the absence of her words, feeling unburdened but not absolved.

I used to figure that Santa was the zombie. Not like modern zombies, more like the voodoo ones. The elves resurrect this long dead saint to do their festive bidding every year because they were magically restricted to the North Pole. It’s entirely possibly my mom let me watch too many horror movies.

I am able to separate the mythological aspects of my religion from the practical ones. Jesus, his sacrifice, the Gospels? Those are true to me. Angels, demons, burning bushes, Revelations? Primitive people trying to express the ineffable. I don’t need to be a biblical literalist to love my God.

We do not require man’s religion for salvation. We do not believe in anything that forces people to keep their places in this world.

They ignored her because of their headphones, a thousand people marching to fifteen hundred different drummers, effectively secluded but for a very basic instinct not to bump into one another. Those that were unplugged rushed from place to place and were never actually anywhere other than “somewhere else.

The boys he met at Annandale only understood one kind of woman. They needed to be coddled and cooed over as their own mothers had done their whole lives.

In an electroencephalogram… one of her seizures was almost identical to an orgasm... Nothing happened during a seizure that couldn’t happen outside one, except that Roselyn was not in control of it and it happened all at once. Since then, she had experienced hundreds of orgasms and dozens of seizures and, though she didn’t come close to finding the latter nearly as entertaining as the former, it was always in her mind. In the midst of Dryden’s often machine gun lovemaking or her own considerably more directed and soft ministrations, it was always in the back of her mind at the moment of climax—this is a tenth of a seizure, this is a fifth of one.

I cannot deal with obscurity for more than a few decades before I get the worst ache in my chest.

You can’t exist on this plane for long purely one thing or another. A totally evil creature is so destructive that it obliterates itself. A totally good one… the same. So, we mix a bit of coffee with our cream.

No divinity worth His salt could be contained in a book.

Do you know the amount of evil done by well-meaning humans? Oodles. Do you know the amount done by ill-meaning devils? Infinitesimal.

She had loved and been loved, but she felt in this moment of embrace as though there were nothing in her not shaped by love, from the chipped purple paint on her toenails to the fuzz in her belly button to her scarecrow hair escaping from Roselyn’s ministrations and unguents. She was love, standing on love, breathing love, digesting love.

The safest thing to do when in danger is to be too stupid to know you are in danger.

I know a great number of things, though never all at once or for very long.

She is an angel, how bad could it be?” “Ask the first born of Israel when the Pharaoh pissed off Moses. Ask the salty residents of Sodom. Ask anyone who was not Noah or a fish once the Flood rolled in.

For most, ghost hunting was a few steps escalated from telling scary stories around a campfire.

He wouldn’t be the one to prove to the world that there was an afterlife, but he hoped to be the one to prove it to himself, though he would have a few stern questions for a Creator who made people haunt libraries.

Nature was beautiful and filled with spirituality without needing to be likewise full of spirits.

My life of sin among people I’m sure he thinks are deviants is happier and more honest that his oppressive, sexist cesspool.

Love and poor parenting are acceptable topics for any formal meal I make.

Anyone who thinks traditional and modern interpretations of demons are frightening had better remember that real angels inspired awe because they were so ghastly. How we usually think of angel is all due to Renaissance painters trying to sex up the concept. Most Christians, if they saw an angel in the flesh, would go run for their guns.

God has planned the world too perfectly for me to doubt that everyone is where they are supposed to be.

The Word no longer belonged to Man because they believed it did not. Man saw the gods alone as Creators and forgot that there had ever been any other way.

Roselyn corseted Shane in her second best bodice, causing Shane to question in gasps how women who could not heal cracked ribs managed the feat of breathing. “Breathing,” Roselyn assured her, “was overrated.

Don’t cheer for the roadies. It only encourages their poor life choices.

As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods; / They kill us for their sport

Angels are just beyond us. They’re creatures that biology doesn’t apply to. They don’t love humanity at all. They just love God.

We shall not extend ourselves with magic when bureaucracy serves as fine an end.

It’s from Lear,” she said. “Wait. Yes. ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.

Sins don’t go away as long as there is someone to remember them.

Faith is best when it is tested, but not when it is questioned.

Angels are beyond us. They’re creatures that biology doesn’t apply to. They don’t love humanity at all. They just love God.

Humans feel bereft of meaning; you need this mythology to shape the skeleton of your lives. Without myths, how can anyone live in this world and feel fulfilled?

The angel was not light or dark, but something else entirely. An angel, he knew in that moment, was not corporeal. It was ancient Aramaic translated into binary as transcribed to a Japanese scholar. It was the spot in a solar flare seen from feet away. The images of angels were the shadows cast by their fire.

Every baby born is the tangible hope for the future, the only immorality that she could believe. When children die, a universe of possibility snuffs out.

Silence of the desert! The Summer flower and the lover, The night sky and the moon light lovelier, The rain and the monsoon that is wetter, A moment in time forever and a moment called never, The high that balances with the low, The deep of ocean at the shores is shallow, The midday Sun in the night is Moon’s glow, The summer colours like rainbow and the Autumnal yellow, The bound cocoon and the the free butterfly, The web and the spiders ploys, The vast sky and the wings of freedom to fly, The responsible manhood and the careless wanton boy, The right that knows the wrong, And the wrong that sometimes never knows where right does belong, Life that walks and death that never likes life’s song, The day chasing the night and the night chasing the day to create eternity’s song, A feeling of never ending silence over a vast desert of sand dunes, Climbs and walks past the sinking steps of time in these dunes, To greet me in the Summer land of my life while it is playing the love tunes, And as the silence spreads I am reminded of you and me together, just like the silence over the sand dunes, Without you the Summer exists, but never feels so, Because with you around, even the desert feels like Summer and then this feeling does not go, Then it is always the Summer flower and the lover, wherever I see or I may go, Then the chase between night and day ends and it remains so, So I often visit this desert of silence, this desert of time’s sinking foot steps, Because in this silence as my heart beats, I only hear your steps, The whispers of silence which are like your billion foot steps, All marching towards me , you, your memories, your feelings riding these footsteps, Then the stillness, the silence, the sand dunes turn into a mirage of gleaming beauty, A gateway unto you and your endless beauty, And there in this silence I become a part of this new nativity, The stillness, the silence, the vastness and in the midst of all this, the desert blooms like the summer bearing your beauty!