Middlegame Quotes

You can't skip to the end of the story just because you're tired of being in the middle. You'd never survive.

Words can be whispered bullet-quick when no one's looking, and words don't leave blood or bruises behind. Words disappear without a trace. That's what makes them so powerful. That's what makes them so important. That's what makes them hurt so much.

Their past is littered with the unburied bodies of the people they chose never to become.

People who say “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” don’t understand how words can be stones, hard and sharp-edged and dangerous and capable of doing so much more harm than anything physical.

Words don't mean anything without someone to understand them.

Time is a concept invented by men who didn’t want everything to keep happening at once. Time is irrelevant.

Numbers are simple, obedient things, as long as you understand the rules they live by. Words are trickier. They twist and bite and require too much attention.

Hummingbird girl, running on caffeine and borrowed energy. He’s seen what happens when that energy runs out. He never wants to see it again.

This has never been about good and evil. This is about power. Who has it, who doesn't. Who knows how to use it.

Magic doesn't have to be flashy and huge. Sometimes it's the subtle things that are the most effective of all.

The mind is an imperfect engine, and it does what it will with the information it receives.

They were supposed to grow up with their hands in each other’s pockets, compensating for one another’s weaknesses, encouraging one another’s strengths.

Roller coasters are like math you can ride.

Words disappear without a trace. That’s what makes them so powerful. That’s what makes them so important. That’s what makes them hurt so much.

He likes cats. They have their own agenda, and he respects that.

Color is a kind of magic. He hopes people who have it understand that, and don't take it for granted.

Someone made us. Someone made us, and then they separated us because we were dangerous when we were together.

Numbers are simple, obedient things, as long as you understand the rules they live by. Words are trickier. They twist and bite and require too much attention. He has to think to change the world. His sister just does it.

She'd approached the issue of social interaction like it was another puzzle to be solved, another prize to be won.

Time is a funny thing; it doesn’t forgive the things we don’t see.

Dating Erin would be sort of like dating a blender. Sure, it makes great smoothies, but one day you’re going to be minding your own business and it’s going to switch on and remove your hand.

In that moment, Roger is sure-- absolutely certain-- of two things: Dodger is real, and he wants her to be his friend.

It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong. —Richard Feynman

I thought words were supposed to be my thing.” “Can you make change for a dollar?” “Yes . . .” “Then I can occasionally come up with a witty one-liner.

If someone says ‘sorry’ and you don’t say ‘it’s okay, I’m not mad anymore,’ you’re a bad person. Especially if you’re a girl.

She’s lonely, and she’s one of those kids for whom loneliness has become a sort of fearless propulsion, forcing her forward at an ever-accelerating pace, searching for a way to make the loneliness stop.

Every city is the Impossible City, when a savior is needed badly enough.

She is his living mausoleum.

People don't believe things that are too perfect.

The math would be true, and that’s all she’s ever asked from the world.

Roger guesses people all over the world must use the same tone when they talk to the smart kids, like they were bombs on the edge of going off, instead of children with brains too big for the people they’re supposed to be.

Dodger isn’t supposed to be scared. She’s supposed to be the brave one. It’s the compensation for her also being the breakable one.

Everything is fluid. Everything needs someplace to go.

she can no more conceive of failure than a butterfly can conceive of calculus.

Mathematical science shows what is. It is the language of unseen relations between things. —Ada Lovelace

Sometimes the easiest trick is hiding something in plain sight. That which can be found without looking can’t possibly be dangerous, after all.

She looks like peaches and cream, like Saturday afternoons down by the frog pond, innocence and the American dream wrapped up in a single startlingly lovely package. It’s a lie, all of it. He believes in exploiting the world for his own gains, but she’d happily ignite the entire thing, if only to roast marshmallows in its embers.

If Dodger were awake, she’d happily tell him exactly how much of her blood is on the floor. She’d look at the mess around them. She’d calculate the surface area and volume of the liquid as easily as taking a breath, and she’d turn it into a concrete number, something accurate to the quarter ounce. She’d think she was being comforting, even if the number she came up with meant “I’m leaving you.” Even if it meant “there is no coming back from this.” Even if it meant goodbye.

Dodger,” he whispers. “Don’t die. This is an order. This is a command. This is an adjuration. Do whatever you have to do, break whatever you have to break, but don’t you die. This is an order. This is—” This is her eyes opening, pupils reduced to black pinpricks against the gray of her irises, until she looks like she’s suffered a massive opiate overdose. This is gold sparking in the gray, brief and bright, as the Impossible City tries to call her home. He feels the gold in his own bones respond, reaching for the gold in Dodger’s, yearning to reunite.

She’s an earthquake forced into the shape of a girl,

Few things are more dangerous than a scientist with something to learn.

They were born here. That doesn't make it home.

Of course owls can talk,” said the owl. “Everything can talk. It’s simply a matter of learning how best to listen.

Here is a secret about powerful men, one they would prefer go unspoken: their arrogance is one of the greatest forces in the universe. Even the most paranoid among them see what they want to see, believe what they want to believe, and this creates cracks through which the clever may insinuate themselves, changing the story around them.

He stays awake until her bedtime almost every night, so they can fall asleep together, and she wakes when he does, both of them walking through their lives with the constant, immutable sense of presence at the back of their minds. Sometimes they have to work to turn it off, to split themselves apart. Still, sometimes she needs reassurance. “I’m here,” says Roger.

For a man on a mission, a hundred years can pass in the blinking of an eye. Oh, it helps to have access to the philosopher’s stone, to have the fruits of a thousand years of alchemical progress at one’s fingertips, but really, it was always the mission that mattered. James Reed was born knowing his purpose, left his master in a shallow grave knowing his purpose, and fully intends to ascend to the heights of human knowledge with the fruits of his labors clutched firmly in hand. Damn anyone who dares to get in his way.

One was named Hephzibah, because her parents had a languid and eccentric way of looking at the world. They called her “Zib,” understanding that “Hephzibah” was more name than she had shadow. Every day they watched for signs that she was growing into her name, and every day they were disappointed. “Soon,” they promised each other. “Soon.

It was nice to have the boys noticing her for a little while, when she was trying to work out social interaction; boobs were like a cheat code for getting along.

When he was a kid, Roger thought Thanksgiving was the best possible holiday. It didn’t involve lies or home invasion like Christmas;

Lonely, sure, but not broken.

I am the living embodiment of Order, and I am ordering you to get out of bed and follow me.

If we get away, so do you. You're just a kid. You deserve the chance to be something more than everything.

They destroy themselves every time they destroy the world. Their past is littered with the unburied bodies of the people they chose never to become.

Time is the substance from which I am made. —Jorge Luis Borges

Numbers are simple, obedient things, as long as you understand the rules they live by. Words are trickier.

Being universally feared and disliked has its advantages, and she is legion; she needs no one’s company but her own.

His claws, draped in velvet and wrapped in affectation, are sharp enough to slaughter the world.

Imagine a child who embodies transmutation so well that their touch alone is enough to transform base metal,

You can’t skip to the end of the story just because you’re tired of being in the middle. You’d never survive.

The math would be true, and that's all she's ever asked from the world.

He feels the gold in his own bones respond, reaching for the gold in Dodger's, yearning to reunite.

All he’s ever done is try to save her, except when he had to leave her behind to save himself.

She doesn't really understand the difference between teachers and professors, except that professors know so much more than teachers. Professors are like wizards: they create the universe.

We’ve been looking at the basic building blocks of what makes the two of you so goddamn annoying. I think I may be able to isolate the gene for ‘smartass’ based on your DNA. I’ll win the Nobel Prize.

She's going to change the world, remake it in a better image than the one it's made in now, and no one's going to stop her. Not her parents and not her teachers and certainly not the Alchemical Congress

He’s learnt so many new concepts, and the words to pin them to the surface of his soul, perpetual and immutable. Without words, some things would slip away, impossible to describe and hence impossible to hold.

What Dodger is doing isn’t math in the truest sense of the word, and at the same time, it’s a deeper, truer arithmetic than she’s done in years. It is the instinctive math of children weighing parental disapproval against the rapidly setting sun, and the heartbroken math of sailors measuring the holes in their boat against the distance to the shore. This is the math that moves the universe, the measure and countermeasure that dances over and around the numbers. Dodger holds this kind of math in her bones, and her fingers dance through the blend of vegetable and mineral scattered in front of her, separating them from one another with almost thoughtless swipes.

He wishes he had a way of telling them that they can be part of transforming this new place into an old one, that sometimes being the one who etches the lines in the façade is as important as choosing something already weathered and worn.

Words can be whispered bullet-quick when no one’s looking, and words don’t leave blood or bruises behind. Words disappear without a trace. That’s what makes them so powerful. That’s what makes them so important. That’s what makes them hurt so much.

Finally, thank you all, for reading. I couldn't tell these stories without someone who wanted to listen. The Impossible City isn't far from here, and I can take you, if you'd like to go. Just take your hand, close your eyes, and trust me. I know the way.

Wake up," he says. "We need to let my terrifying ex-girlfriend tell us how we're supposed to manifest a primal force of reality before asshole alchemists set us the fuck on fire." As a sentence, it shouldn't make any sense. It does, though: he's proud of that.

If it weren’t for the pain, for the body of his wife beside him and the bodies of his children lying in their rooms (all three of them, oh God, he knows she’s killed all three of them, because a woman like this doesn’t leave survivors, and why can’t he move), it would almost be pleasant.

Girl nerds are in even more trouble than boy nerds, because everybody says we don’t exist, or if we do exist, it’s because we’re trying to get the boy nerds to like us. I don’t like any of the boy nerds in my school. I’m smarter than all of them, so they’re mean to me just like everybody else.

Heaven forbid you do anything -cliché-, Mr. English-Professor-in-Training," says Dodger. "You might find a single cliché is a gateway drug to tweed jackets and khaki slacks, and the next thing you know, you're teaching Kerouac and making eyes at that cute undergrad in the front row who makes you think about fucking all of Middle America in one triumphant go.

Roger Middleton is seven years old and so in love with language that there’s no room in his world for anything else. He doesn’t play sports or go on adventures in the nearby woods; he doesn’t want a dog or to spend the weekend at a friend’s house. He just wants to read, to listen, to expand his understanding of the syllables making up the universe around him.

certain musical instruments and modes could influence the balance between Logos (rational behavior) and Pathos (emotional thought). Later alchemists came to see this as the interaction between the two halves of the human heart, and more, as the balance between language and mathematics: the two methods through which Man has always been able to influence and even command Nature

The man she has assembled out of the dead gasps, opens his eyes, and stares at her with fearful wonder. “Who are you?” he asks. “Asphodel,” she says. “I am your teacher.” “Who am I?” he asks. She smiles. “Your name is James,” she says. “You are the beginning of my greatest work. Welcome. We have so much to do.” He sits up, still staring at her. “But I don’t know what the work is.” “Don’t worry.” Her smile is the first brick in what she will one day call the improbable road. Today, now, in this moment, they are beginning their voyage toward the Impossible City. “I’ll show you,” she says, and the deed is done. It’s too late to turn back now.

People who say “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” don’t understand how words can be stones, hard and sharp-edged and dangerous and capable of doing so much more harm than anything physical. If someone chucks a real stone at you on the playground, it leaves a bruise. Bruises heal. Bruises get people in trouble, too; bruises end with detentions for the rock-throwers, with disapproving parents ushered into private offices for serious conversations about bullying and bad behavior. Words almost never end that way. Words can be whispered bullet-quick when no one’s looking, and words don’t leave blood or bruises behind. Words disappear without a trace. That’s what makes them so powerful. That’s what makes them so important. That’s what makes them hurt so much.

she doesn’t tell people things when she doesn’t feel she needs to. She keeps her secrets close to her chest. That’s how she survives in a world where she’s so much smarter than she should be, and so much more delicate than she seems.

There’s nothing in the rules about a voice in your head telling you what the answers are supposed to be. I checked.” “I think the rules think any voices in your head will belong to you,” says Roger. Dodger shrugs. “It’s not my fault the rules don’t think of everything.

Words can be whispered bullet-quick when no one’s looking, and words don’t leave blood or bruises behind. Words disappear without a trace. That’s what makes them so powerful. That’s what makes them so important.

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist of creating out of void, but out of chaos. —Mary Shelley

None of them encompass the feeling of weightlessness, like all the troubles in the world have been lifted from his shoulders. He guesses this feeling is probably a cliché, but the people who like to put those labels on things don’t always remember that things become clichés because they keep happening, over and over, all around the world.

terror and hope are uncomfortable bedfellows, and when they lie down together, frivolities like lies tend to fade away.

Leigh, drenched from head to toe, is not so lucky. She screams as she dissolves. Dodger backs away farther, and thinks she will hear that sound, the wailing of a dozen dead women finally consigned to the grave, until the day she dies.

She could show up for class naked and singing Queen songs, and they’d use her as an example of modern Dionysian behavior. Her supposed graduate career is just a cover for the life she’s not openly allowed to lead.) Instead she’s here, in this sterile, brightly lit place, watching a woman’s blood—a friend’s blood—spread across the tile floor like a benediction.

I want you to do what every molecule of your bodies was designed to do. I want you to embody the Doctrine of Ethos. Once you do that, once you become the living force that holds the universe together, they won’t be able to touch you.

Roger and Dodger stare at her. Roger finds his voice first, asking, “Why didn’t you tell me any of this? You’ve had seven years to tell me this.” “I love that we live in a world where that’s the confusing part and not, I don’t know, everything else,” mutters Dodger.

This is a small town aspiring to become a city, still connected to the people who forged it; they no doubt remember the names of their founders, celebrating them every year, as if creating a settlement were something special and unique, and not the human urge to propagate writ large. Better to celebrate the people who came after the sweet rush of newness, the ones who fought their way through floods and famine to build a functioning municipality, an infrastructure worth sustaining. Better to support the ones who fought and died in the name of something that would never be theirs, would always belong to some sainted, long-dead founder.

he is tall and slim and attractive to the eye, but none of these are things that get a man taken seriously in the presence of other men.

everything is perfect. There are pieces missing, sure, and not just in the living room floor, but whose life doesn’t have a few missing pieces? Missing pieces are what makes it real, rather than just a painting of a life that could never actually exist. Missing pieces are essential.

Smart kids get put on a pedestal by parents and teachers alike, and the rest of the class gathers around the base of it throwing rocks, trying to knock them down. People who say ‘sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me’ don’t understand how words can be stones, hard and sharp-edged and dangerous and capable of doing so much more harm than anything physical.

The woman was impossibly beautiful. She looked like sunshine on a Saturday, like chocolate cake and afternoons with no homework. She had a smile like a mother’s praise, all sugar and softness,

Play the opening like a book, the middlegame like a magician, and the endgame like a machine.’” I puzzle that over in my head, thinking about what it means. “That’s true of any strategy,” Papa says, his dark eyes fixed on mine. “Remember that, Seb. Follow the rules at first. Confound your opponent in the middle. And in the end, finish him without hesitation, without mercy, and without thought.

Play the opening like a book. The middlegame like a magician. And the endgame like a machine. When this whole thing began, I played by the rules. I did everything the way I was supposed to—I met with Yenin, and I signed the contract. Now it’s time to become a magician instead. It’s time to surprise and shock him. It’s time to make everything he holds dear turn to dust in his hands, without him understanding how it’s even happening. And then in end . . . I’ll kill them all, as cold and relentless as any machine. Without hesitation, without mistakes, and without mercy.

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Play the opening like a book, the middlegame like a magician, and the endgame like a machine.” – Rudolph Spielmann

We need to let my terrifying ex-girlfriend tell us how we’re supposed to manifest a primal force of reality before asshole alchemists set us the fuck on fire.

It’s a good toaster. Why did she never notice before what a good toaster it is? There’s a dent in one shiny metal side the exact size and shape of Dr. Peters’s skull. It probably won’t make toast anymore. That’s a pity. It was a good toaster.