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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

People don't believe things that are too perfect.

She is his living mausoleum.

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.

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 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

Everything is fluid. Everything needs someplace to go.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Lonely, sure, but not broken.

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

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

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

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,

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm tired of feeling like something's missing. I'm tired of wondering what color my apples are. Stay with me. Sure, we'll probably hurt each other, but no one else will ever hurt us again.' That's what she's always wanted, isn't it? For no one to hurt her.

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.

The beauty queen turns. It's all he can do not to recoil. She's lovely, yes, but her eyes are a dead woman's, so cold and so flat that he can see the death of stars reflected there, even at this distance.

There's a flicker in his vision, the sense of someone else looking through his eyes (has the feeling ever been that strong? Has it ever been that easy to know when he's not alone, when one has become two has become something that is not a number, but is instead an inevitability?)

Erin is gone. He should feel worse about that. He should feel more about that, should feel anything at all. Instead, he's...numb, like this was a somehow-inevitable consequence, sad, yes, even heartbreaking, but no more or less tragic than everything else that's happened. Maybe he's a bad person. Maybe he's always been a bad person, and this is just the world finally proving it to him.

Look at the boy from Cambridge, Massachusetts, always too thin, now so tired he can barely move. He's uninjured, but that doesn't matter: he's still wounded. He holds the body of his sister, and if she's alive, it's only barely, survival measured by the thinnest of margins. His clothing is stained with her blood. His hands ache with splinters and with their own stillness, as if through motion he might have redeemed her and, by redeeming her, redeemed himself. Look at the girl from Palo Alto, California, so motionless that it's clear how close she is to the transition from person to past. She is crumpled and cast-aside, exhausted from her own efforts to become something more than a consequence. The wound in her shoulder has crusted over; the bleeding has stopped. That doesn't matter. There was more than enough damage done to take her to the edge, and over, into what waits beyond. She is ready to return to the Up-and-Under via the graveyard path. When she goes, she knows she will not go alone.

It won't be long before no one will notice them if they don't want to be noticed, if they tell the air to keep them hidden, the world to keep them safe. Roger thinks this is a quiet tragedy. Dodger thinks this is a miracle. Both of them are right.

Part of him remembers that voice, deep down and tucked away in a corner of his mind. He remembers every voice he's ever heard, on some level, because that too is a part of language. This voice was the first voice the world contained.

Every war, however slow, however understated, has its crossfires, and he was, in the end, unable to keep the man he loved above all others out of the way. His love will live and he will die, and in this moment, that seems like the only way this could have gone.

You could have been perfect. You still could be. Hand me your reins. Let me bind you to my service, be my children, let me love you, and I will let you live.

They aren't people who somehow inherited a cosmic force of logic and definition: they are that force, made incarnate by someone who should have known better, should have done better, should have been better. They're ideas who dreamt of being people, and now that they're waking up, its too late for them to be anything else.

Roger says she needs to let go of the rules, but rules are what make the numbers work. There will always be rules, for her. That's probably a good thing. Without them, she would unmake everything just to make him happy.

He doesn't fully understand. She can see that, and be frustrated by it, even as she forgives him. Sometimes she won't understand him either. That's why they have to stay together. They have to explain the universe for one another.

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.

Math takes something living, strips it down to its essentials, and then rolls forward into the future, not asking the thing what it wants. Math doesn’t care.

If she brings people soup when they’re sick because the rules say she should and not out of empathy, what does that matter? They still get the soup. She still gets the contact. The math is good.

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.

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

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.

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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.

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.

Roger thinks that’s the trouble with grownups. The more effort they put into deciding what kids are going to do or think or be, the more things go wrong for them.)

She smiles, and she thinks it’s as good a smile as any she’s ever worn. She doesn’t think too deeply about that; about why her false smiles and her real ones look the same.