Slippery Creatures Quotes

And he owned a lot of books, although just now and then, when it got dark and the shelves loomed over him, he got the feeling that they owned him.

Thank God they were British. He took a deep breath. “Cup of tea?

What I say is, one can be as moral as one likes but one should have the courtesy to do it in private, like any other bad habit.

Besides,” Hatta said, tossing the shredded paper back at her. It wisped and fluttered and clung to the fabric of her gown. “I have a personal rule about not entering into business with spineless creatures. No snakes. No slippery eels. And worst of all, no fickle women.

Why do we count the cost of change, but not the cost of the world staying the same?

My dear chap, this is a bookshop. There’s never anywhere better to be.

I'd call you a whore but you're nothing so honest

Swathed in silk, I feel like a caterpillar in a cocoon awaiting metamorphosis. I always supposed that to be a peaceful condition. At first it is. But as I journey into the night, I feel more and more trapped, suffocated by the slippery bindings, unable to emerge until I have transformed into something of beauty. I squirm, trying to shed my ruined body and unlock the secret to growing flawless wings. Despite enormous effort, I remain a hideous creature, fired into my current form by the blast from the bombs.

If you couldn’t have a thing without hurting someone who didn’t deserve it, you shouldn’t have it.

He had no idea what civilians, or civilised people, would say in these circumstances. Thanks for that, old chap, much obliged, perhaps? Ought he apologise for coming in his mouth? Would this be a good moment to restart the conversation about where Kim had learned to use a knife? Thank God they were British. He took a deep breath. “Cup of tea?

Jimmy held on to the reins for dear life, and thought that a horse was about the most slippery creature to sit on that he had ever met. He slithered first one way and then another, and at last he slid off altogether and landed with a bump on the ground. Sticky Stanley and Lotta held on to one another and laughed till the tears ran down their faces. They thought it was the funniest sight in the world to see poor Jimmy slipping about on the solemn, cantering horse.

I have a personal rule about not entering into business with spineless creatures. No snakes. No slippery eels. And worst of all, no fickle women. - Hatta

I volunteered to go kill men who I’d have had a drink with if I’d met them in a pub, and that wasn’t courage, just a twist in the head that went the other way round to shellshock. Calling it honour is putting ribbons on a pile of shit. It might look good, but it still stinks.

But you will be back, and you will always be here. Don’t think that in death you go far from the earth; you remain down here with everything—the part of you that loved, which is the most important part. That part of you will patiently be here as the earth changes colour, exhausts itself, breathes in fresh life again, and revives. That part of you will be here all along, through that whole entire time, while the slugs make their sluggish art, beautiful little swirls in the mud, and whatever will populate the sea, and the greatest beasts that will ever be; slippery with green gills and lots of scales, feathers and fur. Even the swimming creatures will have their own ways of moving which will be radically new. And you will be here for that, too! Why am I so stuck in the art of the past? Because you are stuck in this situation, thinking it is the only one. There will be a second draft, and the part of you that loves, which is the best part of you, and the most eternal part, will be in the bears, the lizards, the mammoths, and the birds, there in the second draft of life.

She was sliding dangerously fast down a slippery slope, if she went from "no kissing" and "we'll see" to him coming over when the children were gone. She cast around in her mind for something, anything, to stop her headlong plunge. She blurted out, "Do Djinn date?" He blinked. "That is not something to which I have given much thought," he said. "Perhaps some Djinn might date some ... creatures ... some ... times. Dating has not previously been a habit of mine." She nodded, too rapidly, and forced herself to stop. "I just wondered." "Humans like to date," Khalil said thoughtfully. Then he turned decisive. "That is what we will do tomorrow. We will go on a date." Suddenly she was dying. She didn't know from what exactly: repressed laughter or mortification or perhaps a combination of both. She managed to articulate, "You don't dictate a date." "I do not see why not," said Khalil, his energy caressing hers with lazy amusement. He tapped her nose. "Humans require air. Breathe now." She did, and a snicker escaped. "If you order a date to happen, it's no longer a date. It becomes, I don't know, a meeting or kidnapping or something.

Who the hell came armed to rob a bookshop?

I think you’re rather lovely,” he said, startling himself. “I know I am,” Phoebe assured him. “But it’s always nice to be told so.

It’s impossible to eat onion soup with dignity, so please don’t try,” she remarked, which was embarrassing because he hadn’t been trying.

He looked smart and well groomed and rich, and his eyes were as raw and lonely and full of wishes as Will felt.

I know I had to do it: that was why I did it. I don’t stab people by accident.

You’re a bit of a mess, aren’t you?” “My friend, you have no idea.

Suffice to say I love Kim dearly, but ‘love’ means an awful lot of things. I think more people should understand that.

He'd been apprenticed to a joiner before the war, but that felt like decades ago: all he was good at now was killing people, which was discouraged.

In the meantime—and this is not a threat but a warning—I strongly suggest you stop playing with fire. You are swimming in deep waters, Mr. Darling." "Wouldn’t that put the fire out?

Will shrugged. “I’ll be voting Labour if this election comes about, and higher taxes and redistribution of wealth sound like good things to me. But I don’t like bombs, or blowing up civilians.

He was a treacherous river, murky and beautiful, hiding sharp rocks and beasts with teeth under the navy surface, and she was an innocent forest creature who slid on the slippery bank, trapped in the cutting waves until someone helped her. Or she helped herself.

Kim shut the door behind Norris at last, and Will heard the bolt go. He came back through the shop to where Will stood, face unreadable, eyes watchful, incongruous and beautiful in his scuffed black-and-white finery. Will stepped forward and shoved him against a bookcase.

My grateful nation wasn’t grateful enough to give me a job. I pawned my medals to keep a roof over my head and food in my belly, and I’ll tell you what, the Military Cross doesn’t fetch a great deal, no matter how many bars you have on it. The pawnbroker told me I should have tried for a Victoria Cross. That would be worth something, he said.

What do you want to talk about?" "I don't know. The football results? Politics. The pictures. Why the blazes you're called Kim when your name is Arthur." "My name, since you raise the topic, is Arthur Aloysius Kimberley de Brabazon Secretan. What would you do in my place?" "Leave the country," Will said wholeheartedly. "You poor bastard, you never stood a chance.

I might just be nervy.” “You are a terribly delicate flower.” “It’s the waiting,” Will said. “At least in the trenches, when they tapped you for a raid, you know it was happening and you got on with it.” “Scheduled mayhem is more convenient? I suppose you can put it in your diary. Work around it.” “‘Sorry, I’ve no time for a knife fight in the street on Thursday, could you make it Friday?

A slippery beast, grief slid under my skin and ran down my cheeks, stole the air from my lungs, burned the blood in my veins, and made my muscles ache, sucked the life out of me with each beat of my heart. This was a creature I had no way to fight, no weapon that would slay it. Some say faith was the weapon to fight grief, or maybe love . . . but I wasn’t sure there was anything truly strong enough to hold the monster off me.

When pioneers are pitted in the face of an antagonizing unknown, there is nothing worse than violence met against their fellow man. The unsurmountable danger comes not from the barrage of storms, nefarious creatures, or the torments of slippery sickness, but from what you hold dearest. Betrayal strikes at the heart, just as much as the soul. The loss of one’s humanity is an unjustifiable demise, the beginning of greater evils.

Through the dark he found his way to the Thing, to its mouth. He touched it softly, and it answered softly, kindly. He shivered and stood still. Then he began to feel it all over, ran his finger-tips along the slippery sides, embraced the carved legs, tried to get some conception of its shape and size, of the space it occupied in primeval night. It was cold and hard, and like nothing else in his black universe. He went back to its mouth, began at one end of the keyboard and felt his way down into the mellow thunder, as far as he could go. He seemed to know that it must be done with the fingers, not with the fists or the feet. He approached this highly artificial instrument through a mere instinct, and coupled himself to it, as if he knew it was to piece him out and make a whole creature of him. After he had tried over all the sounds, he began to finger out passages from things Miss Nellie had been practising, passages that were already his, that lay under the bone of his pinched, conical little skull, definite as animal desires.

Over this lip, as over a slippery threshold, we now slide into the mouth. Upon my word were I at Mackinaw, I should take this to be the inside of an Indian wigwam. Good Lord! is this the road that Jonah went? The roof is about twelve feet high, and runs to a pretty sharp angle, as if there were a regular ridge-pole there; while these ribbed, arched, hairy sides, present us with those wondrous, half vertical, scimitar-shaped slats of whalebone, say three hundred on a side, which depending from the upper part of the head or crown bone, form those Venetian blinds which have elsewhere been cursorily mentioned. The edges of these bones are fringed with hairy fibres, through which the Right Whale strains the water, and in whose intricacies he retains the small fish, when openmouthed he goes through the seas of brit in feeding time. In the central blinds of bone, as they stand in their natural order, there are certain curious marks, curves, hollows, and ridges, whereby some whalemen calculate the creature's age, as the age of an oak by its circular rings. Though

Alien monsters were pleasant and funny. One early and almost forgotten piece of history tells that Adam, in addition to naming all the sub-lunar creatures, also named the nine hundred and ninety-nine species of creatures who had their homes and nests above the moon, on other moons or trabants or asteroids or planets. And after they were named, the super-lunary creatures went back to their own places, with friendly memories of Earth, the ‘naming place’. So we do have nine hundred and ninety-nine alien species, monstrous but friendly, waiting to meet us again.

The Sentinel of Rain I am a creature who cooks on roofs, sleeps on roofs, livess on roofs. The unenlightened call me homeless; my inner circle know me as 'The Sentinel of Rain'. I know all there is to know about roofs: copper roofing, itchy; aluminium sheeting, noisy; precast concrete; dusty; ceramic tiles; slippery. I haven't had the pleasure of crashing on banana leave or straw roofs but I imagine them to be quite comfy, though pitched a bit steep to saunter about, and as for cooking dinner on, fuhgeddaboudit! Those roofs are as flammable as a cellulose nitrate print of The Blue Angel. Thank God I wasn't born in Southeast Asia or in the backward English countryside with their thatch roof cottages. It's good to be homeless in America. There are so many roof choices, the streets are virtually paved with dumpsters, stocked to the gills like the shelves of Walmart, and when it rains ~ and I'm the first to know, there's never an overpass too far to shelter me from nature's whims.

Plainly stated, I believe consciousness is an instinct. Many organisms, not just humans, come with it, ready-made. That is what instincts are, something organisms come with. Living things have an organization that allows life and ultimately consciousness to exist, even though they are made from the same materials as the non-living natural world that surrounds them. And instincts envelop organisms from bacteria to humans. Survival, sex, resilience, and walking are commonly thought to be instincts, but so, too, are more complex capacities such as language and sociality—all are instincts. The list is long, and we humans seem to have more instincts than other creatures. Yet there is something special about the consciousness instinct. It is no ordinary instinct. In fact, it seems so extraordinary that many think only we humans can lay claim to it. Even if that’s not the case, we want to know more about it. And because we all have it, we all think we have insight into it. As we will see, it is a slippery, complex instinct situated in the universe’s most impenetrable organ, the brain.

Up until the nineteenth century, the oyster was thought to be a simple primitive creature. We like to think this of the creatures we eat, especially the ones we pop into our mouths whole and raw. But it turns out that the oyster has a brain and a nervous system. In the words of the nineteenth-century British Darwinsist Thomas Huxley, ‘I suppose that when the sapid and slippery morsel – which is gone like a flash of gustatory summer lightning – glides along the palate, few people imagine that they are swallowing a piece of machinery (and going machinery) greatly more complicated than a watch.

All of the real original stories, all of the best stories, were first told by the animals. The bears were superb story-tellers; so were the deep-space geese (they took nine generations to make a migration, laying eggs on the space journey and hatching out of them on the space journey, for the summer-land of their migrations was not on Earth). The brindled cave-cats were very good story-tellers. Among the stories were well-established genre stories. The seals told under-water stories that they learned from river-and-ocean creatures; and the golden weasels, who really came from the moon, told all sorts of space stories. So the Neanderthals, who learned the stories from the animals, had a very good stock of tales.

These creatures, of course, have sex. Rolling and rollicking and robust sex, and sweaty and slippery and sticky sex, and trembling and quaking and tumultuous sex, and tender and tingling and transcendent sex. They have sex fingers to fingers. They have sex belly to belly. They have sex genital tubercle to genital tubercle. They /have/ sex. They do not have /a/ sex. In their erotic lives, they are not required to to act out their status in a category system – because there /is/ no category system. There are no sexes to belong to, so sex between creatures is free to be between genuine individuals – not representatives of a category. They have sex. They do not have a sex. Imagine life like that.

Salamanders are so very much the "other," cold, slimy creatures verging on repulsive to the warm-blooded Homo sapiens. Their startling otherness makes it all the more remarkable that we were here tonight in their defense. Amphibians offer few of the warm fuzzy feelings that fuel our protection of charismatic mammals that look back at us with Bambi's grateful eyes. They bring us face to face with our innate xenophobia, sometimes directed at other species and sometimes directed at our own, whether in this hollow or in deserts halfway around the globe. Being with salamanders gives honor to otherness, offers an antidote to the poison of xenophobia. Each time we rescue slippery, spotted beings we attest their right to be, to live in the sovereign territory of their own lives.

Calling it honour is putting ribbons on a pile of shit. It might look good, but it still stinks.

Don’t be a shit,” Kim said, and the worst part of that was he sounded entirely resigned, as though he expected Will to be a shit. “I’m not that bad, and you’re not that stupid.

Should I be taking you dancing?” “Not in those clothes. I’ve standards.

What I say is, one can be as moral as one likes but one should have the courtesy to do it in private, like any other bad habit.

I wonder if you’re a brave man, or a stupid one.

His father curled a finger toward him. “I have need of your gift.” “Why?” His Starborn abilities were little more than a sparkle of starlight in his palm. His shadow talents were the more interesting gift. Even the temperature monitors on the high-tech cameras in this city couldn’t detect him when he shadow-walked. His father held up the prism. “Direct a beam of your starlight through this.” Not waiting for an answer, his father again put an eye to the metal viewing contraption atop the prism. It ordinarily took Ruhn a good amount of concentration to summon his starlight, and it usually left him with a headache for hours afterward, but … He was intrigued enough to try. Setting his index finger onto the crystal of the prism, Ruhn closed his eyes and focused upon his breathing. Let the clicking metal of the orrery guide him down, down, down into the black pit within himself, past the churning well of his shadows, to the little hollow beneath them. There, curled upon itself like some hibernating creature, lay the single seed of iridescent light. He gently cupped it with a mental palm, stirring it awake as he carefully brought it upward, as if he were carrying water in his hands. Up through himself, the power shimmering with anticipation, warm and lovely and just about the only part of himself he liked. Ruhn opened his eyes to find the starlight dancing at his fingertip, refracting through the prism. His father adjusted a few dials on the device, jotting down notes with his other hand. The starlight seed became slippery, disintegrating into the air around them. “Just another moment,” the king ordered. Ruhn gritted his teeth, as if it’d somehow keep the starlight from dissolving. Another click of the device, and another jotted note in an ancient, rigid hand. The Old Language of the Fae—his father recorded everything in the half-forgotten language their people had used when they had first come to Midgard through the Northern Rift. The starlight shivered, flared, and faded into nothing. The Autumn King grunted in annoyance, but Ruhn barely heard it over his pounding head. He’d mastered himself enough to pay attention as his father finished his notes. “What are you even doing with that thing?” “Studying how light moves through the world. How it can be shaped.” “Don’t we have scientists over at CCU doing this shit?” “Their interests are not the same as mine.” His father

[...] honour was the lie they told to get us out there. Nobody should have gone.

He held her a moment longer, allowing the merhorse to become accustomed to her. "How do I steer?" she asked. "You don't," he said. "She steers. You ride." He then released her. Instinctively, she leaned forward and grabbed onto Sian's mane as the merhorse lunged away from the rocks. Sea spray and wind spattered Kiela's face. The merhorse picked up speed, jumping through the waves like a dolphin. Kiela clung to her mane, feeling as if she were holding on to seaweed, slippery but soft. She let out a shriek as Sian leaped over the top of a large cresting wave, and then she laughed as they sailed down the other side. She'd never felt anything like this. It was terrifying. And wonderful. She felt as if her blood had become the wind, and her breath had become the sea spray. She tasted salt, and she tasted freedom. Both were glorious.

In the headlights of the truck, I saw small animals popping out of the ground everywhere. Steve leaped out of the truck excitedly and motioned me over to get a close-up look at the creatures emerging from the mud. “Cycloranas,” Steve said, “water-holding frogs.” He explained that these frogs would burrow into the ground and then cover themselves with a membrane that would hold in water. They wouldn’t pee, and none of their bodily fluids would evaporate. They could remain underground for weeks, months, or even years, until the next rain hit. “Then they emerge up from their tiny tombs, lost their membrane, and are good as gold,” Steve said, marveling. “They’re ready now to reproduce and feed and do their own thing.” It was an epic task to get the camera out and set up the waterproof gear to film the cycloranas. The rain finally broke, and Steve was able to film a scene. We had been driving all day, out in the rain, changing flat tires from the debris on the track. Steve even had to repair the fence when the crew’s truck slid sideways across the slippery mud, knocking a neat hole in one section. Everybody was beyond exhausted. No matter how hard Steve tried, he couldn’t get his words right. He couldn’t properly explain how the frogs could go so long without water. “Membranes” became “mum-branes,” “water-filled” was “water-flood.” We were all getting frustrated. John said, exasperated, “Just give us something really concise.” I whispered two words into Steve’s ear. He turned to the camera. “Water…nah,” he said. The whole crew cracked up. Two words to sum up the water-holding frog.

My enemies closed in. The fight was seconds away from starting, and probably as many seconds away from finishing. I had nowhere to go. They came closer. I made a colossal decision: I would not put up a fight. I would not take it like a man. I would not take it like a battler. Look, I know people like reading about those outclassed in strength who make up for it in spirit, like my uncle Terry. Respected are those who go down fighting, right? But those noble creatures still get a heavy clobbering, and I didn’t want a clobbering of any kind. . Also, I remembered something Dad had taught me in one of our table kitchen classes. He said, ‘Listen, Jasper. Pride is the first thing you need to do away with in life. It’s there to make you feel good about yourself. It’s like putting a suit on a shrivelled carrot and taking it out to the theatre and pretending it’s someone important. The first step in self- liberation is to be free of self- respect. I understand why it’s useful for some. When people have nothing, they can still have their pride. That’s why the poor were given the myth of nobility, because the cupboards were bare. Are you listening to me? This is important, Jasper. I don’t want you to have anything to do with nobility, pride, or self- respect. They’re tools to help you bronze your own head.’ I sat on the ground with my legs crossed. I didn’t even straighten my back. I slouched. They had to bend down to punch me in the jaw. the whole 21 One of them got on his knees to do it. They took turns. They tried to get me to my feet; I let my body go limp. One of them had to hold me up, but I had become slippery and slid greasily through their fingers back onto the ground. I was still taking a beating, and my head was stunned by strong fists pounding at it, but the pummelling was sloppy, confused. Eventually my plan worked: they gave up. They asked what was wrong with me. They asked me why I wouldn’t fight back. Maybe the truth was I was too busy fighting back tears to be fighting back people, but I didn’t say anything. They spat at me and then left me to contemplate the colour of my own blood. Against the white of my shirt, it was a luminous red.

[...] it was hard to identify that look. It held something of the expression you saw in church sometimes, when people were lost in the invisible, and the pain in their minds was edged with hope.

Isabella did not lack for occupation, and had plenty of projects between the embellishment of her art collection and, during Francesca’s absences, the running of Mantua. The worsening situation as Cesare Borgia greedily took the weaker Romagnal states, as well as there being two French invasions, had left Isabella as regent of her husband’s small but important state for much of her married life. During that critical period, which required supreme diplomacy, she feared that her husband, a creature not gifted with the necessary slippery talents, could cause real harm to the couple and their state with one of his ill-tempered and overly frank outbursts.

He’d been apprenticed to a joiner before the war, but that felt like decades ago: all he was good at now was killing people, which was discouraged.

They are driven by staggering greed at the top and fanatic idealism below, and between greed and fanaticism people can justify anything.

If you’d listened to a word I’d said at any point in the last weeks, it would now be held securely,” Kim snapped. “It’s a pity you’re constitutionally incapable of that.

Kim rolled his eyes. “Oh, please. You know who you are, and you wear it well. I really don’t know why you listen to me.” “Nor do I, you corkscrew-tongued bastard. Jesus wept. You could open wine bottles with that.

It would help if you were more reliably unreliable. At least I’d know where I stood.

It could be the start of a story or the end of one, Will thought, as they headed out together into the cold, dark street. It could be a farewell, or the foundation of a friendship. It could be an awkward drink in a crowded pub with an upper-class man wound tighter than a neurasthenic’s pocket watch, or just possibly something else entirely, something precious and fragile that Will didn’t want to look at straight on in case he jinxed it. It could be anything. He might as well find out what.

And here he was now in his own bookshop, well fed, usefully busy, and enjoyably partnered. It made the violent assault and threat of torture seem quite worthwhile.

Libra smiled. It gave Will the impression he'd sent off a postal order for a booklet on Smiling for Beginners.

Britain was full of men like him, trying to find something to do in a country that had managed perfectly well without them.

He liked walls the color of some creature's muted underside or the soft inner petal of a plant, slippery leather banquettes and a silky curl of gravlax served on a slick white plate.

This book contains references to a pandemic and the spread of infectious disease.

I got my medals for hand to hand fighting. It’s when you take the personal out of it—the barrage from miles away, the machine guns—that it becomes slaughter.

Maybe Kim would, maybe he wouldn’t: Will could wait and see. In the meantime, he still had his right hand and someone to think about, plus a sense of exciting possibilities that he hadn’t felt in so long he’d almost forgotten what it was like. A fuck, a fight, a friendship: he’d take any or all.

callipygous

He tried not to curse his uncle for administrative incompetence, but it was difficult.

A creature--a frightfully, awful creature--was mere feet from her. Its eyes were enormous, the size of goose eggs and milky white. Its gray, slippery skin was stretched taut upon its face. Its mouth was wide and full of needle teeth. Its hands rested on the rock, hands that were webbed and huge with each finger ending in a sharp, curved nail. It was as tall as a human man, yet oddly shrunken and hunched.