Stone Mattress Quotes

There’s only so long you can feel sorry for a person before you come to feel that their affliction is an act of malice committed by them against you.

Betrayal was a stone beneath a mattress of thr bed you shared, something you felt digging into you no matter how you shifted position. What was the point of being able to forgive, when deep down, you both had to admit you'd never forget?

It’s a lifelong failing: she has never been prepared. But how can you have a sense of wonder if you’re prepared for everything? Prepared for the sunset. Prepared for the moonrise. Prepared for the ice storm. What a flat existence that would be.

Money does talk, but it has a limited vocabulary.

Experiences were what you got when you couldn’t get what you wanted.

He drowned his sorrows, though like other drowned things they had a habit of floating to the surface when least expected.

His touch both consoles and devastates me; I feel my heart pulse, then wither, naked as a stone on the roaring mattress while the lovely, moony night slides through the window to dapple the flanks of this innocent who makes cages to keep the sweet birds in. Eat me, drink me; thirsty, cankered, goblin-ridden, I go back and back to him to have his fingers strip the tattered skin away and clothe me in his dress of water, this garment that drenches me, its slithering odour, its capacity for drowning.

But how can you have a sense of wonder if you’re prepared for everything?

The beauty is an illusion, and also a warning: there’s a dark side to beauty, as with poisonous butterflies.

You believed you could transcend the body as you aged, she tells herself. You believed you could rise above it, to a serene, nonphysical realm. But it’s only through ecstasy you can do that, and ecstasy is achieved through the body itself. Without the bone and sinew of wings, no flight. Without that ecstasy you can only be dragged further down by the body, into its machinery. Its rusting, creaking, vengeful, brute machinery.

According to Tobias, women hang around longer because they’re less capable of indignation and better at being humiliated, for what is old age but one long string of indignities? What person of integrity would put up with it?

From this distance it does resemble fun. Fun is not knowing how it will end.

But how can you have a sense of wonder if you’re prepared for everything? Prepared for the sunset. Prepared for the moonrise. Prepared for the ice storm. What a flat existence that would be.

She's not extravagant or greedy, she tells herself: all she ever wanted was to be protected by layer upon layer of kind, soft, insulating money, so that nobody and nothing could get close enough to harm her.

When demons are required someone will always be found to supply the part, and whether you step forward or are pushed is all the same in the end.

According to Tobias, it was more difficult to seduce a stupid woman than an intelligent one because stupid women could not understand innuendo or even connect cause with effect.

How strange to remember typewriters, with their jammed keys and snarled ribbons and the smudgy carbon paper for copies.

What is a stromatolite? he asks rhetorically, his eyes gleaming. The word comes from the Greek stroma, a mattress, coupled with the root word for “stone.” Stone mattress: a fossilized cushion, formed by layer upon layer of blue-green algae building up into a mound or dome. It was this very same blue-green algae that created the oxygen they are now breathing. Isn’t that astonishing?

she doesn’t want to begin, she wants to continue. No: she wants to go back.

What is it about winter that causes people to drive as if their hands are feet?

all she ever wanted was to be protected by layer upon layer of kind, soft, insulating money,

there are some things that do not fare well in high definition.

Sex was a given, like food, and as such was to be relished when excellent and derided when substandard; it was an entertainment, like the theatre, and could thus be reviewed like a performance.

Katar," said Britta, "I thought you would want to stay with your friends from home while they were here, so I had your things moved from your room in the delegates' wing." "You can have my things brought in too," said Peder, throwing himself onto the nearest bed. He sighed as he sank into the soft mattress and rolled onto his side. "Um... I don't think boys are-" Britta began. "Don't you mind me!" Peder pulled a blanket over his head. Miri didn't know how he could even pretend to fall asleep. She could barely keep from pacing. "Don't worry, Britta," said Esa. "We'll kick him out before night. Off to your fancy apprenticeship, big brother." She nudged Peder's shape under the blanket. Peder made an exaggerated snoring noise.

When it came to love, wasn't believing the same as the real thing?

White clouds gather and billow. Thin grass does for a mattress, The blue sky makes a good quilt. Happy with a stone underhead Let heaven and earth go about their changes.

Constance did not have a bun. She didn’t need one. She more or less was a bun: neat and contained, and then so tumultuous when unleashed.

Lighting a fire is an act of renewal, of beginning, and she doesn't want to begin, she wants to continue. No: she wants to go back.

Harry didn’t know which was worse — people telling him he’d be brilliant or people telling him they’d be running around underneath him holding a mattress.

The subliterary fiction she was churning out was many decades away from being in any way respectable. There was a small group that confessed to reading The Lord of the Rings, though you had to justify it through an interest in Old Norse.

Girls did that then – knocked themselves out to support some man’s notion of his own genius. What was Gavin doing to help pay the rent? Not much, though she suspected him of dealing pot on the side. Once in a while they even smoked some of that, though not often, because it made Constance cough. It was all very romantic.

Of late the three of them wouldn’t even let him dry the dishes because he’d dropped too many of them on the floor. He’d done that on purpose, since it was useful to be considered inept when it came to chore division,

The freezing rain sifts down, handfuls of shining rice thrown by some unseen celebrant. Wherever it hits, it crystallizes into a granulated coating of ice.

Guess it’s the climate change,” says Sam. That’s what people say, the way they used to say, We’ve angered God.

At the outset Verna had not intended to kill anyone.

It was only a dream. It was only a larval poem. —

Encyclopedia-selling was known to be the last resort of the feckless, the inept, and the desperate

Even guppies have their opacities.

As his editor put it, “Yeah, it’s a piece of shit, but it’s good shit.

She wants to jig and amble, she wants to lisp, she wants to suck the last slurp of essence out of his almost-voided cranium. Avaunt, wanton!

He feels like saying that of course there’s lint on Mr. Wiggly, or dust at any rate, or maybe rust; what does she expect, because as she is well aware Mr. Wiggly has been on the shelf for some time.

Why couldn’t the two of them have gone on and on forever? Himself and Constance, sun and moon, each one of them shining, though in different ways. Instead of which he’s here, forsaken by her, abandoned. In time, which fails to sustain him. In space, which fails to cradle him.

Charis disapproves of crass words like shit. Roz has offered poop, but Charis rejected it as too babyish. Her alimentary canal products? Tony has suggested. No, that sounds too coldly intellectual, said Charis. Her Gifts to the Earth.

It's a lifelong failing: she has never been prepared. But how can you have a sense of wonder if you're prepared for everything? Prepared for the sunset. Prepared for the moonrise. Prepared for the ice storm. What a flat existence that would be.

With a room of his own, a room at the top, he could proffer a temporary refuge to some lovely, fatigued, world-weary, sophisticated, black-turtlenecked, heavily-eyelinered girl he might lure up the stairs into his newspaper-strewn boudoir and onto his Indian-bedspreaded bed with the promise of artistic talk about the craft of writing, and the throes and torments of creation, and the need for integrity, and the temptations of selling out, and the nobility of resisting such temptations, and so forth. A promise offered with a hint of self-mockery in case such a girl might think he was pompous and cocksure and full of himself. Which he was, because at that age you have to be that way in order to crawl out of bed in the morning and sustain your faith in your own illusory potential for the next twelve hours of being awake.

It’s wonderful to hear his voice, even if she can’t depend on having any sort of a conversation with him. His interventions tend to be one-sided: if she answers him, he doesn’t often answer back. But it was always more or less like that between them.

She breathes in the cold air; pellets of blown ice whip against her face. The wind’s getting up, as the TV said it would. Nonetheless there’s something brisk about being out in the storm, something energizing: it whisks away the cobwebs, it makes you inhale.

Languor is a more efficient method of control.

In Tin’s already jaded view, experiences were what you got when you couldn’t get what you wanted, but Jorrie had always been more optimistic than him.

Everyone likes to think they are doing good while at the same time pocketing a bag of cash,

Malum quidem nullum esse sine aliquo bono, Tin noted in the journal he was sporadically keeping then. Every cloud has a silver lining.

She was so pliable. He could do anything with her, arrange her as he pleased, and she would say yes. Not just yes. Oh yes!

A rebuke, a palpable rebuke! How dare she? He was already middle-aged when she was born! He could have been her father! He could have been her child molester!

Florida’s not the hick town you keep saying it is,” says Reynolds. “Times have changed; they’ve got good universities now and a great book festival! Thousands of people come to it!

he hasn’t yet taken to crapping on the carpet and destroying the furniture and whining for meals, but close.

so hard, sometimes, to tag those memories accurately.

It’s astonishing how folks can get so worked up over something that doesn’t exist.

What were prizes but one more level of control imposed on Art by the establishment?

With the young writers now it’s F and C all day long, which he, personally, finds boring.

She would rather see for herself; she doesn't trust Tobias to interpret; she suspects him of holding things back.

It’s as if some bored theatrical costume designer got drunk behind the scenes and raided the storage boxes:

Poems are made of words. They aren’t boxes. They aren’t houses. Nobody is in them, really.

it was a form of compliment, she felt, since it made her the focus of his attention.

The hair compromise he finally agreed to is a white strip on the left side – geriatric punk, he’d whispered to himself – with, recently, the addition of an arresting scarlet patch. The total image is that of an alarmed skunk trapped in the floodlights after an encounter with a ketchup bottle.

Gavin has tried quoting Yeats to the effect that women must labour to be beautiful, but Reynolds--who used to be a passionate Yeats fan--is now of the opinion that Yeats is entitled to his point of view, but that was then and social attitudes were different then, and in actual fact Yeats is dead.

I should have married Constance,” he says. That’s his ace: plonk! Right down on the table. Those five words are usually very effective: he might score a barrage of hostility, and maybe even some tears.

Calling a piece of short fiction a “tale” removes it at least slightly from the realm of mundane works and days, as it evokes the world of the folk tale, the wonder tale, and the long-ago teller of tales.

However she tried to hide it, she resented me, of course. There's only so long you can feel sorry for a person before you come to feel that their affliction is an act of malice committed by them against you.

He was a dork, a dink, a dong… Why should the male member be used as a term of abuse? No man hated his own dorkdinkdong, quite the opposite. But maybe it was an affront that any other man had one. That must be the truth.

Does she ever see him watching her through the picture window? Most likely. Does she think he’s a lecherous old man? Very probably. But he isn’t exactly that. How to convey the mix of longing, wistfulness, and muted regret that he feels? His regret is that he isn’t a lecherous old man, but he wishes he were. He wishes he still could be.

Jack quit his advertising job and devoted himself to the life of the pen. Or rather, to the life of the Remington, soon to be replaced with an IBM Selectric, with the bouncing ball that let you change the typeface. Now that was cool!

Betrayal was a stone beneath the mattress of the bed you shared, something you felt digging into you no matter how you shifted position. "What was the point of being able to forgive, when deep down, you both had to admit you'd never forget?

there are some things that do not fare well in high definition. She resents the pores, the wrinkles, the nose hairs, the impossibly whitened teeth shoved right up in front of your eyes so you can’t ignore them the way you would in real life.

By contrast, no one in Alphinland ever demanded a blowjob. But then, no one in Alphinland had a toilet either. Toilets weren’t necessary. Why waste time on that kind of routine bodily function when there were giant scorpions invading the castle?

The Dead Hand, yeah, it was, like, seminal, but tame by today’s standards. Violet, for instance, did not get her intestines ripped out. There wasn’t any torture, nobody’s liver got fried in a pan, there wasn’t any gang rape. So what’s the fun of that?

Their mother died early, and not in a good way. Not that anyone dies in a good way, Tin footnotes to himself, but there are degrees. Being hit by a truck after closing time while jaywalking blinded with mournful tears was not a good way. Though it was quick.

And the vampires. You used to know where you stood with them – smelly, evil, undead – but now there are virtuous vampires and disreputable vampires, and sexy vampires and glittery vampires, and none of the old rules about them are true any more. Once you could depend on garlic, and on the rising sun, and on crucifixes. You could get rid of the vampires once and for all. But not any more.

She breathes in the cold air; pellets of blown ice whip against her face. The wind’s getting up, as the TV said it would. Nonetheless there’s something brisk about being out in the storm, something energizing: it whisks away the cobwebs, it makes you inhale. The

She’s wearing her hair in a bun, like a ballerina’s. Buns are so sexy. They used to be a treat to take apart: it was like opening a gift. Heads with the hair pulled back into buns are so elegant and confined, so maidenish; then the undoing, the dishevelment, the wildness of the freed hair, spilling down the shoulders, over the breasts, over the pillow. He enumerates in his head: Buns I have known.

the pores, the wrinkles, the nose hairs, the impossibly whitened teeth shoved right up in front of your eyes so you can’t ignore them the way you would in real life. It’s like being forced to act as someone else’s bathroom mirror, the magnifying kind: seldom a happy experience, those mirrors.

Nor does she attend conventions any more: she’s seen enough kids dressed up like vampires and bunnies and Star Trek, and especially like the nastier villains of Alphinland. She really can’t bear one more inept impersonation of Milzreth of the Red Hand – yet another apple-cheeked innocent in quest of his inner wickedness.

She’s taken to renaming him according to her own analysis of his mood of the day, or his mood of the hour, or his mood of the minute: according to her, he’s moody. Each mood is personified and given an honorific, so he’s Mr. Grumpy, Mr. Sleepy, Dr. Ironic, Sir Sardonic, and sometimes, when she’s being sarcastic or possibly nostalgic, Mr. Romantic.

a killing was exactly what he didn’t want to make because to make a killing you had to kill, and he lacked the killer instinct.

Man kann nur eine bestimmte Zeit lang Mitleid haben mit einem Menschen; irgendwann bekommt man das Gefühl, sein Leiden sei ein bewusster Akt der Böswilligkeit.

Because hasn't she spent most of her life just watching?

She winged

She’d given up faking it – no more cardboard moaning – so the act would take place in eerie silence, enclosed in a pink, sickly sweet aura of fabric softener.

She says the clogs are comfortable, and that comfort trumps fashion as far as she’s concerned. Gavin has tried quoting Yeats to the effect that women must labour to be beautiful, but Reynolds – who used to be a passionate Yeats fan – is now of the opinion that Yeats is entitled to his point of view, but that was then and social attitudes were different, and in actual fact Yeats is dead. Reynolds

The priest was bribed; in addition to that, we appealed to his sense of compassion. Everyone likes to think they are doing good while at the same time pocketing a bag of cash, and our priest was no exception.

She wouldn’t be afraid of vampires as such: being rash and curious, she’d be the first into the forbidden crypt. But she wouldn’t like the thought of Tin turning into one, or turning into anyone other than her idea of him. Meanwhile,

And presently I was shaking hands with both of them in the street, the sloping street, and everything was whirling and flying before the approaching white deluge, and a truck with a mattress from Philadelphia was confidently rolling down to an empty house, and dust was running and writhing over the exact slab of stone where Charlotte, when they lifted the laprobe for me, had been revealed, curled up, her eyes intact, their black lashes still wet, matted, like yours, Lolita.

After lunch, there's a lecture on walruses. There are rumours of rogue walruses that prey on seals, puncturing them with their tusks, then sucking out the fat with their powerful mouths. The women on either side are knitting. One of them says, "Liposuction." The other laughs.

As they entered November, the weather turned very cold. The mountains around the school became icy gray and the lake like chilled steel. Every morning the ground was covered in frost. Hagrid could be seen from the upstairs windows defrosting broomsticks on the Quidditch field, bundled up in a long moleskin overcoat, rabbit fur gloves, and enormous beaverskin boots. The Quidditch season had begun. On Saturday, Harry would be playing in his first match after weeks of training: Gryffindor versus Slytherin. If Gryffindor won, they would move up into second place in the House Championship. Hardly anyone had seen Harry play because Wood had decided that, as their secret weapon, Harry should be kept, well, secret. But the news that he was playing Seeker had leaked out somehow, and Harry didn’t know which was worse — people telling him he’d be brilliant or people telling him they’d be running around underneath him holding a mattress. It was really lucky that Harry now had Hermione as a friend. He didn’t know how he’d have gotten through all his homework without her, what with all the last-minute Quidditch practice Wood was making them do. She had also lent him Quidditch Through the Ages, which turned out to be a very interesting read.

There's a classic iceberg on the port side, with a centre so blue it looks dyed, and ahead of them is a mirage--a fata morgana, towering like an ice castle on the horizon, completely real except for the faint shimmering of its edges. Sailors have been lured to their death by those; they've drawn mountains on maps where no mountains were.

This room has only a little window high up with bars on the inside, and a straw-filled mattress. There’s a crust of bread on a tin plate, and a stone crock of water, and a wooden bucket with nothing in it which is there for a chamber pot. I was put in a room like this before they sent me away to the Asylum. I told them I wasn’t mad, that I wasn’t the one, but they wouldn’t listen.

Things are getting out of hand: Tony finds herself channeling this opinion at least once a day. The crazed weather. The vicious, hate-filled politics. The myriad glass high-rises going up like 3-D mirrors, or siege engines. The municipal garbage collection: Who can keep all those different-coloured bins straight? Where to put the clear plastic food containers, and why isn't the little number on the bottom a reliable guide? And the vampires. You used to know where you stood with them--smelly, evil,undead--but now there are virtuous vampires and disreputable vampires, and sexy vampires and glittery vampires, and none of the old rules about them are true any more. Once you could depend on garlic, and on the rising sun, and on crucifixes. You could get rid of the vampires once and for all. But not any more.

Yes,I was thinking about a nap,then..." He shrugged and glanced away. He didn't have to wait long. "Oh,dear! The mattress was too lumpy, wasn't it?" Her rich voice lowered with false compassion. "I'm so sorry about that. Red refuses to purchase new mattress ticking when-" "You misunderstood," Dougal said. "I didn't intend to take a nap, just to rest. However, the bed was so comfortable that I fell asleep anyway." Sophia opened her mouth,then closed it. She'd spent hours stuffing his feather mattress with straw, wood chips, stones,and sticks. How could he posibly have slept? "How...how fortunate for you.My bed is as hard as a rock." He leaned forward, so close that his lapel brushed her cheek, the scent of sandalwood engulfing her as he whispered in her ear, "Perhaps you need another opinion...about your bed.

electrical wires dragged down by the weight of the ice and flickering balefully, a row of sleet-covered planes stranded in an airport, a huge truck that’s jackknifed and tipped over and is lying on its side with smoke coming out. An ambulance is on the scene, a fire truck, a huddle of raingear-clad operatives: someone’s been injured, always a sight to make the heart beat faster. A policeman appears, crystals of ice whitening his moustache; he pleads sternly with people to stay inside. It’s no joke, he tells the viewers. Don’t think you can brave the elements! His frowning, frosted eyebrows are noble, like those on the wartime bond-drive posters from the 1940s. Constance remembers those, or believes she does. But she may just be remembering history books or museum displays or documentary films: so hard, sometimes, to tag those memories accurately. Finally, a minor touch of pathos: a stray dog is displayed, semi-frozen, wrapped in a child’s pink nap blanket. A gelid baby

(From Chapter 9: Hearts and Gizzards) I’m lying on the hard and narrow bed, on the mattress made of coarse ticking, which is what they call the covering of a mattress, though why do they call it that as it is not a clock. The mattress is filled with dry straw that crackles like a fire when I turn over, and when I shift it whispers to me, hush hush. It’s dark as a stone in this room, and hot as a roasting heart; if you stare into the darkness with your eyes open you are sure to see something after a time. I hope it will not be flowers. But this is the time they like to grow, the red flowers, the shining red peonies which are like satin, which are like splashes of paint. The soil for them is emptiness, it is empty space and silence. I whisper, Talk to me; because I would rather have talking than the slow gardening that takes place in silence, with the red satin petals dripping down the wall. I think I sleep. [...] I’m outside, at night. There are the trees, there is the pathway, and the snake fence with half a moon shining, and my bare feet on the gravel. But when I come around to the front of the house, the sun is just going down; and the white pillars of the house are pink, and the white peonies are glowing red in the fading light. My hands are numb, I can’t feel the ends of my fingers. There’s the smell of fresh meat, coming up from the ground and all around, although I told the butcher we wanted none. On the palm of my hand there’s a disaster. I must have been born with it. I carry it with me wherever I go. When he touched me, the bad luck came off on him. I think I sleep. I wake up at cock crow and I know where I am. I’m in the parlour. I’m in the scullery. I’m in the cellar. I’m in my cell, under the coarse prison blanket, which I likely hemmed myself. We make everything we wear or use here, awake or asleep; so I have made this bed, and now I am lying in it.

My dear Marwan, in the long summers of childhood, when I was a boy the age you are now, your uncles and I spread our mattress on the roof of your grandfathers’ farmhouse outside of Hom. We woke in the mornings to the stirring of olive trees in the breeze, to the bleating of your grandmother's goat, the clanking of her cooking pots, the air cool and the sun a pale rim of persimmon to the east. We took you there when you were a toddler. I have a sharply etched memory of your mother from that trip. I wish you hadn’t been so young. You wouldn't have forgotten the farmhouse, the soot of its stone walls, the creek where your uncles and I built a thousand boyhood dams. I wish you remembered Homs as I do, Marwan. In its bustling Old City, a mosque for us Muslims, a church for our Christian neighbours, and a grand souk for us all to haggle over gold pendants and fresh produce and bridal dresses. I wish you remembered the crowded lanes smelling of fried kibbeh and the evening walks we took with your mother around Clock Tower Square. But that life, that time, seems like a dream now, even to me, like some long-dissolved rumour. First came the protests. Then the siege. The skies spitting bombs. Starvation. Burials. These are the things you know You know a bomb crater can be made into a swimming hole. You have learned dark blood is better news than bright. You have learned that mothers and sisters and classmates can be found in narrow gaps between concrete, bricks and exposed beams, little patches of sunlit skin shining in the dark. Your mother is here tonight, Marwan, with us, on this cold and moonlit beach, among the crying babies and the women worrying in tongues we don’t speak. Afghans and Somalis and Iraqis and Eritreans and Syrians. All of us impatient for sunrise, all of us in dread of it. All of us in search of home. I have heard it said we are the uninvited. We are the unwelcome. We should take our misfortune elsewhere. But I hear your mother's voice, over the tide, and she whispers in my ear, ‘Oh, but if they saw, my darling. Even half of what you have. If only they saw. They would say kinder things, surely.' In the glow of this three-quarter moon, my boy, your eyelashes like calligraphy, closed in guileless sleep. I said to you, ‘Hold my hand. Nothing bad will happen.' These are only words. A father's tricks. It slays your father, your faith in him. Because all I can think tonight is how deep the sea, and how powerless I am to protect you from it. Pray God steers the vessel true, when the shores slip out of eyeshot and we are in the heaving waters, pitching and tilting, easily swallowed. Because you, you are precious cargo, Marwan, the most precious there ever was. I pray the sea knows this. Inshallah. How I pray the sea knows this.