The Weight Of Ink Quotes

In the end mortals always expired before faeries. They were such finite creatures. Their first heartbeat and breath were but a blink from death. To add the weight of nourishing his insatiable court in a time of peace was to hasten that unconscionably.

She adjusted her body weight and caught his eyes, her gaze shiny and with a tinge of sadness. “My grandmother told me once that the world is filled with ghosts. The longer we live the more ghosts will haunt us.” She paused glancing at her palms. “But they’re here to remind us we are alive. That our hearts beat, blood runs through our veins, we breath air into our lungs.

Never underestimate the passion of a lonely mind.

People go through life trying to please some audience. But once you realize there’s no audience, life is simple. It’s just doing what you know in your gut is right.

Jack kissed him so carefully that August thought he would fall to pieces. Kissed him with the weight of knowing the price of risk. Then he gazed back at August like his heart was already breaking. It was the same face that Jack had made on the roof, in the middle of the night, when they rolled in the grass, when he sat back with August’s blood and ink on his hands, when his face was lit orange with flames, when he’d opened the door to Rina’s room, when he stared across the gym at the homecoming dance, when he pulled him from the river and breathed him back to life. Jack had been waiting. He’d been trying. He was scared. There were tears in his eyes and it took August’s breath away.

A definition of loneliness surfaced in his mind: when you suddenly understand that the story of your life isn’t what you thought it was.

Love must be, then, an act of truth-telling, a baring of mind and spirit just as ardent as the baring of the body. Truth and passion were one, and each impossible without the other.

Our life is a walk in the night, we know not how great the distance to the dawn that awaits us. And the path is strewn with stumbling blocks and our bodies are grown tyrannous with weeping yet we lift our feet. We lift our feet.

Jane, as we mentioned earlier, loved books. There was nothing she relished more than the weight of a hefty tome in her hands, each beautiful volume of knowledge as rare and wonderful and fascinating as the last. She delighted in the smell of the ink, the rough feel of the paper between her fingers, the rustle of sweet pages, the shapes of the letters before her eyes. And most of all, she loved the way that books could transport her from her otherwise mundane and stifling life and offer the experiences of a hundred other lives. Through books she could see the world.

Never underestimate the passion of a lonely mind.

I got through so much ink in the learning that the inkseller took to knocking at least once a week on the garden door. He had a gray solemn face that looked as if it was chiseled out of stone; he was stooped down like the letter C, as if he were Atlas carrying the weight of the world in his wooden barrel of ink. Maybe he did. I have learned that there is great power in words, no matter how long or short they be.

You’re American,” she said simply. “You think straightforwardness is a virtue.

But I felt the weight of those inked dreams of people now dead and buried. I felt them as if I had embraced a millstone.

For every loyalty, whether to self or community, does impose a blindness, and each love does threaten to blur vision, as few can bear to see truth if it harm that which is dear to us.

All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world: but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World. Look at yon butterfly. If it swallowed all Hell, Hell would not be big enough to do it any harm or to have any taste' 'It seems big enough when you're in it, Sir.' 'And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies, and itchings that it contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good. If all Hell's miseries together entered the consciousness of yon wee yellow bird on the bough there, they would be swallowed up without trace, as if one drop of ink had been dropped into that Great Ocean to which your terrestrial Pacific is only a molecule' 'I see,' said I at last. 'She couldn't fit into Hell.

I don’t think anyone had ever written me a letter before. It was shockingly effective. Way better than text or email, like it had a different weight to it or something. There’s something about holding the paper in your hand, seeing the ink on the page, the press of the pen. He made this. It took effort. It was a physical act. He couldn’t erase it if he made a mistake, he had to think about what he was going to say before he said it—or he said exactly what he wanted to and didn’t need to change it.

There was a library and it is ashes. Let its long length assemble. Than its stone walls its paper walls are thicker; armoured with learning, with philosophy, with poetry that drifts or dances clamped though it is in midnight. Shielded with flax and calfskin and a cold weight of ink, there broods the ghost of Sepulchrave, the melancholy Earl, seventy-sixth lord of half-light.

Do you wonder, ever,” said Ester quietly, “whether our own will alters anything? Or whether we’re determined to be as we are by the very working of the world?

She'd spent the decades barricading herself from life, setting the conditions for love so high no one else could ever meet them. Few, in fact, had made any effort. It was a simple thing, in the end, to hide in plain sight. The world did not prevent you from becoming what you were determined to become.

That he had not the slightest idea who he was without praise, without steady advancement toward a degree and title, without organized competition for some elite goal?

If you find a way to live as you wish, unnatural though it might be, you’ll carry on your shoulders the weight of a thousand wives’ wishes. Though aloud all may curse you as a very devil.

I love you,” I whispered into his suit. My words had life, and weight, and a pulse. I said them again. “I love you, Dad. I love you. I love you. I love you.” He lifted me up like I was a little girl, spinning me in place and burying his nose in my hair. Tears rolled down our faces. The pen bled the last of its ink, marking this page in our lives forever in my father’s office. I knew, with certainty that made my heart swell, that he was not going to replace that carpet. He was going to look at it every day, remember the day it had happened, and cherish it. “I love you, too, baby girl.

Frustrated with drawing, I switched to the printmaking department, where I overturned great buckets of ink. After trying my hand at sculpture, I attempted pottery. During class critiques the teacher would lift my latest project from the table and I’d watch her arm muscles strain and tighten against the weight. With their thick, clumsy bases, my mugs weighed in at close to five pounds each. The color was muddy and the lips rough and uninviting. I gave my mother a matching set for Christmas, and she accepted them as graciously as possible, announcing that they would make the perfect pet bowls. The mugs were set on the kitchen floor and remained there until the cat chipped a tooth and went on a hunger strike.

The greatest act of love—indeed, the only religion she could comprehend—was to speak the truth about the world. Love must be, then, an act of truth-telling, a baring of mind and spirit just as ardent as the baring of the body. Truth and passion were one, and each impossible without the other.

woman must have a heart made of something tougher, or she dies when a first blow comes.

I understand why we sleep. To slip the knot of the world.

And she thought: don’t trust love unless you can see what it costs the lover.

The saving of a life is equal in merit to the saving of the world. So it is said, he who saves one life saves a world. Yet if this was so, then what exactly was meant by world? Were there worlds of different size and merit? Or was the world of one soul as capacious as the world that contained all of creation—infinite, even? Was Ester’s world, peopled by her parents and her brother, equal to all the others God had created?

I don’t think I’m strong enough,” Aaron said. Slowly the steam faded from the pub’s windows. Helen was staring across the street as well. She said, “How do you think people get strong?

She had devoted her life to remembering. And yet she’d failed. She had, somewhere across the years, forgotten what she’d once understood. What Ester Velasquez had understood. That desire was the only truth worth following.

She had seen early in life that there was none in this world to audit one's soul. A man could deform himself into the most miserable of creatures, and no holy hand would descend from the clouds and cry Halt. And if there was no auditor, then one must audit one's own soul, tenaciously and without mercy.

The idea of suggesting that Strike stop lying to the women in his life occurred only to be dismissed, on the basis that the resolutions to stop smoking, lose weight and exercise were enough personal improvement to be getting on with.

A woman such as I is a rocky cliff against which a man tests himself before retreating to safe pastures. I cannot fault any such man as takes what ease the world offers him.

The distances between things are vast,” he said. “They are vast.

Even motionless, she was decisive.

I’m an ivy twined so long against a tower of strange design that I cannot now assume any other shape.

Life is muddy. Denying that—thinking there’s only one noble path above the fray—can be a poisonous approach to life.

The greatest act of love—indeed, the only religion she could comprehend—was to speak the truth about the world.

Do not consider then, however learned you are, that your knowledge is complete. For learning is the river of G-d and we drink of it throughout our lives.

What is the purpose of study?” the rabbi had asked. She’d said, “That the spirit be clothed in reason, which is more warming than ignorance.” The rabbi had corrected, gently, “Yet the text we studied said knowledge, Ester, not reason.” And she’d countered, “But reason is more warming, for it seeds knowledge. But knowledge can grow nothing outside itself.” The rabbi had smiled then, though with a furrowed brow. “You have a good mind,” he’d said after a moment.

Once you’ve held a book and really loved it, you forever remember the feel of it, its specific weight, the way it sits in your hand. My thumb knows the grain of this book’s leather, the dry dust of red rot that’s crept up its spine, each waving leaf of every page that holds a little secret or one of Peabody’s flourishes. A librarian remembers the particular scent of glue and dust, and if we’re so lucky—and I was—the smell of parchment, a quiet tanginess, softer than wood pulp or cotton rag. We would bury ourselves in books until flesh and paper became one and ink and blood at last ran together. So maybe my hand does clench too tightly to the spine. I may never again hold another book this old, or one with such a whisper of me in it.

Nature gave a woman not only body but also intelligence, and a wish to employ it. Was it then predetermined that one side of Ester’s nature must suffocate the other? If two of God’s creations were opposed, must it be that God decided in advance that one was more perfect and therefore must be victorious? Did God determine before each storm that either the wind or the oak tree must prevail, one being more dear to Him? Or perhaps, rather, the storm itself was God’s most prized creation—and only through it could the contest between wind and oak tree be resolved, and one proven hardier. Perhaps—she trembled at her own heresy—the storm itself was God.

I am a creator, writing like the wind, I carry the weight of a future world in the barrel of a pen, etching my characters into the paper with life giving ink so my dreams and reality might finally meet.

Indeed, for the first time in her life she almost could see her heart, and to her astonishment it seemed a brave and hopeful thing: a small wooden cup of some golden liquid, brimming until it spilled over all...

How wrong she'd been, to believe a mind could reign over anything. For it did not reign even over itself...and despite all the arguments of all the philosophers, Esther now saw that thought proved nothing. Had Descartes, near his own death, come at last to see his folly? The mind was only an apparatus within the mechanism of the body - and it took little more than a fever to jostle a cog, so that the gear of thought could no longer turn. Philosophy could be severed from life. Blood overmastered ink. And every thin breath she drew told her which ruled her.

Men, perhaps, might nourish both heart and mind, but for a woman there could be no such luxury... How readily the rules of female behavior--gentleness, acquiescence, ever-mindfulness--turn to shackles. So, she thought, there must be declared a new kind of virtue: one that made the throwing off of such rules, and even such deceit as this required, praiseworthy.

Do you think a life has any value if one doesn’t leave some mark upon the world?' Remy’s expression sobers, and he must read the sadness in her voice, because he says, 'I think there are many ways to matter.' He plucks the book from his pocket. 'These are the words of a man—Voltaire. But they are also the hands that set the type. The ink that made it readable, the tree that made the paper. All of them matter, though credit goes only to the name on the cover.' He has misread her, of course, assumed the question stemmed from a different, more common fear. Still, his words hold weight—though it will be years before Addie discovers just how much.

Sentiment would undo her - each of its ties were a tether that would hold her from her purpose. Men, perhaps, might nourish both heart and mind; but for a woman there could be no such luxury. Had not Catherine drowned in the London air while practicing the virtues of love and obedience? How readily the rules of female behavior - gentleness, acquiescence, ever-mindfulness - turned to shackles.

It was little more than a weak flame flickering under the weight of his melancholia, but it was there. A splinter of possibility. Maybe he didn't want to die. Maybe, just maybe, he wanted to live. It didn't burn away his sadness. It didn't make his future appear any less dark. But it was there—hope, perhaps, or something like it—and it was enough.

Ecofont is designed to save ink, money and eventually the planet, but heaven save us from worthy fonts. Ecofont is a program that adds holes to a font. The software takes Arial, Verdana, Times New Roman and prints them is if they had been attacked by moths. They retain their original shape but not their original form, and so lose their true weight and beauty... a study at the University of Wisconsin claimed that Ecofonts, such as Ecofont Vera Sans, actually uses more ink and toner than lighter fonts such as Century Gothic...

My grandmother," Ester said, "wished not to trap her love into taking her. She said a heart is a free thing, and once enslaved will mutiny....

Then it was only right that she do as her spirit told her, and let the struggle itself answer the question of which was the stronger: her will or her womanly nature.

And he knew that he would never be able to tell her that he loved her as a foundering ship loves a lighthouse, even though the lighthouse is powerless to save it.

Lying had become her clothing—without it she’d freeze.

You have a beauty of a sort,” he said. “But more important than that, you have enough manly strength in you to match me.

A woman’s body, said the world, was a prison in which her mind must wither.

Do you hear the argument the other side makes?

I do not refute the divine, but only its false depiction, and my thinking is maligned by any who say otherwise.

For love does not set shackles, nor entrap.

There’s a hole in you where your heart once was. And in its place, you’ve put history.

If a Jew tell a lie because the truth of his faith cannot be tolerated by those around him, shouldn’t one then prosecute the world rather than the Jew?

You name a country, and I’ll tell you about a time it became obsessed with killing Jews.

Truth-telling is a luxury for those whose lives aren’t at risk.

Let me begin afresh. Perhaps, this time, to tell the truth. For in the biting hush of ink on paper, where truth ought raise its head and speak without fear, I have long lied.

The words of prayer are like birds, Ester,” he said gently. “They soar.

God has planted in us endless hungers. Yet we master them in order to live.

The imperative—she whispered it to herself—to live. The universe was ruled by a force, and the force was life, and life, and life—a pulsing, commanding law of its own.

If my words cut, then let them cut as the physick’s knife, to restore health. And let my own imperfections, numerous as grains of sand, not mar my message.

And because history cared not at all if the negligent left its missives unread, she insisted on caring.

And a reminder too of the sole faith that still offered her a semblance of comfort-- the faith that history, soulless god though it was, never failed to offer what must be understood.

Yet sacrifice of the self is everywhere viewed as the highest calling, and the more so for a woman, who must give every element of her life to others. Kindness is at all times counseled to women, who are called unnatural if not kind. Yet how can a kindness that blights the life of even one--though it benefit others--be called good? Is it in face kindness to sever oneself from one's own desires? Mustn't the imperative to protect all life encompass--even for a woman--her own? Then we must abandon our accustomed notion of a woman's kindness, and forge a new own.

I was walking on campus when I saw the statistic on the front page of a newspaper: one in four women, one in five? I don’t remember, it was just too many, too many women on campus had been sexually assaulted. But what got me was the graphic, rows of woman symbols, the kind you see on bathroom signs, across the entire page, all gray, with one in five inked red. I saw these red figures breathing, a little hallucination. My whole life had warped below the weight of the assault, and if you took that damage and multiplied it by each red figure, the magnitude was staggering. Where were they? I looked around campus, girls walking with earmuffs, black leggings, teal backpacks. If our bodies were literally painted red, we’d have red bodies all over this quad. I wanted to shake the paper in people’s faces. This was not normal. It was an epidemic, a crisis. How could you see this headline and keep walking? We’d deadened to the severity, too familiar a story. But this story was not old to me yet. A word came to my mind, another. I remember, after learning of the third suicide at school, people shook their heads in resignation, I can’t believe there’s been another. The shock had dimmed. No longer a bang, but an ache. If kids getting killed by trains became normalized, anything could. This was no longer a fight against my rapist, it was a fight to be humanized. I had to hold on to my story, figure out how to make myself heard. If I didn’t break out, I’d become a statistic. Another red figure in a grid.

Nowhere in the known world, it seemed to her, could she live as she'd been created: at once a creature of body and of mind. It was a precept so universal as to seem a law of nature: one aspect of a woman's existence must dominate the other. And a woman like Ester must choose, always, between desires: between fealty to her own self, or to the lives she might bring forth and nurture.

The request had been impossible to refuse, delivered as it was in Darcy’s perennial air of wry cheer—a demeanor Aaron was certain was tattooed onto the English genome, right beside wry despair.

Much as I detest the man, I’ll never know the full circumstances behind his choices. Life is muddy. Denying that—thinking there’s only one noble path above the fray—can be a poisonous approach to life.

Glimpsing the void in your souls, you will by nature wish for that which will fill it at once. It is from this wish that you must be on your guard, and discern the light of true learning from the false.

The faded silhouette of Masada offered itself, its mute lines clear testimony for those who knew to read what was written there. A stark choice. Self-immolation or slavery. Freedom or life, but not both.

He’d always pitied those ensnared in the time periods he studied—people captured in resin, their fates sealed by their inability to see what was coming. The greatest curse, he’d thought, was to be stuck in one’s own time—and the greatest power was to see beyond its horizons.

And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies and itchings that it contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good. If all Hell’s miseries together entered the consciousness of yon wee yellow bird on the bough there, they would be swallowed up without trace, as if one drop of ink had been dropped into that Great Ocean to which your terrestrial Pacific itself is only a molecule.

The story that had once singed and flared in her had long since receded, as her habit of silence turned, over the decades, into law. Did she mean to take it to the grave with her, then? Plainly, that was what she was going to do. She was going to take it to the grave. And it would end there. Dust.

For the first time, she felt it: this was the freedom her brother had sought. There was life in London. There was life in her. And desire. A flame leapt in her, defiant of the bounds in which she'd imprisoned it. How could desire be wrong - the question seized her - if each living being contained it? Each creature was born with the unthinking need to draw each next breath, find each next meal. Mustn't desire then be integral - a set of essential guideposts on the map of life's purpose? And mightn't its very denial then be a desecration? The thought were heretical, and they were her own.

More than half the candle remained. She could read an hour before it guttered, longer if she took another candle from the drawer. How many had she burned already this month? Her hours of night reading seemed to grow ever more necessary, for each day’s study compelled her to explore these volumes further, and with a fierce attention impossible when others were about.

Do not succumb to darkness. Lack of hope, as I learned long ago, is a deadly affliction. And in one so highly regarded as you, it is not merely a blight on one precious soul, but a contagion that may leave many in darkness. Recall that the light you bear, though it may flicker, yet illuminates the path for our people. Bear it. For in this world there is no alternative.

The Portuguese and Hebrew words had been finished here and there with high, distinctive arches that sloped backward over the letters they adorned: the roofs of the Portuguese letters sloping to the left, those of the occasional Hebrew verse to the right, the long unbroken lines proceeding down the page like successive rows of cresting waves approaching a shore, one after another, dizzying.

The greatest curse, he’d thought, was to be stuck in one’s own time—and the greatest power was to see beyond its horizons. Studying history had given him the illusion of observing safely from outside the trap. Only that’s what the world was: a trap. The circumstances you were born to, the situations you found yourself in—to dodge that fray was impossible. And what you did within it was your life.

don’t think anyone had ever written me a letter before. It was shockingly effective. Way better than text or email, like it had a different weight to it or something. There’s something about holding the paper in your hand, seeing the ink on the page, the press of the pen. He made this. It took effort. It was a physical act. He couldn’t erase it if he made a mistake, he had to think about what he was going to say before he said it—or he said exactly what he wanted to and didn’t need to change it.

Rich men spent small fortunes in engaging artists to make the most beautiful books ever known. A corps of papermakers, calligraphers, painters, and bookbinders in some cases worked for seventeen years on one volume. Paper had to be of the best; brushes were put together, we are told, from the white neck hairs of kittens not more than two years old; blue ink was sometimes made from powdered lapis lazuli, and could be worth its weight in gold; and liquid gold was not thought too precious for some lines or letters of design or text.

Once, before the fire had burned away all pretense, she might have become the sort of wife who would shutter her desire to learn, keep a civil tongue, profess happiness with what was available to her. She was no longer that person. The human heart—her mother’s, her grandmother’s, her own—was a chaos of desire. And she could counter it only with the life in her mind. By living in words and books and cool reason. Recording the map traced by her thoughts, though it be an infinitesimal gesture, small and unseen. A fingernail’s scrape on a prison wall.

If two of God’s creations were opposed, must it be that God decided in advance that one was more perfect and therefore must be victorious? Did God determine before each storm that either the wind or the oak tree must prevail, one being more dear to Him? Or perhaps, rather, the storm itself was God’s most prized creation—and only through it could the contest between wind and oak tree be resolved, and one proven hardier. Perhaps—she trembled at her own heresy—the storm itself was God. And God was only the endless tumult of life proving new truths and eradicating old.

Remy nods thoughtfully. "Small places make for small lives. And some people are fine with that. They like knowing where to put their feet. But if you only walk in other people's steps, you cannot make your own way. You cannot leave a mark." Addie's throat tightens. "Do you think a life has bay value if one doesn't leave some mark upon the world?" Remy's expression sobers, and he must read the sadness in her voice, because he says, "I think there are many ways to matter." He plucks the book from his pocket. "These are the words of a man - Voltaire. But they are also the hands that set the type. The ink that made it readable, the tree that made the paper. All of them matter, though credit goes only to the name on the cover." He has misread her, of course, assumed the question stemmed from a different, more common fear. Still, his words hold weight -- though it will be years before Addie discovers just how much.

A legacy of plunder, a network of laws and traditions, a heritage, a Dream, murdered Prince Jones as sure as it murders black people in North Lawndale with frightening regularity. “Black-on-black crime” is jargon, violence to language, which vanishes the men who engineered the covenants, who fixed the loans, who planned the projects, who built the streets and sold red ink by the barrel. And this should not surprise us. The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days, we must invariably return. The killing fields of Chicago, of Baltimore, of Detroit, were created by the policy of Dreamers, but their weight, their shame, rests solely upon those who are dying in them. There is a great deception in this. To yell “black-on-black crime” is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding. And the premise that allows for these killing fields—the reduction of the black body—is no different than the premise that allowed for the murder of Prince Jones. The Dream of acting white, of talking white, of being white, murdered Prince Jones as sure as it murders black people in Chicago with frightening regularity. Do not accept the lie. Do not drink from poison. The same hands that drew red lines around the life of Prince Jones drew red lines around the ghetto.

Kell skimmed the spell and frowned. “An eternal flame?” Rhy absently plucked one of the lin from the floor and shrugged. “First thing I grabbed.” He tried to sound as if he didn’t care about the stupid spell, but his throat was tight, his eyes burning. “Doesn’t matter,” he said, skipping the coin across the ground as if it were a pebble on water. “I can’t make it work.” Kell shifted his weight, lips moving silently as he read over the priest’s scrawl. He held his hands above the paper, palms cupped as if cradling a flame that wasn’t even there yet, and began to recite the spell. When Rhy had tried, the words had fallen out like rocks, but on Kell’s lips, they were poetry, smooth and sibilant. The air around them warmed instantly, steam rising from the penned lines on the scroll before the ink drew in and up into a bead of oil, and lit. The flame hovered in the air between Kell’s hands, brilliant and white. He made it look so easy, and Rhy felt a flash of anger toward his brother, hot as a spark—but just as brief. It wasn’t Kell’s fault Rhy couldn’t do magic. Rhy started to rise when Kell caught his cuff. He guided Rhy’s hands to either side of the spell, pulling the prince into the fold of his magic. Warmth tickled Rhy’s palms, and he was torn between delight at the power and knowledge that it wasn’t his. “It isn’t right,” he murmured. “I’m the crown prince, the heir of Maxim Maresh. I should be able to light a blasted candle.” Kell chewed his lip—Mother never chided him for the habit—and then said, “There are different kinds of power.” “I would rather have magic than a crown,” sulked Rhy. Kell studied the small white flame between them. “A crown is a sort of magic, if you think about it. A magician rules an element. A king rules an empire.” “Only if the king is strong enough.” Kell looked up, then. “You’re going to be a good king, if you don’t get yourself killed first.” Rhy blew out a breath, shuddering the flame. “How do you know?” At that, Kell smiled. It was a rare thing, and Rhy wanted to hold fast to it—he was the only one who could make his brother smile, and he wore it like a badge—but then Kell said, “Magic,” and Rhy wanted to slug him instead. “You’re an arse,” he muttered

When an ovulating woman offers herself to you, she's the choicest morsel on the planet. Her nipples are already sharp, her labia already swollen, her spine already undulating. Her skin is damp and she pants. If you touch the center of her forehead with your thumb she isn't thinking about her head—she isn't thinking at all, she's imagining, believing, willing your hand to lift and turn and curve, cup the back of her head. She's living in a reality where the hand will have no choice but to slide down that soft, flexing muscle valley of the spine to the flare of strong hips, where the other hand joins the first to hold both hip bones, immobilize them against the side of the counter, so that you can touch the base of her throat gently with your lips and she will whimper and writhe and let the muscles in her legs go, but she won't fall, because you have her. She'll be feeling this as though it's already happening, knowing absolutely that it will, because every cell is alive and crying out, Fill me, love me, cherish me, be tender, but, oh God, be sure. She wants you to want her. And when her pupils expand like that, as though you have dropped black ink into a saucer of cool blue water, and her head tips just a little, as though she's gone blind or has had a terrible shock or maybe just too much to drink, to her she is crying in a great voice, Fuck me, right here, right now against the kitchen counter, because I want you wrist-deep inside me. I hunger, I burn, I need. It doesn't matter if you are tired, or unsure, if your stomach is hard with dread at not being forgiven. If you allow yourself one moment's distraction—a microsecond's break in eye contact, a slight shift in weight—she knows, and that knowledge is a punch in the gut. She will back up a step and search your face, and she'll feel embarrassed—a fool or a whore—at offering so blatantly what you're not interested in, and her fine sense of being queen of the world will shiver and break like a glass shield hit by a mace, and fall around her in dust. Oh, it will still sparkle, because sex is magic, but she will be standing there naked, and you will be a monster, and the next time she feels her womb quiver and clench she'll hesitate, which will confuse you, even on a day when there is no dread, no uncertainty, and that singing sureness between you will dissolve and very slowly begin to sicken and die. The body knows. I listened to the deep message—but carefully, because at some point the deep message also must be a conscious message. Active, not just passive, agreement. I took her hand and guided the wok back down to the gas burner. Yes, her body still said, yes. I turned off the gas, but slowly, and now she reached for me.

Some candle inside him was dangerously close to guttering. A definition of loneliness surfaced in his mind: when you suddenly understand that the story of your life isn’t what you thought it was.

The God the tradition spoke of must necessarily wish for the well-being of His creations. Either there was no such God, then....or perhaps there existed only a God who could do nothing to alter the world’s evils. Then did God quake in helpless fear at the roar of fire, the cry of a mob? Did God too tremble at times with the rage and confusion?

But I will tell you what I learned after I lost my sight... I walked through rooms that had once been familiar, my arms outstretched, and was fouled and thwarted by every obstacle in my path. What I learned then, Ester, is a thing that I have been learning ever since... The distance between things are vast," he said. "They are vast.

Thomas watched wealth, it struck Ester, the way some men watched a sunset.

Some candle inside him was dangerously close to guttering. A definition of loneliness surfaced in his mind: when you suddenly understand that the story of your life isn't what you thought it was.

The mind was only an apparatus within the mechanism of the body--and it took little more than a fever to jostle a cog, so that the gear of thought could no longer turn. Philosophy could be severed from life. Blood overmastered ink. And every thin breath she drew told her which ruled her.

What was there to stop him from choosing some completely different life, after all? Nothing but the fact that he’d never wanted a different life.