Trope Quotes

Enemies-to-lovers—it’s our trope, Buxbaum.

The reason that clichés become clichés is that they are the hammers and screwdrivers in the toolbox of communication.

I have written it before and am not ashamed to write it again. Without Wodehouse I am not sure that I would be a tenth of what I am today -- whatever that may be. In my teenage years, his writings awoke me to the possibilities of language. His rhythms, tropes, tricks and mannerisms are deep within me. But more than that, he taught me something about good nature. It is enough to be benign, to be gentle, to be funny, to be kind.

I admire Tolkien greatly. His books had enormous influence on me. And the trope that he sort of established—the idea of the Dark Lord and his Evil Minions—in the hands of lesser writers over the years and decades has not served the genre well. It has been beaten to death. The battle of good and evil is a great subject for any book and certainly for a fantasy book, but I think ultimately the battle between good and evil is weighed within the individual human heart and not necessarily between an army of people dressed in white and an army of people dressed in black. When I look at the world, I see that most real living breathing human beings are grey.

Do you realize we could’ve been doing this for years if you weren’t such a pain in the ass?” “Nah—I didn’t like you until recently.” “Enemies-to-lovers—it’s our trope, Buxbaum.” “You poor, confused little love lover.” A giggle shimmied through me before I set my hands on his face and said as I pulled him back to me, “Just shut up and kiss me.

I've read there is no such thing as a single tear, that old poetic trope. And perhaps there isn't, since hers was simply a companion to my own.

The ultimate act of heroism shouldn’t be death. You’re always saying you want to give Baz the stories he deserves... So you’re going to kill him off? Isn’t the best revenge supposed to be a life well-lived? The punk-rock way to end it would be to let them live happily ever after.

Silence can be a form of protest. It can be a means of survival. But it can also be a school of poetry—one with its own meter, tropes, and conventions. One that needn’t be written with pencils or pens; but that can be written in the soul with a revolver to the chest.” With

She's everything I want: the key to my lock, the arrow to my bow - oh, and ten thousand other such pathetic poetic tropes, none of which comes close to describing what she means to me.

Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.

Opposites attract is my favorite trope, so it made sense to start there. Because, of course, the thing about opposites: they always have a lot more in common than they think

Clichés are relatives of the fairy tale, and tropes aren’t bad; they go with the territory.

apathy is a disease and some days i long for it.

Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another.

So we’re the monster police, too?” I said to Tom. “Correct,” he replied. “The only real question is, who are the monsters?” “They ask that question in every monster movie, you know. It’s an actual trope.” “I know,” Tom said. “What does it say about us that it’s relevant every single time they ask it?

Don’t you love my idealism? My hypocrisy? My willingness to sound as loving and naive as possible? At least I know that I don’t know anything at all. I can admit it. Can you? Can you look yourself in the mirror in the morning and admit that you are no different from every other bundle of bones on this planet? And maybe the only things that make you different are your hands, the way you touch things, and what happens to them.

Social media is addictive precisely because it gives us something which the real world lacks: it gives us immediacy, direction, a sense of clarity and value as an individual.

He tilted his head. “Standard protocol?” “Yup.” “How many times have you done this?” “Zero. But I am familiar with the trope.

He could crush me; the foreshadowing is clearly written. It’s a tale as old as time: the inexperienced bluestocking and the bed-hopping rogue. Bloody hell, I’m a trope.

What is worse: being locked outside of your own mind, or being locked inside of if? What is worse: writing a Trope or being one? What about being more that one?

We don’t feel real to me. It feels like we fell out of a romance tree and hit every trope on the way down.

This is the best day of my fucking life!” he shouted. “Only! One! Bed! My second-favorite trope!

No one can live up to the standards set by racist stereotypes like this that position Black women as so strong they don’t need help, protection, care, or concern. Such stereotypes leave little to no room for real Black women with real problems. In fact, even the most “positive” tropes about women of color are harmful precisely because they dehumanize us and erase the damage that can be done to us by those who might mean well, but whose actions show that they don’t actually respect us or our right to self-determine what happens on our behalf.

Enough already of Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault poured like ketchup over everything. Lacan: the French fog machine; a grey-flannel worry-bone for toothless academic pups; a twerpy, cape-twirling Dracula dragging his flocking stooges to the crypt. Lacan is a Freud T-shirt shrunk down to the teeny-weeny Saussure torso. The entire school of Saussure, inluding Levi-Strauss, write their muffled prose of people with cotton wool wrapped around their heads; they're like walking Q-tips. Derrida: a Gloomy Gus one-trick pony, stuck on a rhetorical trope already available in the varied armory of New Criticism. Derrida's method: masturbating without pleasure. It's a birdbrain game for birdseed stakes. Neo-Foucaldian New Historicism: a high-wax bowling alley where you score points just by knockng down the pins.

sometimes every word i write is 'love' but the letters are rearranged, the sounds are different. all the words are red.

The truth was, Librium and Valium were marketed using such a variety of gendered mid-century tropes—the neurotic singleton, the frazzled housewife, the joyless career woman, the menopausal shrew—that what Roche’s tranquilizers really seemed to offer was a quick fix for the problem of “being female.

Initially, you continue doing what you used to do with her, out of familiarity, love, the need for a pattern. Soon, you realise the trap you are in: caught between repeating what you did with her, but without her, and so missing her; or doing new things, things you never did with her, and so missing her differently. You feel sharply the loss of shared vocabulary, of tropes, teases, short cuts, injokes, sillinesses, faux rebukes, amatory footnotes – all those obscure references rich in memory but valueless if explained to an outsider.

Besides, I always feel safer when I've got words against my heart.

Elliot was left to trail behind. As he did, he thought about Luke talking about literary tropes—the fearless hero, the valiant heroine, and where did it all leave him? Sidekick: a horrible indignity, Elliot refused to accept it. And the other idea was some sort of lurking, jealous figure: an Iago, a pathetic pseudo-villain waiting in the wings to plot and bring the hero down. He wasn’t going to plot against Luke, who had dumb daffodil hair and said “tropez,” for God’s sake.

the love some girls have for other girls is so gentle & so soft & so fucking beautiful, & these girls deserve to have better stories than the ones where they are murdered because they love with too much of their hearts. - love is never a weakness

Standard protocol?" "Yup." "How many times have you done this?" "Zero. But I'm familiar with the trope." "The...what?" He blinked at her confused.

In the same way that the picturesque designers were always careful to include some reminder of our mortality in their gardens -- a ruin, sometimes even a dead tree -- the act of leaving parts of the garden untended, and calling attention to its margins, seems to undermine any pretense to perfect power or wisdom on the part of the gardener. The margins of our gardens can be tropes too, but figures of irony rather than transcendence -- antidotes, in fact, to our hubris. It may be in the margins of our gardens that we can discover fresh ways to bring our aesthetics and our ethics about the land into some meaningful alignment.

These are unusual times. They call for ordinary people to do unusual things, just to get by.

Winston Churchill’s “never give in, never, never, never, never” is an oft-quoted trope. The end of the sentence is always left out: “except to convictions of honor and good sense.” Labor

if you take off your clothes, you will find more clothes.

I think the only necessary conclusion is that we are too beautiful, because being not beautiful at all just doesn't make sense.

She was of average height and average build and average attractiveness, all things that should've made it easy for her to assimilate into a new high school without any of the dramatic tropes that usually inhabit such storylines.

The Death of Allegory I am wondering what became of all those tall abstractions that used to pose, robed and statuesque, in paintings and parade about on the pages of the Renaissance displaying their capital letters like license plates. Truth cantering on a powerful horse, Chastity, eyes downcast, fluttering with veils. Each one was marble come to life, a thought in a coat, Courtesy bowing with one hand always extended, Villainy sharpening an instrument behind a wall, Reason with her crown and Constancy alert behind a helm. They are all retired now, consigned to a Florida for tropes. Justice is there standing by an open refrigerator. Valor lies in bed listening to the rain. Even Death has nothing to do but mend his cloak and hood, and all their props are locked away in a warehouse, hourglasses, globes, blindfolds and shackles. Even if you called them back, there are no places left for them to go, no Garden of Mirth or Bower of Bliss. The Valley of Forgiveness is lined with condominiums and chain saws are howling in the Forest of Despair. Here on the table near the window is a vase of peonies and next to it black binoculars and a money clip, exactly the kind of thing we now prefer, objects that sit quietly on a line in lower case, themselves and nothing more, a wheelbarrow, an empty mailbox, a razor blade resting in a glass ashtray. As for the others, the great ideas on horseback and the long-haired virtues in embroidered gowns, it looks as though they have traveled down that road you see on the final page of storybooks, the one that winds up a green hillside and disappears into an unseen valley where everyone must be fast asleep.

I’m sorry,” he suddenly blurts, noticing my appalled expression. “I’m just written this way.” ​“What?” I question, confused. ​“It’s a trope in romance,” the dinosaur continues to explain. “The more of an asshole I am in this part of the book, the better the payoff is when you change me later on.

I'm not worried about the future as much as I'm worried about the past. About keeping my memories real and not sacrificing them to match the present.

Just bear a passing resemblance to a fictional romantic trope I like and I will love you forever. We're all just trying to find the Mark Darcy of our workplace, aren't we?

Oooh. Grumpy next-door neighbor. That’s one of my favorite tropes.

Good writers are avid readers. They have absorbed a vast inventory of words, idioms, constructions, tropes, and rhetorical tricks,

Tropes are the dreams of speech.

The ragged edge of his voice knocks the wind out of me. I fight the impulse to rein in my shock, and then it all clicks, the bits of Charlie I’ve been collecting like puzzle pieces becoming a full picture. Not the Darcy trope. Not the self-important, dour academic I met for one very unpleasant lunch. A man who craves complete honesty, the realist who doesn’t always understand when he’s not seeing realism. Charlie, who wants to understand the world but has learned not to trust it.

The Door of No Return - real and metaphoric as some places are, mythic to those of us who are scattered in the Americas today. To have one’s belonging lodged in a metaphor is voluptuous intrigue; to inhabit a trope; to be a kind of fiction. To live in the Black Diaspora I think is to live in a fiction - a creation of empires, and also self-creation. It is to be being living inside and outside herself. It is to apprehend the the sign one makes yet to be unable to escape it except in radiant moments of ordinariness made like art. To be a fiction in search of its most resonant metaphor then is even more intriguing.

Mrs. Clinton, speaking to a black church audience on Martin Luther King Day last year, did describe President George W. Bush as treating the Congress of the United States like 'a plantation,' adding in a significant tone of voice that 'you know what I mean ...' She did not repeat this trope, for some reason, when addressing the electors of Iowa or New Hampshire. She's willing to ring the other bell, though, if it suits her. But when an actual African-American challenger comes along, she rather tends to pout and wince at his presumption (or did until recently).

Space and other dimensions. He wields incredible power. Forget vampires, werewolves, and other sexy tropes of romance novels, Radek Basarab is a whole new level of badass, to put it this way.

The systems we will be exploring in order are: ● Breeding Targets: Arousal patterns tied to systems meant to get our ancestors to have sex with things that might bear offspring (e.g., arousal from things like penises, the female form, etc.). ● Inverse Systems: Arousal patterns that arise from a neural mix-up, causing something that disgusts the majority of the population to arouse a small portion of it (e.g., arousal from things like being farted on, dead bodies, having insects poured on one’s face, etc.). ● Emotional States and Concepts / Dominance and Submission: Arousal patterns that stem from either emotional concepts (such as betrayal, transformation, being eaten, etc.) or dominance and submission pathways. ● Emotional Connections to People: While emotional connections do not cause arousal in and of themselves, they do lower the threshold for arousal (i.e., you may become more aroused by a moderately attractive person you love than a very attractive stranger). ● Trope Attraction: Arousal patterns that are enhanced through a target’s adherence to a specific trope (a nurse, a goth person, a cheerleader, etc.). ● Novelty: Arousal patterns tied to the novelty of a particular stimulus. ● Pain and Asphyxiation: Arousal patterns associated with or enhanced by pain and oxygen deprivation. ● Basic Instincts: Remnants of our pre-cognitive mating instincts running off of a “deeper” autopilot-like neurological system (dry humping, etc.) that compel mating behavior without necessarily generating a traditional feeling of arousal. ● Physical Stimuli: Arousal patterns derived from physical interaction (kissing, touching an erogenous zone, etc.). ● Conditioned Responses: Arousal patterns resulting from conditioning (arousal from shoes, doorknobs, etc.).

Instead of eating too much, I'm thinking too much and I need to throw up some of these thoughts before something vile happens.

expatriation, like love, is not only a condition that devastates and reconfigures the self; it is, like love, a trope, a figure with which we try to explain, try to narrate profound psychological disruptions in terms of very measurable entities: a person, a place, an event, a moment, etc.

There is something universally chilling about a new plot. And I could see how my boy needed time and space for a story to bloom in his mind, because at any age what comes before sight is a conjuring. A trope, which is just a way to believe.

The farther removed you are from people actually shooting at you, the more you forget that cannons can do something to you other than fire salutes.

Tina knew she could have taken the man a tree that grew its own money and he would say, ‘Not much call for money trees, I’m afraid.

I had to leave my parents to love them again. I had to move across the country to appreciate that I actually had any pull toward them - that I needed them. I had to get away from them in order to come back to them. I'd like to say they did the best they could, but that couldn't have been their best. I wasn't doing my best either, so the idea that everyone is always doing the best they can is a trope. Some people are just interested in surviving; doing their best doesn't even occur to them.

Thus, although life is by and large unthrilling, when we do find ourselves in the sort of situation upon which thrillers dote we cannot really experience it, because our imaginations are occupied by the familiar tropes of popular fiction. And the result of this is a kind of dull bafflement, and the sense that whatever it is cannot really be happening. We actually think that phrase: this can’t be happening to me.

Michael writes of sun, but all I can think of is sunsickness, too much in the sun never a daughter. As if God's light still shone on we who have shaded our eyes. A few phrases remain but the drift is vanish. No way out and no way in--a straight call to blast, Adrift on stage for all to view--the cringe, the sigh, the curveilinear clide. The scholar-trancemaker hangs from the end of a trope and asks to be cut down. An umbilical cord signifies no less. Yet despite, i can now see or is it all a mitake? & does it splatter?

There is a word for someone whose existence threatens your sanity, life, happiness, and future: human. And there is a word for someone whose existence is the hope for your sanity, life, happiness, and future: human.

Our heroes have arrived, then," the stranger said, his voice a soft, bubbly murmur. "Excuse me?" Poison queries. The odd creature put down his rod in a little wooden cradle that rested next to him and got up from the edge of the jetty. He looked them over with his vast, yellowish eyes. "Hmm," he said gloomily. "You don't seem a bad bunch." He jostled past them and began to shuffle back towards his house. "At least you're not the typical muscle-bound warrior, beautiful sorceress, and amusing thief sidekick. By the waters, did that become stale fast.

We’ve actually made the world into this very ugly video game, and it’s not a sustainable model.

Hello?” he asked as he went ... just so that anyone intent on killing him would know exactly where to look.

Language composed into dialogue offers a spectrum that runs from mental meanings at one end to sensual experiences at the other. For example, a character might call a singer's voice either "lousy" or "sour." Both terms make sense, but "lousy" is a dead metaphor that once meant "covered with lice." "Sour" still has life. The moment the audience hears "sour," their lips start to pucker. Which line stirs the most inner feeling: "She walks like a model" or "She moves like a slow, hot song"? Dialogue can express the same idea in countless ways, but in general, the more sensory the trope, the deeper and more memorable its effect.

Violent men’s grievances are born out of a conviction of their personal righteousness and innocence: they are never the instigators; they are only righting what has been done to them. This shit-eating innocence is crucial to the fantasy of American masculinity, a bizarre collection of expectations and tropes “so paralytically infantile,” as James Baldwin writes in “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood,” “that it is virtually forbidden—as an unpatriotic act—that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood.

Children don’t read ‘genres’; they read stories. Below a certain age, they don’t distinguish between ‘true’ and ‘not true,’ because they see no reason that a white rabbit shouldn’t possess a pocket watch, that whales shouldn’t talk, or that sentient beings shouldn’t live on other planets and travel in spaceships. Science-fiction tropes aren’t read as ‘science fiction’; they’re read as fiction. And fiction is read as reality. And sometimes reality lives under the bed and has very large teeth, and it’s no use pretending otherwise.

By paying a certain kind of attention, you can humanise or dehumanise, cherish or strip of all value. By a kind of alienating, fragmenting and focal attention, you can reduce humanity – or art, sex, humour, or religion – to nothing. You can so alienate yourself from a poem that you stop seeing the poem at all, and instead come to see in its place just theories, messages and formal tropes; stop hearing the music and hear only tonalities and harmonic shifts; stop seeing the person and see only mechanisms – all because of the plane of attention. More than that, when such a state of affairs comes about, you are no longer aware that there is a problem at all. For you do not see what it is you cannot see.

There is always a man eager to explain my mental illness to me. They all do it so confidently, motioning to their Hemingway and Bukowski bookshelf as they compare my depression to their late-night loneliness. There is always someone that rejected them that they equate their sadness to and a bottle of gin (or a song playing, or a movie) close by that they refer to as their cure. Somehow, every soft confession of my Crazy that I hand to them turns into them pulling out pieces of themselves to prove how it really is in my head. So many dudes I’ve dated have faces like doctors ready to institutionalize and love my crazy (but only on Friday nights.) They tell their friends about my impulsive decision making and how I “get them” more than anyone they’ve ever met but leave out my staring off in silence for hours and the self-inflicted bruises on my cheeks. None of them want to acknowledge a crazy they can’t cure. They want a crazy that fits well into a trope and gives them a chance to play Hero. And they always love a Crazy that provides them material to write about. Truth is they love me best as a cigarette cloud of impossibility, with my lipstick applied perfectly and my Crazy only being pulled out when their life needs a little spice. They don’t want me dirty, having not left my bed for days. Not diseased. Not real. So they invite me over when they’re going through writer’s block but don’t answer my calls during breakdowns. They tell me I look beautiful when I’m crying then stick their hands in-between my thighs. They mistake my silence for listening to them attentively and say my quiet mouth understands them like no one else has. These men love my good dead hollowness. Because it means less of a fighting personality for them to force out. And is so much easier to fill someone who has already given up with themselves.

There were no dreams that night. Tina fell asleep to the feeling of Lockie’s ribs moving up and down. It felt strange to be touched by another person. She had not been touched by anyone for two years. Well, she had been touched, but those were the touches that burned your skin and made it crawl.

The most dangerous trap for feminists lies in thinking that our current political options are limited to two: on the one hand, a “progressive” variant of neoliberalism, which diffuses an elitist, corporate version of feminism to cast an emancipatory veneer over a predatory, oligarchic agenda; on the other, a reactionary variant of neoliberalism, which pursues a similar, plutocratic agenda by other means—deploying misogynist and racist tropes to burnish its “populist” credentials. Certainly, these two forces are not identical. But both are mortal enemies of a genuinely emancipatory and majoritarian feminism. Plus, they are mutually enabling: progressive neoliberalism created the conditions for the rise of reactionary populism and is now positioning itself as the go-to alternative to it.

BLOOM: I take it that a successful therapy is an oxymoron. INTERVIEWER: It’s always interminable? BLOOM: I do not know anyone who has ever benefited from Freudian or any other mode of analysis, except by being, to use the popular trope for it, so badly shrunk, that they become quite dried out. That is to say, all passion spent. Perhaps they become better people, but they also become stale and uninteresting people with very few exceptions. Like dried-out cheese, or wilted flowers.

I think sometimes in literature we kind of police ourselves. I know a lot of people talked about Twilight, and they would say, oh, but the heroine, she lets this man make her decisions. And I thought, that may not be the particular fantasy or trope that works for me. But listen man, I read Wuthering Heights. I wanted me a little Heathcliff action. I mean, why can't we indulge that fantasy and also be like, “And now I would like the ERA passed, please. Also, this lipstick is fuckin' killer.

Now she took the pills and, just before she closed her eyes, she summoned Lockie and his smile, and then the dreams would come.In her dream her golden boy tries again and again and again to stand up on the boogie board until he manages to remain upright for at least a minute. In her dream Sarah can feel the tears on her cheeks. Her golden boy was lost and she was too. She tried to dream that they found each other again but she couldn’t control her dreams any more than she could control her nightmares.

Epistrophe is the trope of obsession. It's the trope of emphasizing one point again and again. And it's the trope of not being able to escape that one conclusion, which is one of the reasons that songs are so suited to the idea of obsessive love, political certainty and other such unhealthy ideas. You can't reason in an epistrophic pop song. You can't seriously consider the alternatives, because the structure dictates that you'll always end up at the same point, thinking about the same girl and giving peace a chance.

Just because the package was beautifully wrapped didn’t mean it wasn’t still full of shit.

And then to win the prize had been incredible. She felt like she was being seen, actually being seen, for the first time in the endless years of being a mother and a wife.

If the clean man was not the boy’s father and if he had taken him, Tina knew that someone must be looking for him. She wanted someone to be looking for him.

Tina began to breathe in a little of the boy’s despair. It crept up her spine and tingled at her neck. Right now she wasn’t going anywhere either. Her first instinct had been to run. When she had recognised what was tied up under the table she wanted to run screaming from the house, but she knew enough to wait and keep her mouth shut. She was in real trouble. Panic was stupid.

I’ve learned that many people are just bridges to someone else. Some people become bridges that you take back and forth to get back to yourself. That’s how I interpret self-defining relationships. The people who bring you back to you. The ones who say, “You are always welcome here. You are family. I love you, and there’s nothing you can do about it, so get used to it.” My father’s funeral was a reminder of how important family is, and how important tradition is. That showing up for a funeral is tradition, and that tradition is not a trope and that there’s nothing stale about it.

We could not be further from ballooning’s established tropes: freedom, spiritual exaltation, human progress. Redon’s eternally open eye is deeply unsettling. The eye in the sky; God’s security camera. And that lumpish human head invites us to conclude that the colonisation of space doesn’t purify the colonisers; all that has happened is that we have brought our sinfulness to a new location.

The academic obsession with identity is ironic, since its roots lie in a philosophy that denied the very existence of the self. In the 1970s, the literary theory of deconstruction took over humanities departments with a curious set of propositions about language. Because linguistic signs were arbitrary, successful communication was said to be impossible. Most surprisingly, the human subject was declared to be a fiction, a mere play of rhetorical tropes. In the 1980s, however, the self came roaring back with a vengeance as feminists and race theorists took the mannered jargon of deconstruction and turned it into a political weapon. The key deconstructive concept of linguistic “différance” became identity difference between the oppressed and their oppressors; the prime object of study became one’s own self and its victimization

[...] a familiar art historical narrative [...] celebrates the triumph of the expressive individual over the collective, of innovation over tradition, and autonomy over interdependence. [...] In fact, a common trope within the modernist tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries involved the attempt to reconstruct or recover the lost ideal of an art that is integrated with, rather than alienated from, the social. By and large, however, the dominant model of avant-garde art during the modern period assumes that shared or collective values and systems of meaning are necessarily repressive and incapable of generating new insight or grounding creative praxis.

Dragons, for instance, have the right of safe conduct anywhere in Faërie. A reader may not like to read stories about dragons, she may be morally offended or aesthetically uninterested or simply sick of the subject; but at any rate she will not complain that the author has cheated by bringing in a dragon, because dragons belong in fantasy.

The people in the line scratched and twitched and jumped depending on whether they were on their way up or down. They all wanted breakfast. The body was strange that way. Regardless of what you did to it, it wanted to keep running. Unless, of course, it turned on you.In a fair world the people who set out to destroy themselves would be the ones to get the diseases and little kids would get to grow up without worrying. In a fair world . . . but fuck-all in the world was fair.

The uniform said they didn’t want me anymore,’ interrupted Lockie. Tina could hear some anger underneath his faltering words. ‘He said they weren’t even looking for me.’ The words were said quietly and there was a question in them. Kids thought their parents were superheroes. Surely if they had been looking for him, they would have found him? Tina knew better. Parents were just kids with more responsibility. They couldn’t control the world any more than an eight-year-old kid could.

Border crossing' is a recurrent theme in all aspects of my work -- editing, writing, and painting. I'm interested in the various ways artists not only cross borders but also subvert them. In mythology, the old Trickster figure Coyote is a champion border crosser, mischievously dashing from the land of the living to the land of the dead, from the wilderness world of magic to the human world. He tears things down so they can be made anew. He's a rascal, but also a culture hero, dancing on borders, ignoring the rules, as many of our most innovative artists do. I'm particularly drawn to art that crosses the borders critics have erected between 'high art' and 'popular culture,' between 'mainstream' and 'genre,' or between one genre and another -- I love that moment of passage between the two; that place on the border where two worlds meet and energize each other, where Coyote enters and shakes things up. But I still have a great love for traditional fantasy, for Imaginary World, center-of-the-genre stories. I'm still excited by series books and trilogies if they're well written and use mythic tropes in interesting ways.

Martin had a period of relishing the Boston thug-writer George V. Higgins, author of The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Higgins’s characters had an infectious way of saying ‘inna’ and ‘onna,’ so Martin would say, for example, ‘I think this lunch should be onna Hitch’ or ‘I heard he wasn’t that useful inna sack.’ Simple pleasures you may say, but linguistic sinew is acquired in this fashion and he would not dump a trope until he had chewed all the flesh and pulp of it and was left only with pith and pips. Thus there arrived a day when Park Lane played host to a fancy new American hotel with the no less fancy name of ‘The Inn on The Park’ and he suggested a high-priced cocktail there for no better reason than that he could instruct the cab driver to ‘park inna Inn onna Park.’ This near-palindrome (as I now think of it) gave us much innocent pleasure.

But, as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab's broad madness had been left behind; so in that broad madness, not one jot of his great natural intellect had perished. That before living agent, now became the living instrument. If such a furious trope may stand, his special lunacy stormed his general sanity, and carried it, and turned all its concentred cannon upon its own mad mark; so that far from having lost his strength, Ahab, to that one end, did now possess a thousand fold more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear upon any one reasonable object.

That’s what Lockie was—a little boy.It could do your head in if you thought too much about the cruelty that one person could inflict on another. It was best not to think about it, but here in front of Tina stood an example of the worst cruelty in the world.There was a large bump on one of his ribs. Tina knew what a bone that had healed itself looked like; Mark and the boys were always getting themselves into trouble.It was too much to think about. Too much to try and imagine the pain Lockie must have been in. Too much to imagine him crying for his mother and father. He was so small, so defenceless.

When scientists underestimate complexity, they fall prey to the perils of unintended consequences. The parables of such scientific overreach are well-known: foreign animals, introduced to control pests, become pests in their own right; the raising of smokestacks, meant to alleviate urban pollution, releases particulate effluents higher in the air and exacerbates pollution; stimulating blood formation, meant to prevent heart attacks, thickens the blood and results in an increased risk of blood clots in the heart. But when nonscientists overestimate [italicized, sic] complexity- 'No one can possibly crack this [italicized, sic] code" - they fall into the trap of unanticipated consequences. In the early 1950s , a common trope among some biologists was that the genetic code would be so context dependent- so utterly determined by a particular cell in a particular organism and so horribly convoluted- that deciphering it would be impossible. The truth turned out to be quite the opposite: just one molecule carries the code, and just one code pervades the biological world. If we know the code, we can intentionally alter it in organisms, and ultimately in humans. Similarly, in the 1960s, many doubted that gene-cloning technologies could so easily shuttle genes between species. by 1980, making a mammalian protein in a bacterial cell, or a bacterial protein in a mammalian cell, was not just feasible, it was in Berg's words, rather "ridiculously simple." Species were specious. "Being natural" was often "just a pose.

Logically she understood that everyone had something they were hiding, some hurt they kept deep inside, some reason why they were not really normal either, but she didn’t understand how they functioned. She didn’t understand how they got out of bed every morning or breathed in and out without the hurt weighing down their lungs.

The boy was tied up under the table, scrabbling his way through an empty packet of biscuits, licking his fingers to gather the crumbs.The kitchen was freezing; Tina could see the warmth of her breath in the air. It got like that sometimes in winter. The cold got trapped inside.Her first glance had made the boy a dog, just a mongrel tied up to the table leg, but a second glance told the truth. People saw what they wanted to see. Tina hadn’t wanted to see the boy. She thought she had perfected the art of tunnel vision. There were a lot of things she didn’t want to see.But she saw everything in the kitchen, everything.She felt it too. The despair in the air had a familiar feel. Hopeless defeat. It came off the boy in waves and she had to hold on tight to prevent it knocking her over.

She didn’t see what she didn’t want to see. The women on the street were pretty girls waiting for a date and she was a princess waiting for her prince. The world could be a lot easier to deal with if you lived mostly inside your own head. Probably all the same ugly, sick, twisted stuff went on behind the pretty fences of her childhood anyway.She had built herself a fairly impressive wall in the last two years, but then she had been building that long before she got to the Cross. She could watch the world shit itself up right in front of her and not feel a thing. Sometimes she thought that any feeling at all would have been a luxury, but nothing got through. It meant that nothing could hurt her but it also meant that nothing could move her either. It was a price she was willing to pay. It was one interesting fucking trade-off.

Right now the nightmares were in her waking hours so she needed to stay asleep. She was broken. Shattered. Devastated. Crushed. There was nothing left of the woman she had been. She could see it in her eyes. When she was awake she had to acknowledge her brokenness. She had to admit to herself that she might never be fixed. It was too much to think about. Her boy had to come back and, until he did, she needed to stay in her dreams.

Most of what people read, if you go to the bookshelf in the airport convenience store and look at what’s there, even if it doesn’t have a YA on the spine, is YA in its moral simplicity. People don’t want moral complexity. Moral complexity is a luxury. You might be forced to read it in school, but a lot of people have hard lives. They come home at the end of the day, they feel they’ve been jerked around by the world yet again for another day. The last thing they want to do is read Alice Munro, who is always pointing toward the possibility that you’re not the heroic figure you think of yourself as, that you might be the very dubious figure that other people think of you as. That’s the last thing you’d want if you’ve had a hard day. You want to be told good people are good, bad people are bad, and love conquers all. And love is more important than money. You know, all these schmaltzy tropes. That’s exactly what you want if you’re having a hard life. Who am I to tell people that they need to have their noses rubbed in moral complexity?

He said I was a dirty boy,’ whispered Lockie. ‘I was a dirty boy and that was why he did stuff to me, because I was dirty. It was my fault.’ ‘Bullshit!’ Tina shouted and half the locker room turned around. Tina grabbed Lockie’s hand and they didn’t stop moving until they were out on the street. The cold was a shock after the warmth of the gym but she kept him walking fast until they got back home. ‘It wasn’t your fault, Lockie. It’s never the kid’s fault. The uniform was an evil piece of shit and nothing he said to you was true.’ ‘It was my fault—it was,’ whined Lockie. ‘Why? Why was it your fault?’ ‘I was supposed to stand by the stroller. I was supposed to hold on and not move while Mum got the prize. Dad had to carry the cake. I was supposed to stand by the stroller and not move. It was my fault.’ Lockie’s tears burst like a dam. His small shoulders heaved and his sleeve became a tissue.Tina leaned down and grabbed him by the shoulders. ‘Look at me, Lockie.’He did as he was told.‘This wasn’t your fault. Kids do stuff like that all the time. I have no idea what you’re talking about but I can tell you that my little brother wandered off every chance he got. It wasn’t your fault, Lockie; you were just being a kid.

His body had become a statue as soon as the man’s hand made contact. He was perfectly still on his bed of newspapers. When faced with attack, most animals instinctively know to become motionless. If you didn’t move and you didn’t breathe it was possible that you would not be seen. The boy’s skinny ribcage filled with stale air while he waited for the hand to leave his head.Tina held her breath as well. If the man did more than pat the boy she would have to do something. She would have to do anything. There are some things that cannot be tolerated. If he did more than pat the boy Tina would not survive. She was completely sure of that

Kids didn’t just disappear unless someone made them disappear.‘Relax, mate,’ the head of security said. ‘We’ve never lost one yet.’ Lots of kids wandered off at the Easter Show, he told them. They were always found, usually somewhere near the food.Doug had tried to relax, to stay calm, but he could feel the panic building inside him.The place was too big.There were too many people.Lockie could be anywhere. The police were called. It took hours for everyone to leave the showgrounds because every family was stopped. Every parent was questioned and every child identified. It was way past midnight when everyone had finally gone home, and still they had not found Lockie.The head of security changed his tone. The police held whispered conversations in groups. They began to look at him with sympathy in their eyes.Doug felt his heart slow down. There was a ringing in his ears. He was underwater and he couldn’t swim.Lockie was gone.They had lost one.Sammy had gone from impatience to hunger to exhaustion. She didn’t understand what was happening.Sarah sat next to the pram twisting her hands. She did not cry. She didn’t cry for days, but every time Doug went near her he could hear her muttering the word ‘please’. ‘Please, please, please, please.’ It drove Doug mad and he had to move away because he wanted to hit her, to snap her out of her trance. He had never lifted a hand to his wife or his children, but now he had to close his fist and dig his nails into his palm to keep himself from lashing out Sarah didn’t believe in hitting children; she believed in time out and consequences. It was different to the way Doug had been raised but he had come around to the idea. The thought of anyone—especially himself—hurting Sarah and the kids was almost too much to bear.Doug sometimes wondered, after, if whoever had taken his son had hit him. When he did think about someone hurting his boy he could feel his hands curl into fists. He would embrace the rush of heat that came with the anger because at least it was a different feeling to the sorrow and despair. Anger felt constructive. He wanted to kill everyone, even himself. But as fast as the anger came it would recede and he would be back at the place he hated to be. Mired in his own helplessness. There was fuck-all he could do.

na kept her head down and pulled Lockie out into the street. She hoped he would manage to avoid standing on anything. His bare feet were already filthy but the streets of the Cross held the worst bits of human detritus. Tina didn’t want to have to deal with a piece of glass in Lockie’s foot, or worse. He was walking on tiptoe and more than one adult stopped to look at them. Tina moved quickly, getting Lockie out of sight before the questions had time to form. People tended to ask a lot more questions in the daytime. They saw things more clearly. Tina preferred the dark, where it was easy to hide.She had no idea what she was going to do with the kid after the new clothes and a shower. Maybe if he was warm and fed he would agree to walk into the police station and tell his story. Maybe he just needed a little time. He looked like a thinker. It was possible that she was really fucking up by keeping him. She had no idea what his body had been through. He could drop dead right now or have some kind of psycho meltdown.He looked at the ground as he walked. He held her hand and she guided him around the obstacles. He would not look up.He was locked up inside himself. His body was doing what it needed to do and maybe somewhere in his mind he was trying to find a key. If she got him to go to the police they would bring in a counsellor. Someone with a box of dolls and a soft voice. She had seen a movie about it. Lockie would be able to point to the doll and tell everyone exactly how his childhood had been taken. But would that help? Tina hoped he would be ready to talk to the police soon. If he wasn’t she was really screwed.

Sarah wondered what they—the ‘they’ who had taken her child; the ‘they’ or the ‘him’ or the ‘her’—were feeding him.Sometimes a fear dug at her until she acknowledged it: maybe they weren’t feeding him at all.Who would do that? Who would willingly starve a child? Who would hurt her baby? Who would take her baby? Who was this person and why were they allowed to exist?And what would I do to that person if I got the chance?There were days when she lay on the bed and concocted scenarios in her head. She would see herself finding Lockie. She was never really sure of the place. It would be a dark room in a dark house but the location wasn’t important. She would see herself rescuing her child, folding him in her arms and saying his name. Then she would see the person who had taken him.There was never a face, just a body with a blank head, but Sarah would see herself grow until she towered over the person and then she would hit and hit and hit until there was nothing left and all the time she would be screaming, ‘How dare you take my child? How dare you take him?’She had to find him. The desperate need to find him swirled around her body with everything she did. It ate into her soul and sometimes she had to hold on to the kitchen counter to stop herself running out into the road and screaming his name. She wanted to be looking for him all the time. She wanted to leave Sammy and Doug and just keep going until she got to the city and then she wanted to knock on every door across the whole of Sydney until she found her son. But maybe he wasn’t even in Sydney anymore. Maybe he wasn’t even in Australia. Where are you, Lockie? Where are you, where are you, where are you?

Tina woke to a thin beam of afternoon sun. She lay still for a moment, revisiting, reliving, trying to get comfortable with the events of the night before. The sound of rustling paper got her up and the smell assaulted her again. Lockie was eating a burger, trying for slow, but failing.He had his back to her as he perched in a corner, secretively stuffing his mouth. ‘Hey, Lockie,’ said Tina. Lockie turned, wild-eyed and fearful. He stopped mid-chew and pushed his tongue through his teeth to spit the gooey mess out. ‘Gross, kid, just swallow for fuck’s sake.’ ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘Sorry for touching, sorry for eating, sorry for being a bad boy.’ ‘You’re not being a bad boy,’ Tina said. She hated how pathetic the kid sounded. ‘The food is for you, do you understand? It’s all for you.’ Lockie stared. He was still and silent, as if waiting for what would happen next. Tina hated the idea that he was afraid of her, that he would have to be afraid of everyone he ever met from now on. ‘Say it, kid. Say, “It’s all for me.” Go on, say it.’ Lockie stared. ‘Say it, Lockie.’ ‘It’s all . . .’ He faltered. “It’s all for me.” 'Say it, I mean it.’ ‘It’s all for me.’ ‘Say it again, Lockie.’ ‘It’s all for me. All for me, all for me.’ ‘Okay, kid, you can shut up now. Get back to your breakfast. I might have a cigarette.’ ‘The food is all for me,’ said Lockie. His voice was determined. He was telling her, but mostly he was telling himself. ‘That’s right, kid, it’s all for you.’ ‘But you can share it with me,’ he said, and he gave Tina a small smile.Someone had taught Lockie all the right rules. Someone who didn’t even know if he was alive right now. ‘I bet you’ve got the best mum and dad somewhere.' Lockie nodded and chewed. ‘I bet I do.’ He didn’t talk anymore after that. The memory of his parents had obviously been put somewhere far away so thoughts of them wouldn’t hurt. He wasn’t ready to take them out again.

Right now he needed to concentrate on keeping himself under control. Inside, his gut churned. There was a war going on. The joy of holding his son again clashed with the waves of anger that rose higher and higher with each passing moment. He thought he had known why Pete had arrived at the farm. He had pushed the fork into the soil and watched the earth turn over sure that the truth of their tragedy was about to be laid before them. He had watched the dry earth give up the rich brown soil and wanted to stay there forever in the cold garden just watching his fork move the earth. He had not wanted to hear what Pete had to say. And now this..this..What did you call this? A miracle? What else could it be? But this miracle was tainted. He was not holding the same boy he had taken to the Easter Show. This thin child with shaved hair was not the Lockie he knew. Someone had taken that child. They had taken his child and he could feel by the weight of him they had starved him. Someone had done this to him. They had done this and god knew what else. Doug walked slowly into the house, trying to find the right way to break the news to Sarah. She was lying down in the bedroom again. These days she spent more time there than anywhere else. Doug walked slowly through the house to the main bedroom at the back. It was the only room in the house whose curtains were permanently closed. How damaged was his child? Would he ever be the same boy they had taken up to the Show ? What had been done to him? Dear God, what had been done to him? His ribs stuck out even under the jumper he was wearing. It was not his jumper. He had been dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, perfect for the warm day. He had a cap with a Bulldogs logo. What could have happened to his clothes? How long had he had the jumper?Doug bit his lip. First things first. He opened the bedroom door cautiously and looked into the gloom. Sarah was on her back. Her mouth was slightly open. She was fast asleep. The room smelled musty with the heater on. Sarah slept tightly wrapped in her covers. Doug swallowed. He wanted to run into the room whooping and shouting that Lockie was home but Sarah was so fragile he had no idea how she would react. He walked over to the window and opened the curtains. Outside it was getting dark already but enough light entered the room to wake Sarah up. She moaned and opened her eyes. ‘Oh god, Doug, please just close them. I’m so tired.’ Doug sat down on the bed and Sarah turned her back to him. She had not looked at him. Lockie opened his eyes and looked around the room. ‘Ready to say hello to Mum, mate?’ Doug asked. ‘Hi, Mum,’ said Lockie to his mother’s back. His voice had changed. It was deeper and had an edge to it. He sounded older. He sounded like someone who had seen too much. But Sarah would know it was her boy. Doug saw Sarah’s whole body tense at the sound of Lockie’s voice and then she reached her arm behind her and twisted the skin on her back with such force Doug knew she would have left a mark. ‘It’s not a dream, Sarah,’ he said quietly. ‘He’s home.’ Sarah sat up, her eyes wide. ‘Hi, Mum,’ said Lockie again. ‘Hello, my boy,’ said Sarah softly. Softly, as though he hadn’t been missing for four months. Softly, as though he had just been away for a day. Softly, as though she hadn’t been trying to die slowly. Softly she said, ‘Hello, my boy.’ Doug could see her chest heaving. ‘We’ve been looking for you,’ she said, and then she held out her arms. Lockie climbed off Doug’s lap and onto his mother’s legs. She wrapped her arms around him and pushed her nose into his neck, finding his scent and identifying her child. Lockie buried his head against her breasts and then he began to cry. Just soft little sobs that were soon matched by his mother’s tears. Doug wanted them to stop but tears were good. He would have to get used to tears.