I was cleaning the inbox folder of my email when I found some quotes from books I had been reading, emailed to myself in 2010. It seems like a long time ago.
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Terry Pratchett’s Men At Arms
(Two examples of why my favourite author is a brilliant, brilliant human being.)
‘Good grief,’ said Angua, when they had put several streets between them and the crowd of dogs. ’He’s mad, isn’t he?’
‘No, mad’s when you froth at the mouth,’ said Gaspode. ‘He’s insane. That’s when you froth at the brain.’
Terry Pratchett’s Monstrous Regiment
The reedy little voice trembled with such belief that Polly felt embarrassed, and then ashamed and, finally, after the ringing ‘amen’, amazed that the world appeared no different from before. For a minute or two, it had been a better place…
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Andrew Davidson’s The Gargoyle
(This was read on a lark, and it was good, if the number of quotes I have here are anything to go by; and yet depressing is not what I’d usually read.)
It was not only a lack of communication from God that made me feel less worthy, it was also that the other nuns seemed so sure of their paths when there was so much I didn’t understand. I was bewildered in heart and mind; I was deficient in the certainty the others seemed to have.
But none of that is enough. Your skin is the emblem of your identity, the image that you presented to the world. But it was never who you really are. Being burnt doesn’t make you any less– or more– human. It only makes you burnt.
I called her stupid; she laughed and replied that against stupidity even the gods struggle in vain.
We rarely notice our innate feeling for time until it’s removed. This is why amnesiacs are so confused when they become first aware of their condition. It’s not because they’ve lost memories– we all lose memories; it’s because they’ve lost time.
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Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files Book 4: Summer Knight
(This, I suspect I only kept on reading because of a completion-ist tendency… and also because this particular paragraph made me laugh.)
Here’s where I ask why don’t you spend your time doing something safer and more boring. Like maybe administering suppositories to rabid gorillas.
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Lastly, something I’ve quoted once before in an old place, and have always kept close to my heart; just as I have his stories:
Dan Rhode’s Anthropology
Indifference
Not wanting the intensity of my love to drive Skylark away, I feigned indifference. I worried that this tactic wasn’t working; seeming bored in my company, she would keep looking at her watch as though impatient to go somewhere far better. Even so, we would always disinterestedly arrange to meet up again. When, besotted, I casually suggested we get married, she shrugged her shoulders and, yawning, said, ‘Whatever.’ I couldn’t believe my luck. The man asked us whether we were prepared to love and cherish one another forever. Skylark said she might as well, and I told him I supposed so.
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