“Your daughter is ugly. She knows loss intimately, carries whole cities in her belly. As a child, relatives wouldn’t hold her. She was splintered wood and sea water. They said she reminded them of the war. On her fifteenth birthday you taught her how to tie her hair like rope and smoke it over burning frankincense. You made her gargle rosewater and while she coughed, said macaanto girls like you shouldn’t smell of lonely or empty. You are her mother. Why did you not warn her, hold her like a rotting boat and tell her that men will not love her if she is covered in continents, if her teeth are small colonies, if her stomach is an island if her thighs are borders? What man wants to lay down and watch the world burn in his bedroom? Your daughter’s face is a small riot, her hands are a civil war, a refugee camp behind each ear, a body littered with ugly things but God, doesn’t she wear the world well.”
“In our world, said Eustace, a star is a huge ball of flaming gas. Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of.”
“I don t need to kill goats to say things. I CAN talk.”
“Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.”
“We live in a dark and romantic and quite tragic world.”
“But for what purpose was the earth formed? asked Candide. To drive us mad, replied Martin.”
“There s nothing more dangerous than someone who wants to make the world a better place.”
“To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown.”
“That was the thing about the world: it wasn t that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn t expect.”