Cloud Cuckoo Land Quotes
"While I’m sure you will doubt the truth of the outlandish events they relate, my dear niece, in my transcription, I do not leave out a word."
"Maybe in the old days men did walk the earth as beasts, and a city of birds floated in the heavens between the realms of men and gods."
"The Lakeport Public Library is a high-gabled two-story gingerbread Victorian on the corner of Lake and Park that was donated to the town after the First World War."
"A warrior, truly engaged, does not experience guilt, fear, or remorse."
"He saw the cities of many men and learned their ways."
"These Vulcan form’d with art divine, to wait Immortal guardians at Alcinous’s gate."
"The branch here bends beneath the weighty pear, And verdant olives flourish round the year."
"It’s been a long fucking time since hope."
"There is no bad weathers, only bad clothes."
"Now that we’ve outlined John the Baptizer, we’ll add his features."
"The owls have three eyelids. Their eyeballs are not spheres but elongated tubes."
"Stop, ye thieves, robbers, murderers, horsemen and soldiers, in all humility, for we have tasted the rosy blood of Jesus."
"Each sign signifies a sound, and to link sounds is to form words, and to link words is to construct worlds."
"A book is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before."
"You always think the barley is more plentiful in another man’s field, but it’s no better out there, Aethon, I promise you."
"Pastor White labors up the stairs with a plate of ham and crackers and sits on the little brass bed breathing hard."
"The snow falls in big conglomerated flakes. A voice inside his head whispers, You are alone and it’s probably your fault, and the daylight wanes."
"As Zeno steps onto the ice, the snowpack gets thinner, freeze-dried and blown flat by wind."
"Only now does fear fill his body, a thousand snakes slithering beneath his skin."
Bona fide honest-to-God hero," the pastor says. "What your daddy was.
"Nonetheless, as soon as he gets home, no matter the weather, no matter how deep the snow, he drops his backpack, goes out the sliding door, ducks under the wire, and climbs through the forest to the big dead ponderosa in the clearing halfway up the hill."
"I have heard the people say that the Pigeon is of all birds the most temperate and restrained in its sexual relations."
"Fear of the thing," Maher murmurs, "will be more powerful than the thing itself."
"The Queen of Cities, they call it, bridge between East and West, crossroads of the universe."
"In the space inside his ear defenders, Seymour waits for the roar."
"In the distance, what must be a mile away, rocks and mud spray in all directions, as though an invisible plow rakes a great furrow in the earth."
"At nightfall, high on a rocky pass, we reached the mouth of a cave. More thieves came out to embrace the thieves who brought me here, and they prodded me through room after room twinkling with stolen gold and silver, and left me in a miserable unlit cavern."
"Faith, says Widow Theodora, will be our breastplate and piety our sword."
"The things that look fixed in the world, child—mountains, wealth, empires—their permanence is only an illusion."
"All you can do is look. The only solid thing in the Atlas is the ground."
"We are the bridge generations, the intermediaries, the ones who do the work so that our descendants will be ready."
"For as long as we have been a species, whether with medicine or technology, by gathering power, by embarking on journeys, or by telling stories, we humans have tried to defeat death."
"It's that the gods spin threads of ruin through the fabric of our lives, all to make a song for generations to come."
"The whole country's a damn ice-cold prison. Where are we going to run?"
"The sky was black as the Stygian crypt, and on the Ocean great blue vessels of ice sailed to and fro."
"Imagine how it felt to hear the old songs about heroes returning home. To believe that it was possible."
"Somebody needs to pay. Somebody needs to go to jail."
"Great grey owl. World’s largest species of owl by length."
"A hero fights for those who cannot fight for themselves."
"Some stories can be both false and true at the same time."
"Why mourn, Grandfather would say, what men can do?"
"We will all have to be strong. The coming events will test us in ways we cannot yet imagine."
"Life usually seeks to cooperate, not fight."
"The goddess pointed with one wing at a second pile of seaweed, frozen to the gravel, and said, 'That’s the rose of the northern sea and I’ve heard that if you eat enough of it, you’ll feel funny.'"
"The walls of Vault One have dimmed. NoLight coming."
"With every passing hour, I become more confident that you are safe where you are."
"Where has everyone gone and who is she to be the one who is still alive and for what reasons in the universe would Father ever leave his home and doom her to this wretched fate?"
"Why can’t healing happen as quickly as wounding?"
"Some hours she presses her hands against the walls and feels trapped like an embryo inside a seed coat, dormant, waiting to wake up."
"DayLight NoLight DayLight NoLight: inside the Atlas she walks deserts, expressways, farm roads, Prague, Cairo, Muscat, Tokyo, searching for something she cannot name."
"Finally she sits exhausted on the cot and shivers and the diodes in the ceiling dim."
"Every few hours the questions rise to her lips: Sybil, am I the only one left?"
"The house is the same: the ceramic children, a Jesus suffering on every wall."
"He sleeps on the floor beside the bed. He is not quite twenty years old."
"In the last breath before dark a black bear materializes from the twilight."
"Do you think we’re gonna sit in our cars solving climate problems then? Or are we gonna fist-fight and rape and eat each other?"
"Her tongue does not cooperate when she tries to speak, and every few hours muscles in her back and neck seize."
"The sultan’s cannons fire, three five seven, and a distant clamor rises."
"The clamor of drums and cymbals and voices builds at his back."
"A tap on his shoulder. Janet shivers on the curb."
"Humans are best understood as exterminators, every habitat we enter, we decimate, and now we have overrun the earth. The next thing we exterminate will be ourselves."
"Courageous Korea Vet Saves Kids and Library."
"Proteomic analysis of the Diogenes codex turned up traces of tree sap, lead, charcoal, and gum tragacanth, a thickening agent commonly used in ink in medieval Constantinople."
"But if it is probable that the manuscript survived the Middle Ages, like so many other ancient Greek texts, in a monastic library of Constantinople, how it traveled out of the city and to Urbino must be left to the imagination."
"Out here in the woop woop, like Grandmom calls it, we’ve had heaps of troubles."
"I see what you are, little crow. You are a pretender, a creature of clay, not a bird at all. In your heart, you are still a feeble human, hammered from earth, with the blaze of hunger inside."
"He was stupid to make a fire: too much of a risk."
"The Greeks are always drunk, isn’t that what everyone says? Half-beasts permanently inebriated on their own somatic pleasure."
"Probably it is a trick, a witch’s disguise."
"Does she guess why he is alone? Does she sense what he has done?"
"Please be quiet." He imagines her scream traveling out through the trees in every direction.
"In much wisdom is much sorrow, and in ignorance is much wisdom."
"Your brain constantly winnowing through them, weighing consequence, burying pain."
"Time: the most violent war engine of all."
"Forgetting, he is learning, is how the world heals itself."
"May she live five more minutes, breathing it, smelling it."
"Water, given from the sky, in such quantities."
"The darkness of this place is nothing like NoLight."
"A bath, that’s as much magic as any foolish shepherd needs."
"In front of her, out on the horizon, the blue rim of dawn is turning pink, raising its fingers to push back the night."