Two Years Eight Months And Twenty-Eight Nights Quotes
"Very little is known, though much has been written, about the true nature of the jinn, the creatures made of smokeless fire."
"These qualities are broadly accepted: that they are whimsical, capricious, wanton; that they can move at high speed, alter their size and form."
"For a long time their dwelling places were also in dispute. Some ancient stories said, slanderously, that the jinn lived among us here on earth."
"To say that the jinn are inhuman may seem to be stating the obvious, but human beings share some qualities at least with their fantastical counterparts."
"The female jinn, the jinnias or jiniri, are even more mysterious, even subtler and harder to grasp, being shadow-women made of fireless smoke."
"To be thin-skinned, far-sighted, and loose-tongued is to feel too sharply, see too clearly, speak too freely."
"If the best of all possible worlds is one in which another thinker’s ideas can be purloined, then perhaps it would be better to withdraw to cultivate one’s garden."
"History is unkind to those it abandons, and can be equally unkind to those who make it."
"The only proper response to the failure of optimism was to retreat behind high walls, walls in the self as well as in the world, and to await the inevitability of death."
"If you walk away from God you should probably try to stay in the good books of Luck."
"The slits in the world are reopening, so I can come back to see you again."
"That’s the wrong question. The question is, what do you desire?"
"A child understands nothing, and clings to faith because it lacks knowledge."
"You will see, as time goes by, that in the end it will be religion that will make men turn away from God."
"For what the living call life is a worthless triviality when compared to the life to come."
"The existence of the jinn posed problems to moral philosophers from the beginning."
"She, however, had a right to be angry. And the anger of the jiniri was a thing to be feared."
"I am a person from that world, a jinnia, a princess of the tribe of the bright jinn."
"What followed instantly became the stuff of legend."
"If enough people were sensible enough not to clap hands, then this Tinker Bell god would die."
"He understood that his mind, like his body, was detaching itself from solid ground."
"He was feeling his age, and there was something even worse to be faced."
"His condition was not only affecting his health, weakening his muscles, making him old; it was also erasing his character, replacing it with a new self."
"History had slipped away from him, and in his own eyes as well as others’ he was becoming, he had become, nothing more or less than the man who was three and a half inches off the ground."
"Sister wasn’t and had never been a nun but folks called her Sister because of her religious temperament."
"Seemed like ever since his New Mexican 'demise' the whole world was going to hell in sympathy with that loser."
"This new crazy was different. It felt 9/11 crazy: foreign, evil."
"The devil was on the loose, Sister said, loudly and often."
"That Bagdad is my city and I am both its monarch and its citizen, its shopper and its storekeeper, its drinker and its wine."
"We were all trapped in stories, just as he used to say, each of us the prisoner of our own solipsistic narrative."
"And the moral of the story is, don’t push your fucking luck."
"The jinn rarely admitted to one another how interested they were in human beings."
"The fact that you take credit for bad weather only serves to show how desperate you are to prove your potency."
"One thing did not cross her mind. Geronimo Manezes was of the tribe of the Duniazát, which made him her descendant."
"At the beginning of all love there is a private treaty each of the lovers makes with himself or herself."
"Beware the man (or jinni) of action when he finally seeks to better himself with thought. A little thinking is a dangerous thing."
"She was something of a downtown celebrity, world famous on twenty blocks."
"The camel will gladly have sex with its mother, daughter, brother, sister, father, uncle, or what you will."
"At the beginning of the War of the Worlds, Ra’im took to the water, and one lightless afternoon he arose as a giant sea-monster from the winter harbor and swallowed the Staten Island Ferry."
"If you wish to understand how it can be that so many of these extremely powerful spirits have been so frequently captured in bottles, lamps and so on, the answer lies in the immense indolence that comes over a jinni after he has performed more or less any action."
"To recount a fantasy, a story of the imaginary, is also a way of recounting a tale about the actual."
"We tell this story still as it has come down to us through many retellings, mouth to ear, ear to mouth, both the story of the poisoned box and the stories it contained."
"The universe has ten dimensions. That’s one way of looking at it."
"What’s that to me? You’ll do as the new nation requests unless you want to be thought of as an antinational element."
"This is what stories are, experience retold by many tongues to which, sometimes, we give a single name."
"Fear changed the fearful, thought Mr. Geronimo looking down the barrel of the gun."
"The universe is irrational, as every jinn knows."
"It is hard for us as we look back to put ourselves in the shoes of our ancestors, for whom the arrival in the midst of their everyday life of the implacable forces of the metamorphic, the descending avatars of transformation, represented a shocking disruption in the fabric of the real."
"In the battle against the dark jinn, this lightning became a crucial weapon."
"He began to understand time in a new way, and here his human self, urgent, transient, watching the sand run out of the hourglass, was at odds with his new jinn self, which shrugged at time, which saw chronology as a disease of tiny minds."
"The jinn have multitrack minds and are the best of multitaskers."
"Nothing she commanded her tribe to do in the war against the dark jinn could be considered wrong or immoral."
"The number of jinn and jinnia is a constant, and the species is sterile and cannot reproduce."
"There were lower forms of life in Fairyland, the most numerous of which were the devs."
"If we can’t have sex at least a dozen times a day, darling, we might as well be nuns."
"The entire jinn world would crumble and fall and all its inhabitants perish."
"My father is already dead. Why do you imagine your kingdoms are safe?"
"The sexual rejection of the dark jinn by the female population of Fairyland proved strangely counterproductive."
"When lonely, hopeless young men were provided with loving sexual partners, they lost interest in suicide belts, bombs, and the virgins of heaven."
"The human race paid the penalty for the jinnias’ punishment of the Grand Ifrits."
"Now that I have opened your eyes to your true nature, you must promise to fight at my side."
"I’m your mother, the voice said, the mother who put the magic in your body."
"Standing on the doorstep of The Bagdad, he seemed to see a year and a half of his hometown rush before his eyes."
"We are addicted to the acceleration, we have forgotten the pleasures of the old slownesses."
"The survivors of thunderbolt attacks were of two types."
"When you’re a freak it’s good to know you’re not alone."
"The men and women occupied by the parasite-jinn were beyond saving, dead the moment the parasites entered their bodies."
"The rage of the jinn burns with unquenchable fire."
"The making of solidity out of evanescence was one of the newest arts of war."
"This was what she knew about male metamorphs: they would elude you, they would turn themselves into water and slip through your fingers, unless you were quick enough to grab them by the balls and hold on tightly."
"Fish supper tonight, she said, and left him to sink beneath the surface."
"She was the mother of all her flock, the useless ones as well as the worthwhile."
"It was an insane time to open an upscale eatery."
"Liberation radio stations began intermittently to broadcast."
"The kidnapping of Hugo Casterbridge was a new twist in the dark spiral of the war."
"Fear did not, finally, drive people into the arms of God."