Fragile Things: Short Fictions And Wonders Quotes
"I think...that I would rather recollect a life misspent on fragile things than spent avoiding moral debt."
"There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts."
"The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless."
"Stories, like people and butterflies and songbirds’ eggs and human hearts and dreams, are also fragile things, made up of nothing stronger or more lasting than twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks."
"Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkably difficult to kill."
"Humor creeps in. Self-parody whispers at the edges of things. I find myself guying literary convention and sending up both myself and the whole scrivening profession."
"I'm trying to create a slice of life here, an accurate representation of the world as it is, and of the human condition."
"With my death, I truly believe the curse is lifted from our line."
"Had such a thing happened in one of my tales—and such things happen all the time—I would have felt myself constrained to guy it unmercifully."
"In a perfect perfect world you could fuck people without giving them a piece of your heart. And every glittering kiss and every touch of flesh is another shard of heart you’ll never see again."
"When Jesus says will you be there will you be there? No man knows the day or the hour so will you be there."
"It’s how good a person you are. Being alive."
"They go on the Haunted History tours, looking for ghosts, you want to say, dude, this is where the ghosts come, this is where the dead stay. Easier to go looking for the living."
"I was never afraid of dead folk. You know that? They never hurt you. So many things in this town can hurt you, but the dead don’t hurt you. Living people hurt you. They hurt you so bad."
"This is a town where people sleep with each other, you know. We make love to each other. It’s something we do to show we’re still alive."
"Used to be they only did this shit at Mardi Gras," she said. "Now the tourists expect it, so it’s just tourists doing it for the tourists. The locals don’t care."
"A lot of kids they come to New Orleans. Some of them read Anne Rice books and figure they learn about being vampires here. Some of them have abusive parents, some are just bored. Like stray kittens living in drains, they come here."
"I’ll bear that in mind," I told her. "No sister," she said. "No sister. Only me. Only me."
"It’s okay. Every day is freshly ground," I told her.
"Now," said the demon, "you will be tortured."
"In time you will remember even this moment with fondness."
"The next part," it explained, in the moment before it brought down the cat, "is worse."
"Now," said the demon, "the true pain begins."
"Again," said the demon, a thousand years later.
"I played…something. It arched and boomed and sang and reverberated. The bow glided over strange and confident arpeggios, and then I put down the bow and plucked a complex and intricate pizzicato melody out of the bass."
"Like any true story, the end of the affair is messy and unsatisfactory."
"You’re a fantasy writer. You make up stuff like this for a living. No one’s going to believe you."
"It’s making them believe us that’s problematic. Or, if you ask me, impossible."
"She only looked away for a moment, and the mask slipped, and you fell. All your tomorrows start here."
"And the hard part, the bad part, the Jerry Springer Show part is that you never stop loving someone. There’s always a piece of them in your heart."
"Harlequin has given you his heart. You must discover its beat yourself."
"Harlequin, who rose from the dead to play his pranks upon the living."
"It’s Valentine’s Day, I thought. Tell her how you feel. Tell her what you think."
"I wondered, sometimes, if they were sleeping together, but I said nothing about it—I did not dare, although I brooded on it."
"All the things around them that people could eat, if only they knew it."
"It’s astonishing the things that people don’t eat."
"She had a thin sheet over her, but you could see she was naked under the sheet."
"Nobody gets through life without losing a few things on the way."
"I grow weary of the journeying, and I wish sometimes that it would end."
"We heard their histories and we shivered in the chill of the outer places."
"I could learn more in sun, again. Or in the deeps."
"I am a poem, or I am a pattern, or a race of people whose world was swallowed by the sea."
"Isn’t it hard to be three things at the same time?"
"We knew that it would soon be over, and so we put it all into a poem, to tell the universe who we were, and why we were here, and what we said and did and thought and dreamed and yearned for. We wrapped our dreams in words and patterned the words so that they would live forever, unforgettable. Then we sent the poem as a pattern of flux, to wait in the heart of a star, beaming out its message in pulses and bursts and fuzzes across the electromagnetic spectrum, until the time when, on worlds a thousand sun systems distant, the pattern would be decoded and read, and it would become a poem once again."
"You cannot hear a poem without it changing you."
"There are places that we are welcomed, and places where we are regarded as a noxious weed, or as a disease, something immediately to be quarantined and eliminated. But where does contagion end and art begin?"
"It’s the strangest thing about poetry—you can tell it’s poetry, even if you don’t speak the language."
"When you’ve gone as far as you dare. And if you go any further, you wouldn’t be you anymore? You’d be the person who’d done that?"
"She wakes, She feeds the kids, She combs her hair, She goes down to the market, Buys some oil."
"If you do it, you’ll get a fantastic weekend in a historical house, and I can guarantee you’ll get to meet all kinds of interesting people."
"He was not sure what he had been looking for. He only knew that he had not found it."
"I can do whatever I want," she said. "It’s a free country, isn’t it?"
"At the end of the day, you’re going to be dinner."
"Bring us back," said the man holding his hand. "Bring us back or let us go."
"You can’t give a man a hard time for asking."
"It’s what they do to monsters," she said. "It’s what they have to do. It’s what they’ve always done."
"There’s something about building a bonfire, when you’ve hauled over the wood, and put it down in the perfect place, that’s special."
"You think I’m a monster. But you think I’m your monster."
"Sometimes the answer is, he’s got someone like me on his side."
"The hardest thing about being a hulder... is that, if you don’t want to be lonely, you have to love a man."
"This fight was old, older than even Mr. Alice knew... it was the fight of man against monster, and it was old as time."
"There’s worse things than dying... And I know most of them."