Samiha Tasnim
A death is always exciting, always makes you realise how alive you are, how vulnerable but so-far-lucky; but the death of somebody close gives you a good excuse to go a bit crazy for a while and do things that would otherwise be inexcusable. What delight to behave really badly and still get loads of sympathy!
The Sea is a sort of mythological enemy, and I make what you might call sacrifices to it in my soul, fearing it a little, respecting it as you're supposed to, but in many ways treating it as an equal. It does things to the world, and so do I; we should both be feared.
Sometimes the thoughts and feelings I had didn't really agree with each other, so I decided I must be lots of different people inside my brain.
If we're really so bad and so thick that we'd actually use all those wonderful H-bombs and Neutron bombs on each other, then maybe it's just as well we do wipe ourselves out before we can get into space and start doing horrible things to other races.
All our lives are symbols. Everything we do is part of a pattern we have at least some say in. The strong make their own patterns and influence other people's, the weak have their courses mapped out for them. The weak and the unlucky, and the stupid.
...it can be unsettling to hear yourself described as you have thought of yourself in your most honest and abject moods, just as it is humbling to hear what you have thought about in your most hopeful and unrealistic moments.
I know who I am and I know my limitations. I restrict my horizons for my own good reasons; fear - oh, yes, I admit it - and a need for reassurance and safety in a world which just so happened to treat me very cruelly at an age before I had any real chance of affecting it.
Inside this greater machine, things are not quite so cut and dried (or cut and pickled) as they have appeared in my experience. Each of us, in our own personal Factory, may believe we have stumbled down one corridor, and that our fate is sealed and certain (dream or nightmare, humdrum or bizarre, good or bad), but a word, a glance, a slip - anything can change that, alter it entirely, and our marble hall becomes a gutter, or our rat-maze a golden path. Our destination is the same in the end, but our journey - part chosen, part determined - is different for us all, and changes even as we live and grow. I thought one door had snicked shut behind me years ago; in fact I was still crawling about the face. Now the door closes, and my journey begins.
The glasses vibrate with little screams when I touch them. If I pick them up, they'll shatter. “
For one moment we are not failed tests and broken condoms and cheating on essays; we are crayons and lunch boxes and swinging so high our sneakers punch holes in the clouds. For one breath everything feels better.
She offered herself to the big, bad wolf and didn't scream when he took the first bite.
Why? You want to know why? Step into a tanning booth and fry yourself for two or three days. After your skin bubbles and peels off, roll in coarse salt, then pull on long underwear woven from spun glass and razor wire. Over that goes your regular clothes, as long as they are tight. Smoke gunpowder and go to school to jump through hoops, sit up and beg, and roll over on command. Listen to the whispers that curl into your head at night, calling you ugly and fat and stupid and bitch and whore and worst of all “a disappointment.” Puke and starve and cut and drink because you don't want to feel any of this. Puke and starve and cut and drink because you need an anesthetic and it works. For a while. But then the anesthetic turns into poison and by then it's too late because you are main-lining it now, straight into your soul. It is rotting you and you can't stop. Look in a mirror and find a ghost. Hear every heartbeat scream that everysinglething is wrong with you.
“Why?” is the wrong question. Ask “Why not?”
The crap we put up with when we're awake every day—school, house, house, mall, world—is bad enough. Shouldn't I at least get a break when I'm asleep? Or, if I'm doomed to be haunted by ghosts, shouldn't they only work at night, and dissolve when hit by sunlight?
In one aspect, yes, I believe in ghosts, but we create them. We haunt ourselves, and sometimes we do such a good job, we lose track of reality.
If I had lady-spider legs, I would weave a sky where the stars lined up. Mattresses would be tied down tight to their trucks, bodies would never crash through windshields. The moon would rise above the wine-dark sea and give babies only to maidens and musicians who had prayed long and hard. Lost girls wouldn't need compasses or maps. They would find gingerbread paths to lead them out of the forest and home again.
When you're alive, people can hurt you. It's easier to crawl into a bone cage or a snowdrift of confusion. It's easier to lock everybody out. But it's a lie.
I'm learning how to be angry and sad and lonely and joyful and excited and afraid and happy. I am learning how to taste everything.
The tiny elf dancer became a wooden doll whose strings were jerked by people not paying attention.
There were not so many physical threats that could not be countered with a decent hammer, Salander thought.
“The theme of the May issue is the sex trade. The point we have to make is that trafficking is a crime against human rights and that these criminals must be exposed and treated like war criminals or death squads or torturers anywhere in the world. Now let's get going.”
You're an entropic chaos factor.
Those pointless equations, to which no solution exists, are called absurdities
A root of an equation is a number which substituted into the equation instead of an unknown converts the equation into an identity. The root is said to satisfy the equation. Solving an equation implies finding all of its roots. An equation that is always satisfied, no matter the choice of values for its unknowns, is called an identity.
There are no innocents. There are, however, different degrees of responsibility.
Salander had a selective morality. She had nothing at all against swindling the company's clients herself—provided they deserved it—but if she had accepted a job with a confidentiality agreement in it, she would never have broken it.
I said that friendship is built on two things—respect and trust. Even if you don't like me, you can still depend on me and trust me. I've never shared your secrets with anyone.
The reference to friendship made her uncomfortable. She didn't know how to respond to it.
“She's one fucking freaky chick . . . but she's one of the good ones. I like her.”
Salander was the woman who hated men who hate women.
She may be hard up, but she's a survivor.
“And if she spends the next ten years in prison, at least she was the one who chose that path. I'll still be her friend,” Palmgren said.
“I had no idea you had such a libertarian view of humanity.”
“Neither did I,” he said.
The things we call supernatural is only the natural of which the laws are not yet understood.-The Hound of Death
“What people don't realise,” went on Miss Price, “is that there are very few spells that can be done without paraphernalia. You must, if you understand, have something to turn into something and something to turn it with.”
If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.
People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away.
But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires,
His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.
No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man can store up in his ghostly heart.
‘You can't repeat the past.' ‘Can't repeat the past?' he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!'
He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was...
Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees – he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder. His heart beat faster as Daisy's white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.
... and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms further... And one fine morning –
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
This didn't turn out to be as good as I expected it to be. The story had potential, but the characters somehow fell short of the mark.
For to be brave about a thing like that, you must first be sorry. And how could I be sorry, for someone I never knew?
But tonight, all things are out of their order, all my patterns have been disturbed. My liberty beckons: gaugeless, fearful, inevitable as death.
But there are as many different ways of being mad, after all, as there are of being crooked.
Some were perfect maniacs. Two or three, like Betty, were only simpletons. One liked to shout bad words. Another threw fits. The rest were only miserable: they walked, with their eyes on the floor, and sat and turned their hands in their laps, and mumbled, and sighed.
But you see, I'm afraid you must be mad, since you are here. There is something queer about us all. You need only look about you. You need only look at yourself.
The expert detective's pursuit will go unnoticed, but not because he is unremarkable. Rather, like the suspect's shadow, he will appear as though he is meant to be there.
Objects have memory, too. The doorknob remembers who turned it, the telephone who answered it. The gun remembers when it was last fired, and by whom. It is for the detective to learn the language of these things, so that he might hear them when they have something to say.
Best to proceed, therefore, with the vigilance of one who assumes that a corpse is always around the next corner. That way it is less likely to be your own.
Most everything can be divided into two categories: details and clues. Knowing one from the other is more important than knowing your left shoe from your right.
From I one could really go anywhere at all.
Imagine a desk covered with papers. That is everything you are thinking about. Now imagine a stack of file drawers behind it. That is everything you know. The trick is to keep the desk and the file drawers as close to one another as possible, and the papers stacked neatly.
Only if someone has behaved suspiciously should you allow for the possibility of his innocence.
There is no better way to understand your own motives and dispositions than by finding someone to act as your opposite.
A good detective tries to know everything. But a great detective knows just enough to see him through to the end.
A train will bring you back to the place you came from, but it will not return you home.
The unknown will always be boundless.
What frightens us about the carnival, I think, is not that it will come to town. Or that it will leave town, which it always does. What frightens us is the possibility that it will leave forever, and never come back, and take us with it when it goes.
My story will be over soon. But it's not something to be sad about. As we count up the memories from one journey, we head off on another. Remembering those who went ahead. Remembering those who will follow after. And someday, we will meet all those people again, out beyond the horizon.
My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? When the lightning strikes shadows on the bedroom wall and the rain taps at the window with its long fingernails? No. When fear and cold make a statue of you in your bed, don't expect hard-boned and fleshless truth to come running to your aid. What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.
A good story is always more darling than a broken piece of truth.
There is something about words. In expert words, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves round your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.
Returning to myself, I found that my thoughts had been rearranged in my absence.
As famous for her secrets as for her stories, she was a perfect mystery.
People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.
I'd expected the world to give up its childlike and familiar appearance to show me its secret, adult side. Instead, cloaked in my new independence, I felt younger than ever.
For me, to see is to read.
There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere.
I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and more essential than that. When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled.
What is it that allows human beings to see through each other's pretendings?
One gets so used to one's own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people,
I shall start at the beginning. Though of course the beginning is never where you think it is. Our lives are so important to us that we tend to think the story of them begins with our birth. First there was nothing, then I was born... Yet that is not so. Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Families are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole.
Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes—characters even—caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.
I am human. Like all humans, I do not remember my birth. By the time we wake up to ourselves, we are little children, and our advent is something that happened an eternity ago, at the beginning of time. We live like latecomers at the theater; we must catch up as best we can, divining the beginning from the shape of later events.
The incendiary magic she possessed was so strong she could set fire to water if she wanted to badly enough.
Oh! The outrageous sensation of crumpled paper; words gone wild, flying in all directions, senseless. My heart broke.
We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delineaments, weight and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all.
‘I thought you were one of a kind, Artemis, but that girl is a smart one.'
‘Yes,' said Artemis, musing. ‘She's a regular juvenile criminal mastermind.'
Below ground, in Section Eight HQ, Foaly groaned into his microphone. ‘Great,' he said. ‘Now there are two of you.'
I am young enough to believe in magic and old enough to understand how it works.
Oh, shut up, responded her irritated side eloquently.
‘How do you like the plan so far?'
‘Well, I don't like the first bit and I don't know the last bit. So, I'm really hoping the middle bit is exceptional.'
Why is it, he wondered, that the smart ones always think that they're invincible?
Even No1 was entranced. ‘What is that?'
Qwan fluttered his fingers, causing the monkey to somersault.
‘It's a simple magical construct. Instead of allowing the sparks to roam on instinct, I marshal them into a recognizable form. It takes time and effort, but in time you will have this micro-control too.'
‘No,' said No1. ‘I mean what is that?'
Qwan sighed. ‘It's a monkey.'
‘I know magic can be stolen,' said Artemis. ‘Because I stole some myself.'
Holly had been dead and now she was alive.
Artemis's hand tingled with the phantom memory of a gun it may or may not have held moments before.
There will be consequences for this, he thought. You can't alter events in time and be unaffected. But whatever the consequences are, I will bear them, because the alternative is too terrible.
Artemis focused on the important things he had left behind, and realized that they were all people. Mother, Father, Butler, Foaly and Mulch. Possessions that he had believed important now meant nothing.
When we are young, we think ourselves the first to have each feeling in the world.
“A witch,” I said. “With unbound power. Who need answer to none but herself.”
Witchcraft transforms the world. He wanted only to join it.
“You have always been the worst of my children,” he said. “Be sure you do not dishonor me.”
“I have a better idea. I will do as I please, and when you count your children, leave me out.”
It was so simple. If you want it, I will do it. If it would make you happy, I will go with you. Is there a moment that a heart cracks?
He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.
Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills. —ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
But I was beginning to learn that your life is a story told about you, not one that you tell.
The thing about a spiral is, if you follow it inward, it never actually ends. It just keeps tightening, infinitely.
True terror isn't being scared; it's not having a choice in the matter.
I was so good at being a kid, and so terrible at being whatever I was now.
“I don't mind worriers,” I said. “Worrying is the correct worldview. Life is worrisome.”
And if you can't pick what you do or think about, then maybe you aren't really real, you know? Maybe I'm just a lie that I'm whispering to myself.
“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: It goes on.” —ROBERT FROST
When I was little, I knew monsters weren't, like, real. But I also knew I could be hurt by things that weren't real. I knew that made-up things mattered, and could kill you.
I don't understand why he's so stuck inside himself, when there is this endlessness to fall into.
It's so weird, to know you're crazy and not be able to do anything about it, you know? It's not like you believe yourself to be normal. You know there is a problem. But you can't figure a way through to fixing it. Because you can't be sure, you know?
In the best conversations, you don't even remember what you talked about, only how it felt. It was like we weren't even there, lying together by the pool. It felt like we were in some place your body can't visit, some place with no ceiling and no walls and no floor and no instruments.
You're a we. You're a you. You're a she, an it, a they. My kingdom for an I.
You are like pizza, which is the highest compliment I can pay a person.
I'm doing my best, but I can't stay sane for you, okay?
You're both the fire and the water that extinguishes it. You're the narrator, the protagonist, and the sidekick. You're the storyteller and the story told. You are somebody's something, but you are also your you.
Imagine you're trying to find someone, or even you're trying to find yourself, but you have no senses, no way to know where the walls are, which way is forward or backward, what is water and what is air. You're senseless and shapeless—you feel like you can only describe what you are by identifying what you're not, and you're floating around in a body with no control. You don't get to decide who you like or where you live or when you eat or what you fear. You're just stuck in there, totally alone, in this darkness. That's scary.
The problem with happy endings,” I said, “is that they're either not really happy, or not really endings, you know? In real life, some things get better and some things get worse. And then eventually you die.
Why aren't I allowed to be indefinitely incomplete, too?
“Our lives aren't so different from a crossword puzzle, sure. But the thing about life is we don't get to draw the grid; we take the rows and columns we're given. Our bodies, parents, mental health issues, all that. What we do get to do is fill the cells. And rather than filling mine with anxiety over medical school or Greek politics—instead of feeling trapped by my circumstance—I fill them with arbitrary words. An eight-letter word for ‘snowstorm' or a three-letter word for ‘soda.' Silly shit that's true but doesn't mean anything. I can live with my downs and acrosses; I accept the larger truths of my life. But I don't take the cells so seriously.”
It was the opposite of a walk of shame. It was a walk of game. Stride of pride. Pace of Ace.
Nothing is invented, for it's written in nature first. Originality consists of returning to the origin. —ANTONI GAUDÍ
There is only one way to triumph over death, and that is by making our lives masterpieces. We must seize every opportunity to show kindness and to love fully
Entropy is just a fancy way of saying: things fall apart.
We live in an entropic universe,” she said, “a world whose physical laws randomize, not organize.
“Nature—in an effort to promote disorder—creates little pockets of order. These pockets are structures that escalate the chaos of a system, and they thereby increase entropy.”
To efficiently create chaos, Langdon realized, requires some order.
May our philosophies keep pace with our technologies. May our compassion keep pace with our powers. And may love, not fear, be the engine of change.
Love is not a finite emotion. We don't have only so much to share. Our hearts create love as we need it.
Merged review:
Nothing is invented, for it's written in nature first. Originality consists of returning to the origin. —ANTONI GAUDÍ
There is only one way to triumph over death, and that is by making our lives masterpieces. We must seize every opportunity to show kindness and to love fully
Entropy is just a fancy way of saying: things fall apart.
We live in an entropic universe,” she said, “a world whose physical laws randomize, not organize.
“Nature—in an effort to promote disorder—creates little pockets of order. These pockets are structures that escalate the chaos of a system, and they thereby increase entropy.”
To efficiently create chaos, Langdon realized, requires some order.
May our philosophies keep pace with our technologies. May our compassion keep pace with our powers. And may love, not fear, be the engine of change.
Love is not a finite emotion. We don't have only so much to share. Our hearts create love as we need it.
The wizarding world can be a dark and dangerous place. There are spells that can kill in six syllables, potions that can rob someone of free will and magical beasts that can tear even the bravest wizard limb from limb. That's what makes valiant acts of heroism more powerful and more necessary.
If there's one thing these stories prove, it's that heroism comes in all shapes, sizes and varieties – whether it's Remus Lupin giving his life to save the wizarding world or Silvanus Kettleburn hurling Flobberworms at Death Eaters from his attic. After all, you don't have to be a sword-wielding Gryffindor to be a hero; sometimes, all it takes is having your heart in the right place.
Every witch or wizard with a wand has held in his or her hands more power than we will ever know. With the right spell or potion, they can fabricate love, travel through time, change physical form and even extinguish life.
In the wrong hands, power and magic can be dark, lethal, and consuming.
I said: Pain and sorrow. He said: Stay with it. The wound is the place where the Light enters you. —Rumi
You're a Herondale. Which, by the way, means that not only are you part of a stunningly good-looking family, but you're also part of a fam- ily that owns a lot of valuable property, including a London town house and a manor in Idris, which you're probably entitled to part of. You know, if you were interested.
Heroes aren't always the ones who win. They're the ones who lose, sometimes. But they keep fighting, they keep coming back. They don't give up. That's what makes them heroes.
“What's the Nephilim motto again?”
“‘We are dust and shadows,'” said Ty, not looking up from his book.
“Some of us are very handsome dust,” Jace added.
“Come to the library,” she announced. “The tentacle is starting to dissolve.” “You drive me wild with your sexy talk,” said Jace, pulling on his gear jacket.
“I'll crash the wedding,” Emma suggested. “I'll jump out of the cake, but not in a sexy way. Like, with grenades.”
“Didn't you just all catch a murderer?”
“Malcolm sent a note,” Ty said in a withering tone, as if he were disappointed that Malcolm had ruined crime-solving with his confession. “And then he admitted he did it.”
“That does rather narrow down the list of suspects,” Kit said.
You want to live. Just like everyone else does. You don't want to be trapped, is all.
We fear things because we value them. We fear losing people because we love them. We fear dying because we value being alive. Don't wish you didn't fear anything. All that would mean is that you didn't feel anything.
The world isn't the way you want it to be. It's the way it is.
“Magnus Bane,” said Barnabas, with clear loathing. “The Ultimate Traitor.”
“Not my favorite nickname,” Magnus said, gently wiggling his fingers in Barnabas's direction. “I prefer ‘Our Lord and Master' or maybe ‘Unambiguously the Hottest.' ”
That is the problem with revenge—you wind up destroying the innocent as well as the guilty.
It was dangerous to dream, he reminded himself.
“People often run even when they have nowhere to go,” said Cristina. “It is all about what you can bear in the place where you are.”
“Do you know why I'm sure?” he whispered, kissing her temple, her cheek where it tasted like salt. “Because when this universe was born, when it blasted into existence in fire and glory, everything that would ever exist was created. Our souls are made of that fire and glory, of the atoms of it, the fragments of stars. Everyone's are, but I believe ours, yours and mine, are made from the dust of the same star. That's why we've always been drawn to each other like magnets, all our lives. All the pieces of us belong together.”
That's the thing, isn't it? About friendships. You don't know what he needs. You only know he needs it.
You — the three of you — you shone, you know? You liked each other. You had fun. I envied you those friendships more than anything else.
I think you have to make a choice — at a certain point — of the man you want to be. And I tell you that at that time you need a parent or a friend. And if you've learnt to hate your parent by then and you have no friends . . . then you're all alone. And being alone — that's so hard.
Harry, there is never a perfect answer in this messy, emotional world. Perfection is beyond the reach of humankind, beyond the reach of magic. In every shining moment of happiness is that drop of poison: the knowledge that pain will come again. Be honest to those you love, show your pain. To suffer is as human as to breathe.
Life is short, and wisdom long to learn.
Thanatos
Hate for hate. They are an old people and that is their idea of justice.
The world was extra intense for Ty, Julian had always said. It was as if his ears could hear more clearly, his eyes see more, and sometimes it was too much for him. He needed to cover noise, to feel something in his hand to distract him. He needed to rock back and forth to soothe himself. Everyone processed stress in a different way, Julian said. This was Ty's, and it hurt nobody.
“I keep you around because I need an audience for my witty remarks,” she said as they reached the gates and Jules took out his stele to draw an Open rune. The gate popped open.
Julian turned sideways to slide through the opening. “What witty remarks?”
“Oh, you are going to pay for that,” Emma muttered, following him. “I am incredibly witty.”
“Because when someone—shoots you with an arrow—” he gasped, “your immediate response is not—‘Thanks for the arrow, I think I'll keep it for a while.'”
“Why are you wearing a T-shirt under your other T-shirt?” Livvy asked, temporarily diverted.
“In case one of them is stolen,” Mark said, as if this were entirely normal.
“You don't want him,” she said to the pink-haired girl. “He has syphilis.”
The girl stared. “Syphilis?”
“Five percent of people in America have it,” said Ty helpfully.
“I do not have syphilis,” Mark said angrily. “There are no sexually transmitted diseases in Faerieland!”
“It isn't easy, having the Sight, if you don't know others who do,” Julian said in a low voice. “You see things nobody else sees. You can't talk about it because no one will understand. You have to keep secrets, and secrets—they break you apart. Cut you open. Make you vulnerable.”
Heroes aren't always the ones who win. They're the ones who lose, sometimes. But they keep fighting, they keep coming back. They don't give up. That's what makes them heroes.
The choices we make, make us.
There was beauty in the idea of freedom, but it was an illusion. Every human heart was chained by love.
People are more than one thing.
He was definitely smiling now, his mouth curved in amusement. She couldn't quite tell if it was human amusement or the amusement of Faerie, which thrived on chaos.
‘Don't be alarmed, Mister Xuan,' smiled Artemis. ‘The weapons will not be used on you.'
Nguyen didn't seem reassured.
‘No,' continued Artemis. ‘Butler could kill you a hundred different ways without the use of his armoury. Though I'm sure one would be quite sufficient.'
Artemis cracked his knuckles. Time to do what he did best - plot dastardly acts.
Foaly was a paranoid centaur, convinced that human intelligence agencies were monitoring his transport and surveillance network. To prevent them reading his mind, he wore a tinfoil hat at all times.
Confidence is ignorance,' advised the centaur. ‘If you're feeling cocky, it's because there's something you don't know.'
‘Arrrrgh,' said one of the dock hands. It was all he could manage.
Butler raised an eyebrow. ‘Argh? Pathetic and inarticulate. Nice combination. Your mothers must be so proud.'
If I win, I'm a prodigy. If I lose then I'm mad. That's the way history is written.
‘Well, he's only twelve years old. And that's young, even for a human.'
Root snorted, jacking a new battery into his tri-barrelled blaster.
‘Too much damned TV. Thinks he's Sherlock Holmes.'
‘That's Professor Moriarty,' corrected Foaly.
‘Holmes, Moriarty, they both look the same with the flesh scorched off their skulls.'
Artemis put on his best sinister face. Evil, he told himself, evil but highly intelligent. And determined, don't forget determined. He put a hand on the doorknob. Steady now. Deep breaths, and try not to think about the possibility that you have misjudged this situation and are about to be shot dead. One, two, three...He opened the door.
‘Good evening,' he said, every inch the gracious host, albeit a sinister, evil, intelligent and determined one.
Pathetic really: I don't like lollipops. No self-respecting criminal mastermind would be caught dead even using the word lollipops. He really would have to put together a database of witty responses for occasions such as this.
‘Take cover?'
‘Yes, Butler. Cover. I thought speaking in primal terms would be the quickest route to your cognitive functions. Obviously I was mistaken.'
No one built weapons of cruelty like the Mud Men.
We begin just as any witch or wizard on his or her way to Hogwarts would – at London's King's Cross. It's a bustling, cavernous train station filled with busy commuters – so busy that they don't notice people laden with trunks, owls, cats and robes run at a ticket barrier and disappear.
... just as the human mind cannot comprehend time, so it cannot comprehend the damage that will ensue if we presume to tamper with its laws.
THE BALLAD OF NEARLY HEADLESS NICK BY J.K. ROWLING
It was a mistake any wizard could make
Who was tired and caught on the hop
One piffling error, and then, to my terror, I found myself facing the chop.
Alas for the eve when I met Lady Grieve
A-strolling the park in the dusk!
She was of the belief I could straighten her teeth
Next moment she'd sprouted a tusk.
I cried through the night that I'd soon put her right
But the process of justice was lax;
They'd brought out the block, though they'd mislaid the rock
Where they usually sharpened the axe.
Next morning at dawn, with a face most forlorn,
The priest said to try not to cry,
‘You can come just like that, no, you won't need a hat,'
And I knew that my end must be nigh.
The man in the mask who would have the sad task
Of cleaving my head from my neck,
Said ‘Nick, if you please, will you get to your knees,'
And I turned to a gibbering wreck.
‘This may sting a bit' said the cack-handed twit
As he swung the axe up in the air,
But oh the blunt blade!
No difference it made,
My head was still definitely there.
The axeman he hacked and he whacked and he thwacked,
‘Won't be too long', he assured me,
But quick it was not, and the bone-headed clot
Took forty-five goes 'til he floored me.
And so I was dead, but my faithful old head
It never saw fit to desert me,
It still lingers on, that's the end of my song,
And now, please applaud, or you'll hurt me.
My dear, I'm seldom sure of anything. Life at best is a precarious business, and we aren't told that difficult or painful things won't happen, just that it matters. It matters not just to us but to the entire universe.
Your little schemes have a tendency to get people hurt. Usually the people who care about you.
‘aurum potestas est' — ‘Gold is power'
When the moment comes will you take your chance to be a hero?'
I never tell anybody exactly how clever I am. They would be too scared.
‘Bury you alive? That's terrible! You'd be screaming and clawing the dirt. I could get nightmares.'
‘I promise to lie still. Anyway, I deserve it. I did call you a pair of overdeveloped, single-celled Cro-Magnons.'
Artemis was well aware of his talents. He was a plotter, a schemer, a planner of dastardly deeds.
‘Mulch. Of all the fairy People, I will miss your services the most. We could have had such a future together.'
Mulch looked a touch teary. ‘True. With your brains and my special talents.'
‘Not to mention your mutual lack of morals,' interjected Holly.
‘No bank on the planet would have been safe,' completed the dwarf. ‘A missed opportunity.'
I am Artemis Fowl, the latest in the Fowl crime dynasty, and I will not be turned from my path.