Samiha Tasnim

Ninety-eight percent of what goes on in people's heads is none of their smucking business.

It's the pool where we all go down to drink, to swim, to catch a little fish from the edge of the shore; it's also the pool where some hardy souls go out in their flimsy wooden boats after the big ones. It is the pool of life, the cup of imagination, and she has an idea that different people see different versions of it, but with two things ever in common: it's always about a mile deep in the Fairy Forest, and it's always sad. Because imagination isn't the only thing this place is about. It's also about (giving in) waiting. Just sitting...and looking out over those dreamy waters...and waiting. It's coming, you think. It's coming soon, I know it is. But you don't know exactly what and so the years pass.

I think most kids have a place they go to when they're scared or lonely or just plain bored. They call it NeverLand or the Shire, Boo'ya Moon if they've got big imaginations and make it up for themselves. Most of them forget.

She had come to believe that the very things the practical world dismissed as ephemera—things like songs and moonlight and kisses—were sometimes the things that lasted the longest. They might be foolish, but they defied forgetting. And that was good. That was good.

So many long nights when the mind of something...other...might turn to a person, if that person could not keep her mind from turning to it. And how, exactly, did you keep from doing that? How did you not think of somethin?

“... But why Blenkensop?”

“Why not?”

“It seems such an odd name to choose.”

“It was the first one I thought of and it's handy for underclothes.”

“What do you mean, Tuppence?”

“B, you idiot. B for Beresford, B for Blenkensop. Embroidered on my cami-knickers. Patricia Blenkensop. Prudence Beresford. Why did you choose Meadowes? It's a silly name.”

“To begin with,” said Tommy, “I don't have large B's embroidered on my pants... “




“It's an odd life this service of ours. We respect our adversaries and they respect us. You usually like your opposite number, you know - even when you're doing your best to down him.”

There was a silence as Tommy thought over the strange anomaly of war.




Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred in my heart.




Short snore, short snore, short snore - pause - long snore, long snore, long snore - pause - short snore, short snore, short snore...




It's got to be the way things tear you to pieces... It's got to be sorrow and bitterness and dust and ashes.




“Cut out the compliments,” said Tuppence. “I'm admiring myself a good deal, so there's no need for you to chime in.”

I know things. People don't know as I know things. They don't think I've listened and they don't think I'd remember, but I know sometimes–you know, they'll say something and then they'll say who else knows about it and then they'll–well, you know, if you keep quiet you get to hear a lot.




It's a kind of technique, you know. We've taught it to ourselves in the last, oh, say fifty to a hundred years. Taught that if people cohere together and make a tight little mob of themselves, it's amazing what they are able to accomplish and what they are able to inspire other people to accomplish for them.

Dreams, Trixie thought, were like soap bubbles. You could look at them from a distance, and they were lovely. It's when you stuck your face too close that your eyes wound up stinging.


When you fooled around without the feelings attached, it might not mean anything ... but then again, neither did you.


And like any accelerant, that would change the equation. Add love, and a person might do something crazy. Add love, and all the lines between right and wrong were bound to disappear.


Normal's relative.


Even though parents don't want to admit it, school isn't about what a kid absorbs while she's sitting at a cramped desk, but what happens around and in spite of that.


What if love wasn't the act of finding what you were missing but the give-and-take that made you both match?


As it turned out, hell wasn't watching the people you love get hurt; it was coming in during the second act, when it was already too late to stop it from happening.


She was still afraid, years later - not of the dark but of the days. One after another, and no end in sight.


How are you going to know who I am, she finally said, if I don't look like me?


All he'd ever been able to do was repaint the world for her, until it became a place she wanted to be.


Like Daniel, Jason had learned the hard way that we are never the people we think we are. We are the ones we pretend, with all our hearts, we can't become.


Had he forgotten, or had he intended to forget all along?


Who would have imagined that the sound your life made as it disintegrated was total silence?


I did not die, and yet I lost life's breath: imagine for yourself what I became, deprived at once of both my life and death.


“Why did you want to leave so badly?”
Her father came up to the sink and wrung out the sponge. “There was nothing there for me.”
“Then you weren't really running away,” Trixie said. “You were running toward.”


... she inched up the wrist of her coat and looked at the loose net of scars. It was her hairline crack, she supposed, and it was only a matter of time before she completely went to pieces.


Who knew that when you cut a slit in the belly of the night sky it bled color?


Maybe it took realizing that you could die to keep you from wanting to do it.


Some people, they get down in a hole so deep they can't figure out what to hold on to.”


It was easier than you'd think to grow accustomed to silence.


. . . and as it turned out, growing up was just as she'd feared. One day when your alarm clock rang, you got up and realized you had someone else's thoughts in your head ... or maybe just your old ones, minus the hope.


She could remember who she used to be - that picture was like an image sealed into a snow globe, one that went fuzzy when she shook it too hard but then, if she held her breath, might see clearly.


Because the more you changed, the less of you there was.


Fastening and tucking seemed so much more intimate than unbuttoning and unzipping, as if you were privy to putting the person back together whole, instead of unraveling him.


A child's job, ostensibly, was to grow up. So why, when it happened, did a parent feel so disappointed


What made a hero a hero? Was it winning all the time, like Superman? Or was it taking on the task reluctantly, like Spider-Man? Was it learning, like the X-Men had, that at any moment you might fall from grace to become a villain? Or, like Alan Moore's Rorschach, was it being human enough to enjoy watching people die, if they deserved it?


“Being a cop isn't all that different from being a father, you know. You do your damnedest, and it's still not good enough to keep the people you care about from hurting themselves.”


Life could take on any number of shapes while you were busy fighting your own demons. But if you were changing at the same rate as the person beside you, nothing else really mattered. You became each other's constant.

So would also their house, some time, return into the earth, their bodies also. Each had his turn at this earth.

Words were to her things to be caught one by one and released with difficulty.

I am an old done man, grown giddy as a child again.

“I am sorry for your loss as well, Joffrey,” the dwarf said.
“What loss?”
“Your royal father? A large fierce man with a black beard; you'll recall him if you try. He was king before you.”

Was there ever a war where only one side bled?

Varys smiled. “Here, then. Power resides where men believe it resides. No more and no less.”
“So power is a mummer's trick?”
“A shadow on the wall,” Varys murmured, “yet shadows can kill. And ofttimes a very small man can cast a very large shadow.”

“There are ghosts everywhere,” Ser Jorah said softly. “We carry them with us wherever we go.”

“Because it will not last,” Catelyn answered, sadly. “Because they are the knights of summer, and winter is coming.”

Perhaps magic was once a mighty force in the world, but no longer. What little remains is no more than the wisp of smoke that lingers in the air after a great fire has burned out, and even that is fading.

It is not what we do, so much as why we do it.

“Sleep is good,” he said. “And books are better.”

“A grey man,” she said. “Neither white nor black, but partaking of both.”

There are no shadows in the dark. Shadows are the servants of light, the children of fire. The brightest flame casts the darkest shadows.

I am a creature of grief and dust and bitter longings. There is an empty place within me where my heart was once.

She walked fast, to keep ahead of her fear.

Night gathers, and now my watch begins. It shall not end until my death. I shall take no wife, hold no lands, father no children. I shall wear no crowns and win no glory. I shall live and die at my post. I am the sword in the darkness. I am the watcher on the walls. I am the fire that burns against the cold, the light that brings the dawn, the horn that wakes the sleepers, the shield that guards the realms of men. I pledge my life and honor to the Night's Watch, for this night and all the nights to come.