127
" When Magnus looked at Imasu, he saw Imasu had dropped his head into his hands." Er," Magnus said. " Are you quite all right?" " I was simply overcome," Imasu said in a faint voice.Magnus preened slightly. " Ah. Well." " By how awful that was," Imasu said.Magnus blinked. " Pardon?" " I can't live a lie any longer!" Imasu burst out. " I have tried to be encouraging. Dignitaries of the town have been sent to me, asking me to plead with you to stop. My own sainted mother begged me, with tears in her eyes - " " It isn't as bad as all that - " " Yes, it is!" It was like a dam of musical critique had broken. Imasu turned on him with eyes that flashed instead of shining. " It is worse than you can possibly imagine! When you play, all of my mother's flowers lose the will to live and expire on the instant. The quinoa has no flavor now. The llamas are migrating because of your music, and llamas are not a migratory animal. The children now believe there is a sickly monster, half horse and half large mournful chicken, that lives in the lake and calls out to the world to grant it the sweet release of death. The townspeople believe that you and I are performing arcane magic rituals - " " Well, that one was rather a good guess," Magnus remarked." - using the skull of an elephant, an improbably large mushroom, and one of your very peculiar hats!" " Or not," said Magnus. " Furthermore, my hats are extraordinary." " I will not argue with that." Imasu scrubbed a hand through his thick black hair, which curled and clung to his fingers like inky vines. " Look, I know that I was wrong. I saw a handsome man, thought that it would not hurt to talk a little about music and strike up a common interest, but I don't deserve this. You are going to get stoned in the town square, and if I have to listen to you play again, I will drown myself in the lake." " Oh," said Magnus, and he began to grin. " I wouldn't. I hear there is a dreadful monster living in that lake." Imasu seemed to still be brooding about Magnus's charango playing, a subject that Magnus had lost all interest in. " I believe the world will end with a noise like the noise you make!" " Interesting," said Magnus, and he threw his charango out the window." Magnus!" " I believe that music and I have gone as far as we can go together," Magnus said. " A true artiste knows when to surrender." " I can't believe you did that!" Magnus waved a hand airily. " I know, it is heartbreaking, but sometimes one must shut one's ears to the pleas of the muse." " I just meant that those are expensive and I heard a crunch. "
128
" Hello, Bradley,' said Mom. She'd regained her composure after my outburst, and now raised her camera. 'Stand close.'
'No, Mom,' I said. 'No pictures.'
'But you're friend's here now,' she said, waving us together. 'Smile!'
'I don't need a picture with-' the flash snapped '-another guy. That's great, Mom, thank you. Send that one to Dad and tell him we're going steady. "
― Dan Wells , I Don't Want to Kill You (John Cleaver, #3)
132
" If God created our will, then he's responsible for every choice we make... So-- as I recall, the official philosophical answer is that free will doesn't exist. Only the illusion of free will, because the causes of hour behavior are so complex that we can't trace them back. If you've got one line of dominoes knocking each other down, one by one, then you can always say, look, this domino fell because that one pushed it. But when you have an infinite number of dominoes that can be traced back in an infinite number of directions, you can never find where the causal chain begins. So you think, That domino fell because it wanted to... Even if there is no such thing as free will, we have to treat each other as if there were free will in order to live together in society. "
― Orson Scott Card , Xenocide (Ender's Saga, #3)
137
" Don’t get smart - you two are in a heap of trouble!” snarled Anderson. “Names!”
“Names?” repeated the long-haired driver. “Er — well, let’s see. There’s Wilberforce . . . Bathsheba . . . Elvendork . . .”
“And what’s nice about that one is, you can use it for a boy or a girl,” said the boy in glasses.
“Oh, our names, did you mean?” asked the first, as Anderson spluttered with rage. “You should’ve said! This here is James Potter, and I’m Sirius Black!”
“Things’ll be seriously black for you in a minute, you cheeky little — "
― J.K. Rowling , Harry Potter: The Prequel (Harry Potter, #0.5)
138
" You want us to love you, is that right? Love, Tabitha Crum, is to be earned, not given away to just anyone like a festering case of fleas.
She'd been seven when her mother had made the comparison of love and irritable itching. Tabitha remembered the statement quite well because it was the same year children at school had suddenly gotten it in their heads that she had a case of head lice. That had been a difficult time and nobody had gotten close to Tabitha since. Of course, with the addition of a pet mouse over the last year, her lack of friendship could perhaps be further explained by the misapprehension that she spoke to herself. Pemberley was a most excellent consultant in all matters, but he tended to stay out of sight, so Tabitha could somewhat understand the slanderous comments.
Or it might have been the unfortunate, uneven unattractive, blunt-scissored haircut her mother was so fond of giving her.
Or it could have been the simple truth that making friends can be an awkward and a difficult thing when it's a one-sided endeavor and you've a pet mouse and you've been painted as odd and quiet and shy, when really you're just a bit misunderstood.
In any case, nobody at St. John's seemed lacking for companionship except her. But Tabitha reminded herself that there were far worse things than not having friends. In fact, she often made a game of listing far worse things:
• eating the contents of a sneeze
• creatures crawling into her ear holes.
• losing a body part (Though that one was debatable depending on the part. An ear or small toe might be worth a friend or two. "
― Jessica Lawson , Nooks & Crannies
139
" Close friendships, Gandhi says, are dangerous, because “friends react on one another” and through loyalty to a friend one can be led into wrong-doing. This is unquestionably true. Moreover, if one is to love God, or to love humanity as a whole, one cannot give one's preference to any individual person. This again is true, and it marks the point at which the humanistic and the religious attitude cease to be reconcilable. To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others. The autobiography leaves it uncertain whether Gandhi behaved in an inconsiderate way to his wife and children, but at any rate it makes clear that on three occasions he was willing to let his wife or a child die rather than administer the animal food prescribed by the doctor. It is true that the threatened death never actually occurred, and also that Gandhi — with, one gathers, a good deal of moral pressure in the opposite direction — always gave the patient the choice of staying alive at the price of committing a sin: still, if the decision had been solely his own, he would have forbidden the animal food, whatever the risks might be. There must, he says, be some limit to what we will do in order to remain alive, and the limit is well on this side of chicken broth. This attitude is perhaps a noble one, but, in the sense which — I think — most people would give to the word, it is inhuman. The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals. No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid. There is an obvious retort to this, but one should be wary about making it. In this yogi-ridden age, it is too readily assumed that “non-attachment” is not only better than a full acceptance of earthly life, but that the ordinary man only rejects it because it is too difficult: in other words, that the average human being is a failed saint. It is doubtful whether this is true. Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings. If one could follow it to its psychological roots, one would, I believe, find that the main motive for “non-attachment” is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work. But it is not necessary here to argue whether the other-worldly or the humanistic ideal is “higher”. The point is that they are incompatible. One must choose between God and Man, and all “radicals” and “progressives”, from the mildest Liberal to the most extreme Anarchist, have in effect chosen Man. "
― George Orwell
