61
" I remembered that once, as a child, I was filled with wonder, that I had marveled at tri-folded science projects, encyclopedias, and road atlases. I left much of that wonder somewhere between Mrs.Wheeler's class and Mondawmin Mall, somewhere between the schools and the streets. Now I had the privilege of welcoming it back like a long-lost friend, though our reunion was laced with grief; I mourned over all the years that were lost. The mourning continues. Even today, from time to time, I find myself on beaches watching six-year-olds learn to surf, or at colleges listening to sophomores slip from English to Italian, or at cafés seeing young poets flip though 'The Waste Land,' or listening to the radio where economists explain economic things that I could've explored in my lost years, mourning, hoping that I and all my wonder, my long-lost friend, had not yet run out of time, though I know that we all run out of time, and some of us run out of it faster. "
66
" So they were pen pals now, Emma composing long, intense letters crammed with jokes and underlining, forced banter and barely concealed longing; two-thousand-word acts of love on air-mail paper. Letters, like compilation tapes, were really vehicles for unexpressed emotions and she was clearly putting far too much time and energy into them. In return, Dexter sent her postcards with insufficient postage: ‘Amsterdam is MAD’, ‘Barcelona INSANE’, ‘Dublin ROCKS. Sick as DOG this morning.’ As a travel writer, he was no Bruce Chatwin, but still she would slip the postcards in the pocket of a heavy coat on long soulful walks on Ilkley Moor, searching for some hidden meaning in ‘VENICE COMPLETELY FLOODED!!!! "
― David Nicholls
70
" People walk the paths of the gardens below, and the wind sings anthems in the hedges, and the big old cedars at the entrance to the maze creak. Marie-Laure imagines the electromagnetic waves traveling into and out of Michel’s machine, bending around them, just as Etienne used to describe, except now a thousand times more crisscross the air than when he lived - maybe a million times more. Torrents of text conversations, tides of cell conversations, of televisions programs, of e-mails, vast networks of fiber and wire interlaced above and beneath the city, passing through buildings, arcing between transmitters in Metro tunnels, between antennas atop buildings, from lampposts with cellular transmitters in them, commercials for Carrefour and Evian and prebaked toaster pastries flashing into space and back to earth again, I am going to be late and Maybe we should get reservations? and Pick up avocados and What did he say? and ten thousand I miss yous, fifty thousand I love yous, hate mail and appointment reminders and market updates, jewelry ads, coffee ads, furniture ads flying invisibly over the warrens of Paris, over the battlefields and tombs, over the Ardennes, over the Rhine, over Belgium and Denmark, over the scarred and ever-shifting landscape we call nations. And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths? That her father and Etienne and Madame Manec and the German boy named Werner Pfennig might harry the sky in flocks, like egrets, like terns, like starlings? That great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough? They flow above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lungs, and pass out through the other side, the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it.
Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world.
We rise again in the grass. In the flowers. In songs. "
― Anthony Doerr , All the Light We Cannot See
72
" The dying tapers off now and then, but the War is still killing lots and lots of people. Only right now it is killing them in more subtle ways. Often in ways that are too complicated, even for us, at this level, to trace. But the right people are dying, just as they do when armies fight. The ones who stand up, in Basic, in the middle of the machine-gun pattern. The ones who do not have faith in their Sergeants. The ones who slip and show a moment's weakness to the Enemy. These are the ones the War cannot use, and so they die. The right ones survive. The others, it's said, even know they have a short life expectancy. But they persist in acting the way that they do. Nobody knows why. Wouldn't it be nice if we could eliminate them completely? Then no one would have to be killed in the War. "
― Thomas Pynchon , Gravity's Rainbow
78
" What does
this F. — I.W. mean?”
“Initial-slang,” informed Baines. “Made correct
by common usage. It has become a worldwide
motto. You’ll see it all over the place if you haven’t
noticed it already.”
“I have seen it here and there but attached no importance
to it and thought nothing more about it. I
remember now that it was inscribed in several places
including Seth’s and the fire depot.”
“It was on the sides of that bus we couldn’t
empty,” put in Gleed. “It didn’t mean anything to
me.”
“It means plenty,” said Jeff. “Freedom — I
Won’t!”
“That kills me,” Gleed responded. “I’m stone
dead already. I’ve dropped in my tracks.” He
watched Harrison thoughtfully pocketing the plaque.
“A piece of abracadabra. What a weapon!”
“Ignorance is bliss,” asserted Baines, strangely
sure of himself. “Especially when you don’t know
that what you’re playing with is the safety catch of
something that goes bang.”
“All right,” challenged Gleed, taking him up on
that. “Tell us how it works.”
“I won’t.” Baines’ grin reappeared. He seemed to
be highly satisfied about something.
“That’s a fat lot of help.” Gleed felt let down, especially
over that momentary hoped-for reward.
“You brag and boast about a one-way weapon, toss
across a slip of stuff with three letters on it and then
go dumb. Any folly will do for braggarts and any
braggart can talk through the seat of his pants. How
about backing up your talk?”
“I won’t,” repeated Baines, his grin broader than
ever. He gave the onlooking Harrison a fat, significant
wink.
It made something spark vividly within Harrison’s
mind. His jaw dropped, he dragged the plaque from
his pocket and stared at it as if seeing it for the first
time.
“Give it back to me,” requested Baines, watching
him.
Replacing it in his pocket, Harrison said very
firmly, “I won’t.”
Baines chuckled.
“Some people catch on quicker than others. "
― Eric Frank Russell , . . . And Then There Were None
