Home > Work > All the Birds in the Sky (All the Birds in the Sky, #1)
161 " Society is the choice between freedom on someone else’s terms and slavery on yours. * "
― Charlie Jane Anders , All the Birds in the Sky (All the Birds in the Sky, #1)
162 " When Laurence was old enough to do what he liked, he would be old enough to understand he couldn't do what he liked. "
163 " Umm, okay. Thanks.” “But Trish,” Roberta called after Patricia as she turned to go to her own room, across the hallway. “If you do ever take someone out, I get to watch. I want to see you do it.” “Umm, okay. "
164 " Patricia pulled her legs out of the railing and got to her feet. “But you’re lucky,” she said. “There’s a difference between your type of outcast and mine. If you’re a science geek, people give you wedgies and don’t invite you to their parties. But if you’re a witch, everybody just assumes you’re an evil psycho. It’s kind of different. "
165 " Look at her. She’s just laughing at us,” Patricia’s mother said, as if Patricia herself weren’t standing right there. “We need to show her we mean business.” Patricia hadn’t thought she was laughing, at all, but now she was terrified she looked that way. She tried extra hard to fix a serious expression on her face. "
166 " At last, Roberta had found an authority figure she could please without hating herself. "
167 " Yeah.” Laurence cut into his dad’s flow before the conversation got away from him. “That’s right. Milton Dirth. And I really want to go see it. This is like a once-in-a-lifetime chance. I thought maybe we could make it a father-son thing.” His dad couldn’t turn down a father-son thing, or it would "
168 " As Kevin listed these moments, she could see them with perfect clarity: all the missed cues and deflections, all the abortive moments of intimacy. All this time, she had been thinking of him as the one with commitment issues. Somewhere along the line, she had become an asshole. "
169 " Laurence kept sneaking looks under the table at his propped-open copy of Have Space Suit—Will Travel. He was already halfway through the book. "
170 " I can’t talk to Mr. Rose,” Patricia said under her breath, barely audible even in the quiet library. “He’s … I think there’s something not right about him. He told me to … he said something seriously crazy to me, just a couple days before the bloody wall happened. And I keep thinking there has to be some connection there. "
171 " Listen,” Patricia said from the bottom of the stairs. “Tommington was a good cat. I didn’t have anything against him. He was just doing his cat thing. I never meant him any harm, I swear.” There was no response. "
172 " When Laurence was old enough to do what he liked, he would be old enough to understand he couldn’t do what he liked. The "
173 " The sheer volume of bad news had gotten beyond anybody’s ability to process into a narrative. "
174 " WHEN PATRICIA WAS six years old, she found a wounded bird. The sparrow thrashed on top of a pile of wet red leaves in the crook of two roots, waving its crushed wing. Crying, in a pitch almost too high for Patricia to hear. She looked into the sparrow’s eye, enveloped by a dark stripe, and she saw its fear. Not just fear, but also misery—as if this bird knew it would die soon. Patricia still didn’t understand how the life could just go out of someone’s body forever, but she could tell this bird was fighting against death with everything it had. "
175 " You’re going to, what, just walk down to Best Buy and get a time machine off the rack? "
176 " Thirty bucks, okay? That’s pretty much my entire supercomputer fund. "
177 " It’s okay,” Patricia told the bird. “I’ve got you. It’s okay. "
178 " I don’t think a crow has ever even considered the categorical imperative. "
179 " Laurence dwelled on this linguistic injustice "
180 " Patricia had seen creatures in distress before. Her big sister, Roberta, liked to collect wild animals and play with them. Roberta put frogs into a rusty Cuisinart that their mom had tossed out, and stuck mice into her homemade rocket launcher, to see how far she could shoot them. But this was the first time Patricia looked at a living creature in pain and really saw it, and every time she looked into the bird’s eye she swore harder that this bird was under her protection. "