Home > Work > The Strange Bird: A Borne Story (Borne, #1.5)
1 " I doubt you will enjoy it. But that is the price of change. Someone always pays. "
― Jeff VanderMeer , The Strange Bird: A Borne Story (Borne, #1.5)
2 " She liked the feeling of being winnowed down, as if there had been too much of her before, that anything unnecessary had been taken away and what was left was pure. "
3 " That if they could not have a fierce joy in their struggle, then they were not truly free but governed by fear and doubt. "
4 " A falcon screamed down from above and speared one of the two, and peeled off to rise again before the survivor had time to evade or mourn the loss, as if there had always been one and not two. As if there had always only ever been one Strange Bird. But from above, even dying, the companion defiant, urging the last on, and blessing the bird that had caught her, for it was only acting as to its nature and there was no cruelty in that. "
5 " So she sang back silently to them, as a comfort, there in the cell, and when the moonlight lay thick and bright against the gritty cheek of the sand dune, the foxes would gambol and prance for the sheer delight of it and beckon her to join them, would let her into their minds that she might know what it was to gambol and to prance on those four legs, then these four legs, to see the world from a fox’s level. It was almost like flying. Almost. "
6 " Everything added to her and everything taken away had led to that moment and from her perch she had radiated love for every animal she could not help, with nothing left over for any human being. "
7 " But by then, whenever this was, the Strange Bird did not want to live, or did not know she could live, and that was the same thing in the end. "
