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101 " All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you. "
― Cormac McCarthy , The Road
102 " Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned. "
103 " Dark of the invisible moon. The night now only slightly less black. By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp. "
104 " They came upon themselves in a mirror and he almost raised the pistol. It's us, Papa, the boy whispered. It's us. "
105 " The black shape of it running from dark to dark. Then a distant low rumble. Not thunder. You could feel it under your feet. A sound without cognate and so without description. Something imponderable shifting out there in the dark. The earth itself contracting with the cold. It did not come again. What time of year? What age the child? … The silence. The salitter drying from the earth. The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to the waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay moldering. No sound but the wind. "
106 " The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. "
107 " There was a sharp crack from somewhere on the mountain. Then another. It's just a tree falling, he said. It's okay. The boy was looking at the dead roadside trees. It's okay, the man said. All the trees in the world are going to fall sooner or later. But not on us. "
108 " We're carrying the fire. "
109 " The hundred nights they'd sat up arguing the pros and cons of self destruction with the earnestness of philosophers chained to a madhouse wall "
110 " People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didnt believe in that. Tomorrow wasnt getting ready for them. It didnt even know they were there. "
111 " Where you've nothing else, construct ceremonies out of the air, and breathe upon them. "
112 " He turned and looked at the boy. Standing with his suitcase like an orphan waiting for a bus. "
113 " That the boy was all that stood between him and death. "
114 " Ever is a long time. "
115 " The frailty of everything, revealed at last. "
116 " Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts. "
117 " Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned. "
118 " He walked out into the road and stood. The silence. The salitter drying from the earth. The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to th waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay moldering. No sound but the wind. What will you say? A living man spoke these lines? He sharpened a quill with his small pen knife to scribe these things in sloe or lampblack? At some reckonable and entabled moment? He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt. "
119 " In the deep glens where they lived, all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. "
120 " A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body "