4: Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.
15: How I filled my shitty high school to spend my days in4: Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.
15: How I filled my shitty high school to spend my days in New York lost in library attacks, reading obscure texts by dead people, most of whom never dreamed a face like mine floating over their sentences - - and least of all that those sentences would save me.
18: Little Dog was what Lan called me. What made a woman who named herself and her daughter after flowers call her grandson a dog? A woman who watches out for her own, that's who. As you know, in the village where Lan grew up, a child, often the smallest or weakest of the flock, as I was, is named after the most despicable things: demon, ghost child, pig snout, monkey-born, buffalo head, bastard--little dog being the more tender one. Because evil spirits, roaming the land for healthy, beautiful children, would hear the name of something hideous and ghastly being called in for supper and pass over the house, sparing the child. To love something, then, is to name it after something so worthless it might be left untouched--and alive. A name, thin as air, can also be a shield. A Little Dog shield.
75: But if you were a god you would see them. You would look down at this grove of pines, the fresh tips flared lucent at each treetop, tender-damp in their late autumn flush. You would look past the branches, past the rusted light splintered through the brambles, the needles falling, one by one, as you lay your god eyes on them. You'd trace the needles as they hurled themselves past the lowest bough, toward the cooking forest floor, to land on the two boys lying side by side, the blood already dry on their cheeks.
76-77: There are times, late at night, when your son would wake believing a bullet is lodged inside him. He'd feel it floating on the right side of his chest, just between the ribs. The bullet was always here, the boy thinks, older even than himself - and his bones, tendons, and veins had merely wrapped around the metal shard, sealing it inside him. It wasn't me, the boy thinks, who was inside my mother's womb, but this bullet, this seed I bloomed around.
78: Ma. You once told me that memory is a choice. But if you were a god, you'd know it's a flood.
116: I did not know them what I know now: to be an American boy, and then an American boy with a gun, is to move from one end of a cage to another....more
7: Yes; yesterday you will fly to Hermosillo, yesterday, April 9, 1959...
53: I and not only I, other men, could sniff the breeze for the perfumes of o7: Yes; yesterday you will fly to Hermosillo, yesterday, April 9, 1959...
53: I and not only I, other men, could sniff the breeze for the perfumes of other lands, the aromas drawn out of other noons by the wind. I sniff, I sniff.
56: You will stretch out your arms and behind your closed eyes you will see the colors of your mind and finally you will feel, without seeing it, the origin of the touch that you hear: the sheets, the light touch of the sheets between your clenched fingers; you will own your hands and feel the sweat on your palms and perhaps you will remember that you were born without lifelines on your hands, without fortune, life, or love: you were born, you will be born with a smooth palm, but all you have to do is be born; after a few hours, that blank surface will be filled with signs, lines, portents.
56: Chaos has no plural.
84: For seventy-one years your mesentery artery will, under pressure, survive this test, this death-defying feat. Today it will no longer be able to do so. Today it will no longer withstand the pressure. Today, in the swift, piston-like motion downward, forward, and backward, it will stop, convulsed, congested, a mass of paralyzed blood, a scarlet stone that will obstruct your intestine. You will feel that pulse of growing pressure, you will feel it: it's your blood that has stopped for the first time, that now will not reach the other bank of your life, that stops and contains within the swirl of your intestine, to rot, stagnate, without reaching the other bank of your life.
87: The cold, clear dawn erased he pride of the night and came through the half-open window of the bedroom. Once again it defined the details the darkness had confused in a single embrace.
183: "I mean, the Yaqui has a lot to remember." "Maybe in his language they don't remember the same way we do."... "How old are you?" "I'm just turning twenty-six. What about you?" "Twenty-nine. I don't have much to remember either. Even though life got pretty hectic all of a sudden."
193: He raised his eyes and finally saw what someone sentenced to die at dawn must have seen: the distant line of mountains, the more whitish sky, the patio's adobe walls. He listened to whatever it was someone sentenced to die at dawn must listen to: the chirping of hidden birds, the sharp cry of a hungry child, the strange hammering of the worker in the village, remote from the unvarying, monotonous, lost clamor of the artillery and small-arms fire still raging behind him.
198: You will survive: you will run your finger over the sheets and know that you have survived, despite time and the movements that hem in your fortunes with every passing instant.
198: The time you will invent in order to survive, to create the Illusion of a greater permanence on earth: the time your brain will create by perceiving that alternation of light and darkness in the clock face of dreams; by retaining those images of plasticity threatened by the amazing of concentrated black clouds announcing a Thunder lap, the posterity of lightning, the whirlwind discharge of rain, the certain appearance of a rainbow...
290: ...because in her heart something - years, memory, the past that was her life - would tell her there would still exist a margin of life beyond her century of memories: a chance to live and live another being of her blood: something that has not died with the death of Ireneo and Atanasio. But now, with Master Pedrito before her, in the bedroom she hadn't left in thirty-five years, Ludivinia thought she was the center that yoked memory to the beings now around her. Master Pedrito rubbed his unshaven chin and spoke again, this time aloud. "Mama, you don't know..." The old lady's eyes froze the son's voice in his throat....more
Excellent book for proponents and skeptics of technology alike. Not hugely theoretical (a drawback for me), but jam-packed with many excellent exampleExcellent book for proponents and skeptics of technology alike. Not hugely theoretical (a drawback for me), but jam-packed with many excellent examples and a breadth of thinking....more
18: Blood blooms, spreads its wide foliage in my chest, its brimming poplar grows wild and falls violently undone into several fierce rivers.
40: Althoug18: Blood blooms, spreads its wide foliage in my chest, its brimming poplar grows wild and falls violently undone into several fierce rivers.
40: Although my loving body is under earth now, write to me on earth so I can write to you.
71: I am a kiss, a shadow with a shadow. A kiss, pain in pain. For having fallen in love, heartless heart, with things, with creation's shadowless breath....more
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