People are fools, she said. They spend their whole lives getting stuck with pins and act like nothing’s wrong, they just leave them there, and then one day they go and scratch someone’s eyes out.

That’s why we make enemies of our friends as soon as they start to drift, he thought, cos that way they get stuck with all our flaws, unlike when they’re shared. Maybe brief friendships are best. If you pul out in time, the vices are all theirs.

You are a door, not the one who walks through.

All families had started off in some mysterious waay: to repopulate the earth, or by accident, or by force, or out of boredom; and it’s all a mystery what each will become.

Todo lo bueno es un pedazo de algo horrible.

Better to scratch the wound than bandage it: those who lose a child shouldn’t be consoled; parents die to make room for their kids, not the other way around. He wasn’t being cruel, he just thought a gash that deep had to be respected, not swaddled over with cuddles.

They want to live forever but still can’t see that for that to work they need to change color and number. But it’s already happening.

He leaned in toward her, and as he gave her a hug said Give Cora a kiss from me. He said it the same way he gave her the hug, like it wasn’t his sister he was hugging, like it wasn’t his mother he was sending a kiss to, but just a polite platitude. Like he was ripping out her heart, like he was cleanly extracting it and placing it in a plastic bag and storing it in the refrigerator to eat later.

First there was nothing. Nothing but a frayed strip of cement over the white earth. Then she made out two mountains colliding in the back of beyond: like they’d come from who knows where and were headed to anyone’s guess but had come together at that intense point in the nothingness and insisted on crashing noisily against each other, though the oblivious might think they simply stood there in silence.

Es nuestro padre y un ReyY por esta que es muy buenoBajo su brazo es de leyCumplir los trabajos del reino