I figured it out this afternoon, when they let me take a walk around the grounds, that these cows are stupid. Bovine. I knew the word, but I hadn't quite appreciated how literal it could be.
I found myself being helped down to the car. That sort of help is actually a hindrance. If you ever see someone with a walking stick, that stick, and their arm, are actually a leg.
I will laugh about this one day, I told myself. I will laugh about it with people so clever and sophisticated I can't imagine them properly now.
Sometimes I think dressing to go out is the best part of the evening.
Peace is better than war. There's too much glorification of war and not enough glorification of peace, and especially not enough glorification of the importance of the doves.
They want me to do something, and I'll do it, or I won't do it, and it'll work or not, and I'll survive or not.
Nothing mortal can last. At best it can leave legends that can bear fruit in later ages. After.
I love you like stones fall downwards, like the sun rises.
I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books.
They could take the money from building enough nukes to kill all the Russians in the world and give it to libraries. What good does an independent nuclear deterrent do Britain, compared to the good of libraries?
I care more about the people in books than the people I see every day.
I nearly fell asleep over Dickens in English. Mind you, he's snoozeworthy at the best of times.
What was interesting was seeing how much of it could work, how much it really would maximize justice, and how it was going to fail. We could learn a lot from that.
Being left alone - and I am being left alone - isn't quite as much what I wanted as I thought. Is this how people become evil? I don't want to be.
You don't want anything from them except for them to exist and you to see them sometimes and talk to them, and maybe for them to like you back.
We cannot change what has happened. We go on from where we stand. Not even Necessity knows all ends.
This novel is for everyone who has ever studied any monstrosity of history, with the serene satisfaction of being horrified while knowing exactly what was going to happen, rather like studying a dragon anatomized upon a table, and then turning around to find the dragon's present-day relations standing close by, alive and ready to bite.
One of the things I've always liked about science fiction is the way it makes you think about things, and look at things from angles you'd never have thought about before. From.
Good, I said. And we will do the same. But I miss him. I miss him like I miss Mother. Of course we'll honor their memory, and of course their souls have gone on to new lives, but I hadn't finished talking to them in this life. I knew what death meant now. It was conversations cut off.
I don't think I am like other people. I mean on some deep fundamental level. It's not just being half a twin and reading a lot and seeing fairies. It's not just being outside when they're all inside. I used to be inside. I think there's a way I stand aside and look backwards at things when they're happening which isn't normal.
I am small, but sometimes I am a small part of great things.
Welsh mutates initial consonants. Actually all languages do, but most of them take centuries, while Welsh does it while your mouth is still open.
I knew what death meant now. It was conversations cut off.
And his mother, especially as Botticelli had painted her and Auge carved her, seemed like a perfectly nice goddess.
Magic isn't inherently evil. But it does seem to be terribly bad for people.
You can almost always find chains of coincidence to disprove magic.
Trees are what paper was, and wants to be.
I believe that Plato was correct in saying that our souls long for the Good, and that nobody chooses evil for themselves while recognizing that it is evil, though some may do it in ignorance.
I got to help make dinner. You can't imagine the pleasure of wiping mushrooms and grating cheese when you haven't had a chance to do it for a long time. Then eating food you have cooked, or help cook, always tastes so much better. Auntie.
What do you want to be, free or happy? How about if they really are mutually exclusive options? What is freedom anyway? How does humanity govern itself when each person can have anything they want? How does humanity govern itself when nothing is natural?
Class is entirely intangible, and the way it affects things isn't subject to scientific analysis, and it's not supposed to be real but it's pervasive and powerful. See; just like magic. W.
I hate those Socratic dialogues where everything gets drawn out at the pace of an excessively logical snail.
You can't do magic with books unless they're very special copies.
I do not miss my toys. I wouldn't play with them anyway. I am fifteen. I miss my childhood.
I also pursue excellence, and Father told me that it can only ever be pursued, never caught—though.
This school is enough to make anyone a communist.
Left to themselves, people remake their origin stories every few generations to suit present circumstances.
When I got to Aberdare, I got off and walked up the cwm to the ruins we call Osgiliath.
You know, class is like magic. There's nothing there you can point to, it evaporates if you try to analyse it, but it's real and it affects how people behave and makes things happen.
Human nature is against it. People just tend to behave in certain ways because they are people. And.
I like her. She's restful.
Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization. Libraries.
It's lovely when writers I like like each other.
I was inclined to drift away from the sum to wonder why people would care what time two trains passed each other (spies), be so picky about seating arrangements (recently divorced people), or—which to this day remains incomprehensible—run the bath with no plug in.
Our souls know harmony and proportion before we are born, so although I had never seen anything like it, my soul resonated at once to the beauty of the city. Immediately.
Maybe some of the masters really believed they could make it work, but I think what they really wanted wasn't to do it themselves but for somebody else to have made it real and for them to have been born there.
They hang people for murder, and while I didn't exactly like Mummy, she was my mother after all. Though do they hang Viscountesses?
I read in hopes of little sparkling moments that are going to turn my head inside out.
There isn't an end point to excellence where you have it and you can stop. Being your best self means keeping on trying.
