Tangled Mind

The dead man hovered nearby. It seemed rude to leave him waiting indefinitely. “My day off,” Ramirez whispered, his hand over the mouthpiece. The man looked disappointed but showed himself out. An honest mistake, thought Ramirez. Christmas Day, unlike Christmas Eve, was a working day in Cuba. For the first time in years, however, Ramirez had the day off. [loc. 486]

doing never once in the world stopped dying ... not even kids were exempted from the horrorshow that roared on and on behind the peppermint sitcom façade your parents believed in and wanted you to believe in. [loc. 2168]

She was uncertain on the theology of whether someone of fay parentage actually had a soul, but thought it better to err on the side of caution. [loc. 2673]

He was starting to see what people found so addictive about these games. Momus had none of the slapdash inefficiency of reality: every moment was tense with hushed anticipation, foreordained meaning. It was a brighter, higher-grade, more compelling, better-engineered version of reality. (p. 80)

The next day, a little too late to be of any use, the psychic postman writes a message on one of a stack of cheap postcards with views of London he carries with him and he pushes it through Alison’s letterbox. DANGER, he writes, BEWARE. Taron’s mother has taken the precaution of communicating through him in case Taron was listening to loud music yesterday, mistook the words her mother was sending for a subliminal message from the musicians, and ignored them. [loc. 918]

The sort of godhood that comes from the Rituals of Blood is usually, but not always, something people do to themselves; they eat the flesh of innocence and drink its blood and they fix the mask of monster on their face and their face rots away until mask is all there is. But there is something worse: the cunning monster who takes innocence and forces it to eat until there is a puppet that dances for him, dances the deaths of thousands more innocents while a saint or a child screams inside it. [loc.1059]

The word 'murder' sounds so extreme that I hesitated before using it. Could that really have happened? I sat on the fence a bit with my reply: 'Someone made it happen,' I said.
'Someone made them kill themselves?'
... 'Someone killed them.' [loc.1531]

One more thing that Walsingham would never hear from his own lips. Perhaps he should make a list, as Cecil was reputedly so fond of doing:
Item: one treasonous letter from the Spanish.
Item: one initiation into an illegal secret society.
Item: one murder of a skrayling, witness to. [p.176]

On the basis of something she can’t yet define, she feels a strong affinity with the place. No amount of scepticism can diminish the sense of being brushed by microscopic vibrations from the past, as though atoms of ecstasy have been stamped on the very air. [loc. 4363]

What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully? Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him? Who had the usual ambitions and settled all too quickly for them not being realised? Who avoided being hurt and called it a capacity for survival? Who paid his bills, stayed on good terms with everyone as far as possible, for whom ecstasy and despair soon became just words once read in novels? [location 2229]