ramblings

[bedlamsbard]

My favorite passage from a book, ever, comes from Dennis Lehane's Mystic River, which is an absolutely gorgeous book:

I will not dream anymore, you said. I will not set myself up for the pain. But then your team made the playoffs, or you saw a movie, or a billboard glowing dusky orange and advertising Aruba, or a girl who bore more than a passing resemblance to a woman you'd dated in high school -- a woman you'd loved and lost -- danced above you with shimmering eyes, and you said, fuck it, let's dream just one more time.

And while I hate Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (and the only reason I'm reading it is for school), my second favorite passage comes from there:

Once having set up her idols and built altars to them it was inevitable that she would worship there. It was inevitable that she should accept any incosistency and cruelty from her deity as all good worshippers do from theirs. All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.

Now given time, I could probably look through my books and pick out a couple more (there's at least two more from Mystic River alone, and Lehane, God, I could fill a book with the gorgeousness of Lehane), but these are the two that stick out the most.

Coming up on Part Two of the stories I'm not writing:
- if I AUed HP to have a live Cedric, the way I'd do
- "Dangerous Heroes", a.k.a. the Bardverse Mafia story that shall never be
- sequel to "There Are No Heroes Here"
- the great Draco/Hermione epic I started a long, long time ago and never wrote