Amal El-Mohtar Quotes

There's a kind of time travel in letters, isn't there? I imagine you laughing at my small joke; I imagine you groaning; I imagine you throwing my words away. Do I have you still? Do I address empty air and the flies that will eat this carcass? You could leave me for five years, you could return never - and I have to write the rest of this not knowing.

Hunger, Red - to sate a hunger or to stoke it, to feel hunger as a furnace, to trace its edges like teeth - is this a thing you, singly, know? Have you ever had a hunger that whetted itself on what you fed it, sharpened so keen and bright that it might split you open, break a new thing out? Sometimes I think that's what I have instead of friends.

I wonder what of me there is in you.

I want to be a body for you. I want to chase you, find you, I want to be eluded and teased and adored; I want to be defeated and victorious - I want you to cut me, sharpen me. I want to drink tea beside you in ten years or a thousand. Flowers grow far away on a planet they'll call Cephalus, and these flowers bloom once a century, when the living star and its black-hole binary enter conjunction.I want to fix you a bouquet of them, gathered across eight hundred thousand years, so you can draw our whole engagement in a single breath, all the ages we've shaped together.

just how layered and complex plain speech could be, how many secrets wrapped in the banner of Sincerity

This is a collection of dexterous, loving, beautifully optimistic work that left me breathless and delighted ... Hannu Rajaniemi's magnificent science fiction - as is paradoxically appropriate - is pure magic.

She has won, which is not an unfamiliar feeling. She is happy, which is.

This is not even one of the weirder Atlantises. No crystals here, no flying cars, no perfect governments, no psychic powers. (Those last two things don't exist, anyway.)

They would make this war, she thinks, if there were not a war already made for them to make.

What do you want from this, Red? What are you doing here?

Tell me something true, or tell me nothing at all.

. . . may causality forbid Commandant ever dispatch me to one of your viny-hivey elfworlds, profusely floral, all arcing elder trees, neural pollen, bees gathering memories from eyes and tongue, honey libraries dripping knowledge from the comb.

The short answer: no. The longer answer: I don't think so?

Perhaps survival is its own form of torture.

Like your victory, love spreads back through time. It claims our earliest association, our battles and losses. Assassinations become assignations.

I have been birds and branches. I have been bees and wolves. I have been ether flooding the void between stars, tangling their breath into networks of song. I have been fish and plankton and humus, and all these have been me.

The future harvests us.

But when I think of you, I want to be alone together. I want to strive against and for. I want to live in contact. I want to be a context for you, and you for me.

I love you, and I love you, and I want to find out what that means together.

I keep turning away from speaking of your letter. I feel--to speak of it would be to contain what it did to me, to make it small.

Coleridge wrote a poem called 'The Eolian Harp,' in which he explored the notion of music slumbering on its instrument. It's a gorgeous poem! It moves through thoughts and moods of the soul as if we're all but harps waiting for a breeze to pass through us to animate us. I feel the same way about art: that it is something that on many levels colonises you, gets inside you and changes you from the inside out. I find that happens with books, too. After I've read a book, for a couple of days afterwards I think in the patterns of the book's writing, because the act of reading is an act of organising your own thought process. If you are reading someone else's writing, you are having to organise your perception along someone else's structure. So if I read a book by Terry Pratchett, a few days later there is still a little Terry Pratchettness to my thoughts. When I read something by Catherynne Valente, for quite a few days there is a kind of 'jewelled' quality to my thoughts. To read a book is to let someone else reach inside me and reorganise me. As a writer, I find it very difficult to start writing immediately after having read another writer's book. I have to digest it first, and let the influence pass…

PS. I write to you in stings, Red, but this is me, the truth of me, as I do so: broken open by the act, in the palm of your hand, dying.

It's not that I never noticed before how many red things there are in the world. It's that they were never any more relevant to me than green or white or gold. Now it's as if the whole world sings to me in petals, feathers, pebbles, blood.

Words are abstraction, break off from the green; words are patterns in the way fences and trenches are. Words hurt.

I love you and I love you and I love you, on battlefields, in shadows, in fading ink, on cold ice splashed with the blood of seals. In the rings of trees. In the wreckage of a planet crumbling to space. In bubbling water. In bee stings and dragonfly wings, in stars. In the deapths of lonely woods where I wandered in my youth, staring up - and even then you watched me. You slid back through my life, and I have known you since before I knew you.

Her pen had a heart inside, and the nib was a wound in a vein. She stained the page with herself.

I don't give a shit who wins this war, Garden or the Agency, towards whose shift the arc of the universe bends. But maybe this is how we win, Red. You and me. This is how we win.

I wish sometimes I could be less fierce with you. No- I feel sometimes like I ought to want to be less fierce with you.

We have, each of us, a story that is uniquely ours, a narrative arc that we can walk with purpose once we figure out what it is. It's the opposite to living our lives episodically, where each day is only tangentially connected to the next, where we are ourselves the only constants linking yesterday to tomorrow. There is nothing wrong with that, and I don't want to imply that there is by saying how much this shocked me
just that it felt so suddenly, painfully right to think that I have tapped into my Long Tale, that I have set my feet on the path I want to walk the rest of my life, and that it is a path of stories and writing and that no matter how many oceans I cross or how transient I feel in any given place, I am still on my Tale's Road, because having tapped it, having found it, the following is inevitable ...

Red, I love you. Red, I will send you letters from everywhen telling you so. Letters of only one word. Letters that will brush your cheek and grip your hair. Letters that will bite you. Letters that will mark you. I'll write you by bullet ant and spider wasp. I'll write you by shark's tooth and scallop shell.

You must dwell, says Garden, within time to shift it in lasting ways; play a slow game, but win.

At the end as at the start, and through all the in-betweens, I love you.

It's amazing how much blue there is in the world if you look. You're different colors of flame. Bismuth burns blue, and cerium, germanium, and arsenic. See? I pour you into things.

You are yourself, and so remain, as I remain.

There were some problems only coffee and ice cream could fix.

Myth and legend give way to history, which gives way again to myth, like curtains parting and meeting again on either side of a performance. xxx All good stories travel from the outside in.

There is no mono-we; there are many usses. The usses change and interleave.

Funny how we always think of knights as fighting dragons, when in fact they work for them.