Andrew Davidson Quotes

My skin will never work like that again, so aware of the other person that I'm unsure where she ends and I begin. Never again. Never again will my skin be a thing that can so perfectly communicate; in losing my skin to the fire, I also lost the opportunity to make it disappear with another person.

Perhaps there are just some things you leave behind when you choose a new life.

There's the smell of the devil's mischievousness, a pitchfork in your ass and sulfur in your mouth. The Bastard's there, all right, don't doubt it.

It doesn't matter how fast you move, if you never go anywhere.

Belief in a better future is an amazing gift.

It doesn't matter how fast you move, I learned, if you never go anywhere.

Didn't anyone ever tell you that the mouth is the front gate of all misfortune?

This will mark the third time that an arrow has entered my chest. The first time brought me to Marianne Engel. The second time separated us.
The third time will reunite us.

Every Good Friday, this anchored but ever-changing anniversary of my accident, I go to the little creek that saved my life and light one more candle. I offer thanks for two facts: that I am one year older, and that I am one year closer to death.

My words were Egyptian hieroglyphics before the discovery of the Rosetta stone; my words were wounded soldiers limping home, guns spent, from a lost battle; my words were dying fish, flipping hysterically as the net is opened and the pile spreads across the boat deck like a slippery mountain trying to become a prairie.
My words were, and are, unworthy of Marianne Engel.

I once knew a woman who liked to imagine Love in the guise of a sturdy dog, one that would always chase down the stick after it was thrown and return with his ears flopping around happily. Completely loyal, completely unconditional. And I laughed at her, because even I knew that love is not like that. Love is a delicate thing that needs to be cosseted and protected. Love is not robust and love is not unyeilding. Love can crumble under a few harsh words, or be tossed away with a handful of careless actions. Love isn't a steadfast dog at all; love is more like a pygmy mouse lemur.

... She kissed me on my thin lips and all my words were pushed back into my mouth.
"I don't want to die," she whispered, "but I need to lose the shackles of this multitude of hearts.

That kind of love was a thing to be snatched up and crushed in the jaws of real life.

You are mine,I am yours; you may be sure of this. You've been locked inside my heart, the key has been thrown away; within it, you must always stay.

If you listen to the wind very carefully, you'll be able to hear me whisper my love for you.

Love is an action you must repeat ceaselessly.

With every fragment of rock that fall from me, I can hear the voice of Marianne Engle. I love you. Aishiteru. Ego amo te. Ti amo. Eg elska pig. Ich liebe dich. It is moving across time, coming to me in every language of the world, and it sounds like pure love.

Talking with the mouth of a beast won't ease your pain.

Defeat itself is defeated by the embrace of defeat, and death is swallowed up in victory.

How deep was the grim sorter of the dark and the foul going to send me?

She says the problem with most Christians is that they show up once a week to pray that God's will be done- and when it is, they complain.

He recoils at the sight of me. Are they suppose to do that?

Hell is a choice because salvation is available to anyone who seeks it.

Boredom was my bedmate and it was hogging the sheets.

Christ, I'm in Hell and they wear uniforms.

The doctors removed my wasteland exterior by debriding me, scraping away the charred flesh. they brought in tanks of liquid nitrogen containing skin recently harvested from corpses. The sheets were thawed in pans of water, then neatly arranged on my back and stapled into place. Just like that, as if they were laying strips of sod over the problem areas behind their summer cabins, they wrapped me in the skin of the dead. My body was cleaned constantly but I rejected these sheets of necro-flesh anyway; I've never played well with others. So over and over again, I was sheeted with cadaver skin.

How could I protect myself? I had the Viking's scabbard, but not the sword; I had the Buddhist's robe, but not the faith.

I have no idea whether beginning with my accident was the best decision, as I've never written a book before. Truth be told, I started with the crash because I wanted to catch your interest and drag you into the story. You're still reading, so it seems to have worked.

Do you know what the best part of that swim was?"
"No."
"Knowing that you were on the shore waiting for me.

As soon as a man has chosen a side in war, he's already picked the wrong one.

But the truth is that I dislike most men as much as I dislike women. If anything, I am an equal opportunity misanthropist.

Coincidentally, a good age for a Japanese girl is younger than twenty five, because that's when she turns into a 'Christmas Cake'. Christmas cakes, as everyone knows, are desirable before the twenty fifth but afterward quickly become stale and are put on the shelf.

These day's I like to imagine that if a man were to enter through the slash on the book's cover, as if it were a door, he could walk right into the heart of the Inferno.

Personally, I believe it's a poor idea to tell a seven-year-old girl that God's tremendous plan is to incinerate her lungs.

While it is true that outside the library I have lived a life of wickedness, inside it I've always been as devoted to knowledge as a saint to his Bible.

Following my accident, I plumped up like a freshly roasted wiener, my skin cracking to accommodate the expanding meat. The doctors, with their hungry scalpels, hastened the process with a few quick slices. The procedure is called an escharotomy, and it gives the swelling tissue the freedom to expand. It's rather like the uprising of your secret inner being, finally given license to claw through the surface. The doctors thought they had sliced me open to commence my healing but, in fact, they only release the monster- a thing of engorged flesh, suffused with juice.

As in any proper fairy tale, there's a majick formula, in this case called the Rule of Nines.

Scatology was strictly out, as nowhere in my psyche do I harbor the desire to shit on someone and even less do I have the inclination to be shat upon. And if I a a snob for not participating in films that involve sex with animals, then so be it; I am a snob.

Any man who believes he can describe love', I answered, 'understands nothing about it.

You're scared and I understand that. I know it's difficult because you want to imagine the ending but you can't even imagine the beginning. But everything will be ok. It just takes time.

Everything burns if the flame is hot enough. The world is nothing but a crucible.

God cannot be referred to as 'good,' 'better,' or 'best' because He is above all things. If a man says that God is wise, the man is lying because anything that is wise can become wiser. Anything that a man might say about God is incorrect ... The best a man can do is to remain silent ... The true master knows that if he had a God he could understand, he would never hold Him to be God.

Accidents ambush the unsuspecting, often violently, just like love.

The burn unit is often the most distant wing of a hospital, because burn victims are so susceptible to infection that they must be kept away from other patients. More important, perhaps, is that the placement minimizes the chance of visitors stumbling across a Kentucky Fried Human.

You'll swoop from incredible highs when you're just glad to be alive, to those lows when you wish you were dead. And just when you start thinking that you've accepted who you are, that changes, too. Because who you are is not permanent

I am not a hero in soul and never will be, but I am better than I was before. Or so I tell myself; and for now that is enough.

Just as I was beginning my drift into unconsciousness, there was an explosion. Not a movie explosion but a small real-life explosion, like the ignition of an unhappy gas oven that holds a grudge against its owner.

I could hear the hiss of various gases escaping the engine and the tires still spinning outside, above, and there was the creak of metal settling as the car stopped rocking, a pathetic turtle on its back.

That which is painful sharpens one's love.

When I answered that I did not pray, he sternly rebuked me. "You're in Hell. You'd better start".

Coffin,why no lid? Too antiseptic for Hell, and could the roof of heaven really be made of gray metal?

The serpent tries to engulf my head. No, not a snake, an oxygen mask.

Who would have guessed that the monster of fraud was a democracy?

Don't be wasting your sympathy on me, kid. I did pretty damn well, I'll tell you what. You snag a woman like that, you don't ask what you did to deserve it. You just hope she never wises up and changes her mind.

My flesh began to singe as if I were a scrap of meat newly thrown onto the barbecue, and then i could hear the bubbling of my skin as the flames kissed it.

What is it like to wear another person's skin?"
"I don't have a good answer for that," I said. "It hurts."
"Can you remember their stories? Can you feel the love that they felt?

Some day soon," Lance said, "you'll walk out of here and have to decide how you're going to live the rest of your lives. Will you be defined by what other people see, or by the essence of your soul?

If you cannot love the pain, you can at least love the lessons it teaches

That which abides the fire shall become clean. The water of separation shall purify. The Lord is a consuming fire. That which can't abide the fire shall go through water.

All history is just one man trying to take something away from another man, and usually it doesn't really belong to either of them.