Rebecca McNutt Quotes

What's supposed to be and what is, are two very different things.

I guess if there's one thing I can say about the 21st century, it's that the 21st century is all flash and no substance… everything is digital, nothing but files of invisible electronic data on computers and mindless zombies on their cellular phones… it's sad how because of the digital age, society is ultimately doomed. Nothing in the digital age is real anymore, and you know, they say celluloid film and ray tube televisions and maybe even paper might become obsolete in this century? …What's most annoying is that nobody cares, they've just learned to accept the digital age and get addicted to it… none of them are ever going to step up and say to the world, "you're all a bunch of sheep!" and even if they did say anything, I doubt anyone would listen… they're all too obsessed and attached to their cellular phones and overly big televisions and whatever other moronic things they've got these days… it almost makes me want an apocalypse to happen, to erase digital technology and force the world to start over again.

Reasonable doubt trumps everything.

There's always one sure way of finding out that you're a misfit. When you're eleven years old, and your friends are telling you that they just sneaked into the theater to watch 'Twilight' and that it was "sooooo emotional and sooooo terrifying and soooooo romantic!" - but you've been spending the summer watching 'Rosemary's Baby' and 'Don't Look Now' and knowing the lines to all the Alfred Hitchcock films by heart - that's the moment you realize that you're a misfit.

Netflix is SO overrated.

I don't want any other friends! They'd never be as good a friend as you are.

Life is so funny sometimes that you just have to laugh.

Winters are a desolate time where all senses are wiped away, and here in Canada, this is especially true. All smells are sucked clean from the air, leaving only a harsh, icy crispness. Colours are stripped away, leaving a stark white landscape, a sky which stays black at night and gray in the day, a world of only three shades. Stay outside too long, and your hands will get so cold that they'll go numb and turn red, like the claws of a lobster. During a whiteout, even sight itself is reduced to nothingness.

Grief is NOT a mental illness or an emotional disorder. Anyone who tells you otherwise has never experienced it for themselves.

Canada is a free country, after all.

I'm convinced that a few people are going to stand up and do something, anything, to get this world back in our hands.

Um, thanks," Jackson told her. "And your name is…?"

"I'm Margaret, Margaret Van Der Graaf," she answered with another eerie smile. Her teeth were so white that they looked bleached.

"Van Der Graaf?" Jackson repeated, trying to stifle his laughter. He didn't want to be rude to the only person in sight, to this kind-hearted stranger who was offering to help him, but… Van Der Graaf?

"What are you laughing at?" Margaret asked with curiosity, flashing him a calculating gaze. "I like my name. If you're going to be a jerk, then I won't help you. You can stay out here on the street through the night for all I care."

"…Harsh," said Jackson, giving her a quizzical glance back. There was something 'off' about her, something that Jackson couldn't quite place, something that bordered on horrible loneliness and longing. "Who else lives here, Margaret Van Der Graaf?" He couldn't resist saying her name aloud. Despite its hilarity, it had a nice ring to it. "Who else lives here?" he urged.

"Me, myself and I," said Margaret simply, snickering when she saw his horrified and annoyed expression

Whether you live or die, whether you're bad or good, whether you're born or not, it's all arbitrary… but what can I say? I don't like fate or chance, and I don't always play by the rules, legalist as I am.

People never like pollution, it has become very wrong to like pollution at all. But just like there are good and bad things about people, there are good and bad things about pollution. If people were pollution we would get rid of anyone who was different, anyone who was considered an inconvenience ... but we'd be getting rid of a life, a lot of lives ... because we didn't like them. If pollution was a person would we still be trying to get rid of it? Would we have environmentalists still complaining and protesting and trying to get rid of all pollution?

New York City is a phoenix rising from the ashes.

Hello, my name is Holly Eryngo Nemov. My last name is pronounced like 'Nemo', and if you spell 'Nemo' backwards, it becomes 'omen'. 'Nemov' is also an anagram for 'venom'. It also means 'nobody'. My family thought it was a good last name for me. I am fifteen years old – I'll be sixteen after October the 31st – and I'm a necromancer's apprentice. Necromancy, from the Greek words 'nekros' and 'manteia', means 'divination from the dead'. My family prayed to a demon prince a long time ago, to bring me back from that realm of the world, so I used to believe that they wanted me, but they didn't. I like reading, I like practicing magic, I like catching rattlesnakes and I like quiet, isolated places. I don't like dogs, riverbanks, big cities or survival. My family is dead, and I'm supposed to have joined the thing that killed them.

I might be the hazardous waste site that polluted it, but Cape Breton Island is still my home.

Her latest client is Professor Desmond Curnin, a university professor who teaches library sciences to large groups of students. He's quick to pay on-time, quick to never fall behind. He's a brown-haired man with an unkempt beard and thick-framed hipster glasses. He slides a leather briefcase stuffed with dollar bills into the open window of Geraldine's car. "Your fly's unzipped," Geraldine points out, disgusted. "Who gave you a license to sell hot dogs, buddy?

To be wary of science is not to fear progress, or to be ignorant, or to fear the unknown. To be wary of science is to be skeptical about whether or not innovation belongs in human hands. No matter how intelligent a scientist may indeed be, like every human being who has ever lived, the promise of power coupled with one's own biases, prejudices and partiality will undoubtedly taint the end result. Science will always be used to push a certain agenda or to benefit specific people. To believe otherwise is naive.

Super 8 film is the language of silence.

Small talk… Bernie resented it more than life itself. The weather, sports scores, frivolous gossip… nothing real, nothing serious, nothing meaningful about it. People were experts at wasting their brief, precious years on earth with small talk.

Why do they lie?" she asked herself aloud. "They say time makes losing someone you loved easier to deal with, but it only makes it worse.

People who want nothing need nothing more than power.

Smile for the camera, pretty little Sydney Tar Ponds.

there's no better system than our own morality, not law, not science, not religion… just decency.

Would you ever sleep with me?" he questioned once.

"Never," she'd replied, her large eyes shining in the bluish glow from his TV set, "but I love you… in a different way. I'll always be loyal to you, I'll never betray you, that's how I love people.

Why hoard away so many back-issues of People Magazine? Fashion magazines are just empty promises. You can go bankrupt blowing all your cash on expensive beauty products, but the only way you'll ever look just like the people on those glossy front covers is if you know how to use computer editing software for photographs. Besides, people who think they are ugly, are never really all that ugly anyway. People who think they are pretty, are rarely ever all that pretty.

Why is it these days that so many people hate reading? Some people won't even touch a newspaper or magazine. It isn't television that kills reading, or cinema or radio, or even those accursed little things known as video games. People used to read all the time, but when the century shifted subtly, somewhere along the way, people forgot how to imagine. When did it happen? At what point? Who or what is to blame? Maybe it's just because the world has become so cold and scientific and shallow in recent years.

Everybody has magic, it's just that most people either don't know it, or don't believe it.

Oh, trust me Sydney Tar Ponds, you aren't the first Personification to be forgotten by somebody ordinary," Mearth sighed with a falsely-reassuring smile. Alecto stepped back from her, glaring hatefully. "Sydney Tar Ponds," Mearth added, "I've had so many ordinary people as friends in my life that by now I've forgotten all their names. At first it was difficult ... very sad ... to see them always leaving, dying, disappearing, ignoring, but after a while I realized that they weren't worth the trouble. I'd rather be in the company of other Personifications. At least they aren't always dropping dead like houseflies or sailing away to parts unknown. Nil sa saol seo ach ceo, i ni bheimid beo, ach seal beag gearr. Wouldn't you agree?"
"No," Alecto told her. "I think you're insane.

Everything has a past, a voice, existed at some point, even things as small and seemingly meaningless as a house in a huge suburb. It's a house like every other house ... but at some point a family lived there, made it theirs, made it important. When people forget that history, that somebody at some point thought the house mattered, it just becomes an empty pile of nailed wood and brick and concrete that gets torn down for some strip mall or chain store to take its place ... and that's what happens more and more now, everything is disposable, always replaced with no thought at all. That's where things get lost, memories get lost, humanity slips through the cracks, because when we all fail to pay attention to the things that make up our lives, we're no longer human at all, not really.

All the whackjob psychologists out there will tell you that grief is a process. Some say it has five stages. Others say that grief should only last two years at the lost, otherwise it's "abnormal". Putting an expiration date of grief though is like putting out the flame on a burning candle. It might stop the candle from melting down and falling apart, but in the long run the candle goes solid, freezes in a catatonic state. Take away a person's grief and guaranteed they'll only be a frozen shell of a human being afterwards. Grief is only love, it's nothing to hide or send away with happy pills and mother's little helpers. Grief is a lifeline connecting two people who are in different realms together, and it's a sign of loyalty and hope.

The print was an old one made from a negative taken in the 1960's of her parents in Sydney Mines, dancing with thrilled, excited expressions on their faces, in front of a classic car that had been a wedding gift at the time. Her mother's hair, red back then, was held back by a blue handkerchief, and she was dressed in a billowing skirt and white blouse. Her father's denim jeans and faded t-shirt were streaked with coal dust as he held her hands and spun her around in the front yard of their old clapboard house, yellow grass under their feet and a cobalt-blue sky with white clouds drifting above. Mandy could almost feel the late summer breeze as she gazed deeply into the print, watching the flamboyant colors come to life. She hung it up to dry on two wooden clothespins hanging from a string above her.

What's more fun than gnawing on bones? Necromancy in haunted homes! At first glance it's bright with delight, but you'd better beware - there's a full moon tonight!

I used to think to myself that I was the last kind of person who should have a guardian angel, but then I realized that maybe my type of person is the kind who angels come to first.

He felt like the world didn't want him, like he was born hated, and he was. He was smart, he was funny, he'd never done a bad deed in his life, born innocent just like all the rest of us… but he was black in a white world, and I think somewhere along the way, he stopped feeling like a human being.

Where would we be without our painful childhoods?

I don't like vegans, either. Bunch of whiny zealots. A cow or a pig wouldn't give a damn if a person died… animals tear apart other animals while they're still alive, but we aren't so cruel, so vegans should learn to shut up. Vegans use palm oil and never think about the forests and endangered species at risk from that… and they all exploit the world in other ways, buying their computers and their sweatshop clothes and their Starbucks coffees. Anyway, cats and dogs eat their owners after the owner dies. I saw on the news a few times that there was a lot of open animal food in the houses where that sort of thing happens, but the pets eat the dead owner… just because. Maybe a pet's notion of 'unconditional love' is like Jeffrey Dahmer… he used to eat and kill the people he professed to love, too. He was a sicko… I don't believe animals have any empathy. Do elephants ever consider Holocaust victims? Do dogs ever cry over the Rwanda Genocide?

I used to want to be a cop for a brief time, a detective, solving crimes and upholding the law, ever since I stated watching crime shows in junior high. But being a cop, contrary to what many believe, isn't like the films or television shows that we see every day. If you're the cop who has to have the grim duty of telling a parent that their child was killed, or who loses their friend on a dangerous case, or who has to interview victims of horrible crimes, somehow I imagine that you just want to quit forever on some days.

Friends are like the stars that glow in the sky ... you don't always see them, but you know they're always there overhead, and even when it's cloudy, snowy or stormy, even when the power goes out and you're trapped in darkness, they'll always find a way to shine through to you.

You're such a great liar when you lie to yourself.

There are some things in the past that… that just aren't meant to be viewed.

Creosote made Mandy think of the thrill of rushing through a garden sprinkler as a kid, of playing washer toss in the backyard, of spending nights in the neighbors' huge in-ground swimming pool when she was twelve, throwing glow sticks in the turquoise water during Canada Day block parties. She thought of Jud for a moment, how he'd loved doing all those things when he was a kid, but how, as he got older, it was all about popularity, sports, a life of illusion… and without warning, a totally different kind of memory filled her mind – the dull feeling of her head hitting the concrete walls near the wood shop at her old high school, the sounds of kids laughing, the sharp smell of sawdust, the buzzing of electric sanders nearby, the sound of Jud laughing while he beat her up… without realizing it, she'd started crying noiselessly.

You don't have to be invisible to disappear.

Dreams are just lies that we tell ourselves while we're asleep.

You have more issues than Reader's Digest.

Don't pack your bags just yet, stay awhile,
Don't try to run away to higher ground,
You're in my twisted clouds of sad misfortune,
And you are such an entertaining crowd!
(I've never had such cheerful toys to play with...)
Forget I said that – just a little natural disaster Humour,
Ha-ha-ha.

Pull up a rusty lawn chair
On the waterfront in New Orleans,
And ignore the wind that howls,
Things aren't always as they seem.
I can smell fear in the air,
Fresh amidst the cornbread steam,
Forgive me if I sound excited,
(I'm going to be famous, you know!)
And let me take your money, please!

I'll drown your family, hunt down your pets,
I've got tricks that I've never even tried yet,
And it's so easy when I get the chance!
(I'll swipe your house in just one glance!)

As the saying goes, it all comes out in the wash,
But I'm the only wash that leaves no stone unturned,
Financial devastation is my middle name,
And social degradation is my third!

You, little boy from the bayou bank,
You used to fish for pointless fun
(I can appreciate having fun),
But after I go, you'll find your parents poor,
You'll have eviction notices on your door,
You'll have to sell any fish you can catch,
In a desperate grasp for money,
Although I hate to break it to you,
That bayou's polluted, honey!
I see nothing in your future

Again we have the problem that whether you're moral or not is a matter of whether it's cost-effective.

One man, an investment banker from Cantor Fitzgerald, took her to see the viewing deck like a good Samaritan since he felt sorry for her, and… and it was like flying, she could see the entire city, she could see the top of the clouds and the ocean, the pink and purple of the late sunset, and he told her, "it's the closest we can ever get to heaven! These buildings connect everyone together like a big community!"

"If this is the closest place to heaven, are you an angel investor?" she'd asked curiously.

Sometimes I wish I could go back in time, and be the one who ended up in that accident, completely dead ... but you know what? It wouldn't change anything. All I can do now that they're dead is to go through the actions of living without really living, and hope it improves someday.

She shakily rushed towards the car to find Alecto casually standing beside it, smoking a cigarette and staring fixedly on the radio as it played the song 'Draggin' the Line' by Tommy James, his expression thoughtful. "What are you thinking about?" Mandy questioned.
"Wouldn't the world be a very loud place to live if we said everything we thought?" Alecto asked quietly.

That's the problem with socialism. It gave everyone enough to get by but never enough to get out.

These days we have Smartphones, Smartcars, Smartboards, Smarteverything, but consider this: if technology is getting smarter, does that mean humans are getting dumber?

You get people who think you have a mental disorder, people calling you frigid, but I don't care. If they're that desperate, clearly THEY have a problem.

Tony had spent a great deal of time dwelling on whoever this poor Disney hostess must have been, not as a casualty but as a person. She never got to be an adult, he'd told himself in horror.

Mandy smiled cheerfully at an overweight kid in a gold sweater and pink skirt who was chasing her little brother around along the boardwalk. When she was that age, on sunny days she'd be out on the boardwalk with Jud and Wendy, buying rainbow sorbet from the ice cream shop and placing paper boats into the harbour. She felt like a ghost, drifting past the shell of her own childhood.

Climate change, oh climate change, religion dressed as science! If we keep consuming, the world we'll be dooming, 'till the government forces compliance! Algae blooms and monsoons, we had them all along, but how dare we ask if science can ever be wrong?

There's no reason that anything should ever become obsolete, whether it be VHS tapes, celluloid film, print books or even the previous versions of a computer operating system, as long as even just one person still wants them around. After all, one thing leads to another, old inventions are the basis for new ones, inventors and designers and scientists and hobbyists worked hard to create all these things, so don't they deserve some respect, enough not to have their ideas buried in the dust by the latest trends and fads?

If you've ever stared death in the face, the trick to surviving is to win the staring contest.

Sometimes, without effort, you live in the moment. You don't regret the past or worry about the future, and in that moment everything flashes before your eyes , a clear snapshot of what has to be done, and everything pauses.

I can pretend it's all pretend! I can be the life of your death and you can be the death of my life… what a trade-off!

People always say that digital cameras are much more stable than film cameras, but the truth is that digital cameras, or any kind of digital technology, is one of the most unstable things in the world. A film camera can last decades if you know how to look after it, but digital things can break down instantly. A violent storm, a nuclear bomb, even something as minor as a cracked screen or the releasing of newer models, can make a digital product just a block of useless metal.

... Look, I'm real sorry about Cheryl, I know you loved her a lot," Mandy apologized gloomily. "It's wrong that people have to keep killing off Pollution."
"It's alright, I think she wants to be remediated," Alecto told her calmly, though his grief-stricken and depressed expression said more to Mandy than his words did.
"You don't have to forget Cheryl, no matter what Mearth said to you," Mandy pointed out. "People shouldn't be forced to forget what they love, or to just get over the death of what they love. Cheryl was your friend and nobody can make you forget her if you don't want to.

Oh, I'm Chrissy Mackenzie, I'm from Vancouver but I came here to study environmental journalism," the girl exclaimed with way too much enthusiasm. "You got any advice?"

"Search me," Mandy muttered, spooning another ice cube from the empty glass on the table in front of her. "I like pollution, I write in favor of it, and environmental journalism most often implies that it's in favor of all that "go green" hippie crap."

"Oh, well…." Chrissy seemed taken aback, offended, and Mandy sighed a fourth time. "Damn it, I'm really sorry," she apologized, smiling dismally at the aspiring writer. "It's just been a really lousy day for me and I wasn't really thinking. My advice? Find your own cause to represent, not one thrown out into society by a ton of environmentalist dopes. Find something new, something you think could be improved, and work from there." Chrissy smiled with a look of total ecstasy as if the words of some nobody woman were important. Mandy momentarily noticed the groups of laughing, drunk, giggling people, all acting childish… and for a moment she wished she could be them.

History is everywhere, all the fragments of the past…

Well, let's just suppose for the sake of argument that I decided to take Holly travelling to some ancient Indian burial ground in the middle of the desert. I've considered it, from time to time… anyway, he would be using the Black Arts to invoke fallen spirits, spirits that would generally be unwilling, uncooperative… so, there would be an explicit contest of wills. Holly would have to heap conjuration upon conjuration, precisely because spirits and demons are often reluctant to be summoned, and if they were summoned, they would do everything in their power to escape Holly's control, threaten him and deceive him. To gain the upper hand in the game, Holly would have to wield a horrible amount of power… which he does indeed have, and it would be quite spectacular to watch, no doubt. Thousands of ghouls and skeletons rising up from the ground, rushing forth against the wind on deceased white horses towards the crashing waves of the sea, and considering that Holly has more in common with demons himself than he will ever care to admit, he probably wouldn't be able to stop once he started. We would have radical weather patterns and rising sea levels on our hands for days, perhaps even weeks… if he ever tried it, it would probably kill him, but hell's bells, it would be a really captivating show to see!

So many people spend years (and money) studying to be doctors, lawyers, actors, dancers, business executives and scientists - when you're an author, you can be any of these things, and you don't need a degree or certificate; all you need is an imagination, a dream and an open mind.

Photographs are very interesting, and you can look into them a million times and still find a new meaning in them, something in the past that was caught in the film itself ...

Sadly, atheists are becoming everything they aren't supposed to be: obnoxious, oppressive, loud, pushy, smug, condescending and annoying. Since when did the definition of atheism become "an anti-religious person"? It's one thing to say "I don't believe in God because I see no proof in God. We'll just agree to disagree". It's another thing to make it your sworn duty to put down and berate religious people, to view them as primitive morons, to turn every conversation into a debate and to make it your mission to put forth this vision of a faith-free society fueled only by science and technology. This kind of oppression is against everything atheists stand for. Atheists believe in the freedom of choice, the choice to not be religious if one does not want to be. This does not mean being pushy or rude towards anybody else who has made their own choices to be religious. For some people, religion gives them a purpose, helps them cope with trauma and grief, gives them hope, gives them something to hold onto. So, as long as they aren't pushing their faith on others, why should atheists do the same thing to them?

…I love you," he said to her, although at that point he was certain she could no longer comprehend the words. "I'd trade places with you in an instant, Mandy Valems… you never deserved this… why would anyone do something so terrible!?" A cold chill froze his heart when he saw her empty eyes again.

The fluorescent lights in the dim room sparked to life all of a sudden, brightness so sharp that it startled him. In a flash, sharp and sudden, quicker than a lightning strike, the bulbs flickered and exploded with a few jingling pops.

All sharks were born swimming.

It's quite ironic that by being a romantic asexual, you are eternally screwed. See, it's extremely difficult to meet somebody who wants a romantic relationship without any sex. Wanting a romantic relationship without sex is like offering non-alcoholic beer at a house party. They'll laugh at you, call you a socially-awkward dork, they'll ask you why you don't just go with soft drinks... people generally don't drink booze for the colour or flavour (although I suppose you could count those hipsters who hang out at craft breweries debating over the nutty undertaste of it or whatever hipsters debate about). I've come to the conclusion that I am probably better off alone. Lonely at times maybe, but that's what friends are for. Solitude can be wonderfully liberating, anyway. Not having to share belongings or property, having your own time and privacy... and in any case, if you ever feel the need to be anchored by something or someone, material items and hobbies and states of being, those all last indefinitely. They won't go away until you do. It's a kind of freedom that most people don't have access to unless they become divorced or widowed, or if they choose to remain single on purpose. The gilded wings of solitude that probably look ugly and tarnished to everyone standing below them as they gaze up to the sky. The sun shining down on them, wind through silken feathers, that's always brilliant. There are bouts of rain and darkness, but you get that on the ground just as much as you

Try as you might, you'll never be able to please an environmentalist. You can stop using coal to heat your house, you can stop throwing out bottles and cans, you can have every factory in Canada shut down and you can buy only organic gluten-free non-GMO food, you can give up your favorite station wagon for a weird electric hybrid, you can stop developing film and buy a never-ending cycle of digital cameras, you can give up your job at a refinery or mill, and they'll still get after you for not enjoying yourself while doing so.

It's going to happen soon, a nuclear war. Someday, somewhere, some jackass politician will get in over his head and push the button, and us? Society? We haven't really grasped the full reality of the situation. If a nuclear bomb were detonated, we'd all just be collateral damage. That's why it has to be prevented, because trust me when I say that nobody will be standing up for our rights or life when there's no one left to do so.

I've got money!" Eve exclaimed in a frantic frenzy of hope, her eyes dancing wildly with the notion that there was some way out of this. "I mean, I don't know what use money is to the Grim Reaper, but I've got a ton of cash! It's in a hat box under my bed! I've got a bright red Lexus in the garage, I've got my engagement ring upstairs, it's real gold… there must be something we can trade off with…"
"You can't bribe me away, I'm afraid," said Mr. Azrael. "Money means nothing where I come from.

Truthfully she felt incredibly miserable, seeing university students and tourists bustling in and out of the place with their cell phones in hand, texting like there was no tomorrow. Living behind a screen, they'd likely text with their last breath.

Do you mean Y2K? The Enron Scandal? In devastation there is opportunity, you know!

It was then that he realized that all the things in the blaring white window displays, all the trendy new clothes, all the cheerful television commercials, all the soulful music, all the McDonald's Happy Meal toys, all the elaborate art and writing and films, it was all there to keep people further away from death… and for him, now it was failing. Maybe on some strange level, it was designed to fail, like a house built of playing cards, a fragile yet whimsical illusion.

I'll never buy a cell phone, I'd rather die than have a cell phones. Cell phones are the 21st century's ball and chain.

I never said I was sad, I'm just pessimistic," said Alecto. "Expect the worst, that way you'll never be disappointed, Mandy Valems.

Mearth appeared angry and disappointed briefly, but then she just gazed at the ground. " ... It must be horrible, feeling all alone, is it?" she asked.
"Oh, not really," said Alecto, his eyes lifeless, his voice listless. "I'm going to be forgotten by someone who I can't forget, though. That will be terrible ... but maybe it's better if she does forget me altogether.

Life is not the end, and death is just the beginning...

Life is stress by definition.

Her gaze wavered towards one of the books on the sales counter beside the register, a hardcover copy of Shakespeare's Hamlet with many of the pages dog-eared and stained with coffee and tea. The store owner caught her looking at it and slid it across the counter towards her. "You ever read Hamlet?" he questioned.

"I tried to when I was in high school," said Mandy, picking up the book and flipping it over to read the back. "I mean, it's expected that everyone should like Shakespeare's books and plays, but I just…." her words faltered when she noticed him laughing to himself. "What's so funny, Sir?" she added, slightly offended.

"…Oh, I'm not laughing at you, just with you," said the store owner. "Most people who say they love Shakespeare only pretend to love his work. You're honest Ma'am, that's all. You see, the reason you and so many others are put-off by reading Shakespeare is because reading his words on paper, and seeing his words in action, in a play as they were meant to be seen, are two separate things… and if you can find a way to relate his plays to yourself, you'll enjoy them so much more because you'll feel connected to them. Take Hamlet for example – Hamlet himself is grieving over a loss in his life, and everyone is telling him to move on but no matter how hard he tries to, in the end all he can do is to get even with the ones who betrayed him."

"…Wow, when you put it that way… sure, I think I'll buy a copy just to try reading, wh

He didn't remember the very first time he actually died very well. It wasn't as bad as remediation, but he remembered being afraid and worried… and when he found himself alive again a few hours later with Mearth's wild green eyes peering down at him, he remembered still being afraid and worried. It was strange, he thought, to be afraid of being alive… but being alive was worse than being dead in his mind.

On Wall Street, Clarence was a diamond in a sea of glass, never greedy, never an ambulance-chaser, never the kind of person who deserved to die in the way that he did.

Film photography will always be superior to digital - because no matter how many lasers and instant buttons and HD pixels you've got, a human being can take a photograph with much more integrity and meaning than one a built-in robot took.

The Twin Towers stood out like an enormous number 11 looming over New York City, a familiar icon coupled with the Brooklyn Bridge, the Empire State building and the Statue of Liberty. Those towers were like the soul of lower Manhattan, alive in their own right.

A picture's worth a thousand words. But a single word can make you think of over a thousand pictures in your mind, over a thousand moments, a thousand memories.

We're losing society to apathy, to digital technology, the people who care about nobody else but themselves. They share every little detail of their stupid lives online as if the world even gives a damn ... digital technology is getting smarter and society is getting dumber," Mandy whispered in a voice filled with disbelief. "Society is ... it's slipping away.

Most people are as happy as other people decide they should be.

If I hear the phrase "selfie" one more time, I'll have to enroll myself in anger management classes.

Don't you think it's better to continue reading than to just close the book?

Have you ever noticed how as an adult, all the bright colors go out of your life? Now that I'm not a kid anymore, things always look gray, like a clothesline draped with laundry that's been washed too many times and left to stand in the wind. I guess that's what growing up is ... it's a fading photograph.

Through a large field that had turned a dead yellow after an early frost, past the multicoloured clapboard company houses and through a flurry of fabric hanging from clotheslines… after a few minutes he stopped at the edge of a high cliff, where a long time ago he'd been able to see the mine towers and orange smog from the steel mill way off in the distance, and he'd been able to stare for hours at the periwinkle-coloured ocean waves crashing against the jagged rocks below. At times he'd wonder what it would be like to cross the ocean. He knew from the books he'd read that he would be in Europe probably, that by plane it took hours, by boat it took weeks depending on the speed of the boat… he knew the street maps of Paris and London and Pennsylvania. He knew all the monumental buildings of the world… but he was unable to leave, if he tried to leave Nova Scotia, Mearth would lock him in the basement of his house for months, maybe even years, in the dark, isolated…
Not even wanting to consider it, he closed his eyes, the swift wind from the ocean gusting through the scraggly grass. As the sun briefly came out in a haze, a kaleidoscope of reds and golds, he lit a cigarette and tried to imagine that the mill and mines were still in their rightful place.

The child psychologist's clinic: where imaginary friends go to die, where dreams go to burn, where creativity goes to drown.

I never trust anyone", Alecto told Mandy as wisps of smoke drifted from his cigarette. "Treachery is the unfortunate result of any friendships I've ever had. I don't need friends anyway, what I want is to be left alone to carry out my work ... it's a dangerous world and we're just on borrowed time, all of us ... even you.

Someday I'll be a lawyer… someday I'll bring justice to people who need it. Lawyers are either legalized liars… or saviors of the truth.

The prints shop manager, a balding man of about thirty years old, dressed in a plaid work shirt and faded jeans, looked very shocked when he saw the headline text. "Sydney Tar Ponds, Is It As Dangerous As People Say? Well," he exclaimed, glancing at the front photo, which featured the Sydney Steel Corporation, along with its plumes of orange smog. "You know, most people your age are really against that mill, as if it's a disease. We have university students protesting every few weeks or so… strangely enough, the ones who have parents who rely on that steel mill to pay the bills."

"What about the pollution?" Wendy questioned, almost accusingly, as if it was his fault. "What if dangerous chemicals are in the environment?"

"Hey kid, I don't even work at the mill, never have, but my father, my uncle, their father, cousins, all worked there," the prints shop man argued, placing the newspapers in a cardboard box and taping it shut. "When it comes down to all that 'go green' crap, you have to ask yourself, is it worth risking a person's income, their job, their family… their life? I'm not saying you're wrong, but these newspapers might have a point.

There was a heaven beyond anything he knew where there was no jet fuel, no jumping, no burning towers... but he wasn't looking beyond yet. He was still looking back.