"BOMP" is my middle name

things i have: light fingers and a magpie heart your spoon in my drawer your shirt in my closet your blanket in my bed my greatest heist: your hand in mine

I am a minstrel. I know more about lying than you will ever discover. And minstrels know that sometimes lies are what a man needs most. In order to make a new truth of them.

An animal may be ferocious and cunning enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie.

It was a dream, but Moist was good at selling dreams. And if you could sell the dream to enough people, no one dared to wake up.

Polly turned over, and tried to make herself comfortable. It’s all lies, she thought muzzily. Some of them are just prettier than others, that’s all. People see what they think is there. Even I’m a lie. But I’m getting away with it.

Trying to be witty leads to lying, more or less.

when you roll 20 on bluff

Very hard ethical questions are involved,’ he went on. ‘You are to be made into a good boy, 6655321. Never again will you have the desire to commit acts of violence or to offend in any way whatsoever against the State’s Peace. I hope you take all that in. I hope you are absolutely clear in your own mind about that.’ I said: ‘Oh, it will be nice to be good, sir.’ But I had a real horrorshow smeck* at that inside, brothers. He said: ‘It may not be nice to be good, little 6655321. It may be horrible to be good. And when I say that to you I realize how self-contradictory that sounds. I know I shall have many sleepless nights about this. What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him? Deep and hard questions, little 6655321. But all I want to say to you now is this: if at any time in the future you look back to these times and remember me, the lowest and humblest of all God’s servitors, do not, I pray, think evil of me in your heart, thinking me in any way involved in what is now about to happen to you. And now, talking of praying, I realize sadly that there will be little point in praying for you. You are passing now to a region where you will be beyond the reach of the power of prayer. A terrible terrible thing to consider. And yet, in a sense, in choosing to be deprived of the ability to make an ethical choice, you have in a sense really chosen the good. So I shall like to think. So, God help us all, 6655321, I shall like to think.’ And then he began to cry.