quotes? 可以吃的吗?

You've whetted me like a stone. I feel almost invincible in our battles' wake: a kind of Achilles, fleet footed and light of touch. Only in this nonexistent place our letters weave do I feel weak. How I love to have no armor here.

You wrote of being in a village upthread together, living as friends and neighbours do, and I could have swallowed this valley whole and still not have sated my hunger for the thought. Instead I wick the longing into thread, pass it through your needle eye, and set it into hiding somewhere beneath my skin, embroider my next letter to you one stitch at a time.

Blue listens to jays, woodpeckers, grackles, laughs at hummingbirds jousting on the wing. She holds out her hands for nuthatches and chickadees, black-and-white warblers, and they flit to her, make branches of her fingers. She strokes sapsuckers' crests without naming the colour, makes a needle and a thread of the thrill she feels in touching it, then stitches it into the joy Garden expects her to feel in the woods.

Blue loves cities - their anonymity, their smells and sounds - but she loves forests, too, places other people call quiet that are anything but.

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. I don't want to do that.

Her pen had a heart inside, and the nib was a wound in a vein.

...but Red's letters she keeps in her own body, curled beneath her tongue like coins, printed in her fingers' tips, between the lines of her palms. She presses them against her teeth before kissing her marks, reads them over when she shifts her grip on motorcycle handles, dusts soldiers' chins with them in bar fights and barracks games. She thinks without thinking, often, of what she will name Red in her next letter - hides her lists in plausibly deniable dreamscapes, on the undersides of milkweed leaves, in shed chrysalis and wingtip.

As the earth shakes and the sky burns, even the bravest and most single-minded leave their work. Notes and sums and new engines remain behind. They take people and art. The math will burn, the engines melt, the arches fall to dust.

Some days Blue wonders why anyone ever bothered making numbers so small; other days she supposes even infinity needs to start somewhere.

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

Alibi, Joseph Kanon

All those feelings. The hate. At first you want to kill all of them, and you can't even kill one. Not one. And then you know what happens, I think? You start killing yourself. You have to kill someone and there's no one else.

To live under - you know the word tyranny is from the Latin tyrannus. So we have known how to live with this for a long time. You bend. Maybe you think we bend too much, but we look at history and it tells us the important thing is to survive. And we did.

Maybe you get used to it, all the killing. That's the problem. You think you want to kill them all. Where do you stop? The guard who pushed the children on the train? Yes, him. Then why not the ones watching? Why not everybody? And then you're like them.

Alibi, Joseph Kanon

Sometimes there were dreams - really ways of going back, reminders of the nightmare time that was supposed to be over - but mostly the sleep was just fog, opaque and shapeless.

The fog that came in at night from the lagoon would fill my head too, a lulling numbness, asking to be wrapped in blankets, left alone.