She was good at selling roses. She was so small and fragile, her features so clear and pure. she was given a dress that was too big for her, and in it she looked like an angelic doll. The other children petted her, because she was the littlest one. They took turns sleeping beside her at night; she was passed from one set of arms to another.
Every time the women appear, Snowman is astonished all over again. They’re every known colour from the deepest black to the whitest white, they’re various heights, but each one of them is admirably proportioned. Each is sound of tooth, smooth of skin. No ripples of fat around their waists, no bulges, no dimpled skin cellulite on their thighs. No body hair, no bushiness. They look like retouched fashion photos, or ads for a hight priced workout program.
Maybe this is the reason that these women around in Snowman not even the faintest stirrings of lust. It was the thumbprints of human imperfection that used to move him, the flaws in the design: the lopsided smile, the wart next to the navel, the mole, the bruise. These were the places he’d single out. Putting his mouth on them. was it consolation he’d had in mind, kissing the wound to make it better?
He remembered himself as carefree, earlier, in his youth. Carefree, thick-skinned, skipping light-footed over the surfaces, whistling in the dark, able to get through anything.
Crake made the bones of the Children of Drake out of the coral on the beach, and then he made their flesh out of mango. But the Children of Oryx hatched out of an egg, a giant egg laid by Oryx herself. Actually she laid two eggs: one full of animals and birds and fish, and the other one full of words. But the egg full of words hatched first, and the Children of Crake had already been created by then, and they’d eatenup all the words because they were hungry, and so there were no words left over when the second egg hatched out. And that is why animals can’t talk.
I think that voice held him most, with its fluctuating, feverish warmth, because it couldn’t be over-dreamed — that voice was a deathless song.
He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.
He smiled understandingly- much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or tive times in life. It faced- or seemed to face- the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it has precisely impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.
Nately’s whore’s kid sister’s room. She was a tall, strapping girl with long hair and incandescent blue veins converging populously beneath her cocoa-colored skin where the flesh was most tender, and she kept cursing ans shrieking and jumping high up into the air on her bare feet to keep right on hitting him on the rop of his head with the piked heel of her shoe. They were both naked, and raising a rumpus that brought everyone in the apartment into the hall to watch, each couple in a bedroom doorway, all of them naked.” Catch-22
“Every one of them,” Yossarian told him.
“Every one of whom?”
“Every one of whom do you think?”
“I haven’t and idea.”
“Then how do you know they aren’t?”
“Because…” Clevinger sputtered, and turned speechless with frustration… Yossarian had proof, because strangers he didn’t know shot at him with cannons every time he flew up in the air to drop bombs on them, and it wasn’t funny at all. And if that wasn’t funny, there were lots of things that weren’t even funnier.” Catch-22
That bird came from Africa.
But you mustn’t cry for that bird, Paulie, because after awhile it forgot about how the veldt smelled at noonday, and the sounds of the wildebeests at the waterhole, and the high acidic smell of the ieka-ieka threes in the great clearing north of the Big Road. After a while it forgot the cerise color of the sun dying behind Kilimanjaro. After awhile it only knew the muddy, smogged-out sunsets of Boston, that was all it remembered and all it wanted to remember. After awhile it didn’t want to go back anymore, and if someone took it back and set it free it would only crouch in once place, afraid and hurting and homesick in to unknown and terribly ineluctable directions, until something came along and killed it.” Misery
