Quotes About Mystery

a handful of crumpled stars

it's doors I'm afraid of because I can't see through them, its the door opening by itself in the wind I'm afraid of.

More powerful than God, more evil than the Devil; the poor have it, the rich lack it, and if you eat it you die?

Women are hard to keep track of, most of them. They slip into other names, and sink without a trace.

So many crucial events take place behind people's backs, when they aren't in a position to watch: birth and death, for instance. And the temporary oblivion of sex.

It isn't the sort of thing you ask questions about, because the answers are not usually answers you want to know.

Mushrooms were the roses in the garden of that unseen world, because the real mushroom plant was underground. The parts you could see - what most people called a mushroom - was just a brief apparition. A cloud flower.

Perhaps they were looking for passion; perhaps they delved into this book as into a mysterious parcel - a gift box at the bottom of which, hidden in layers of rustling tissue paper, lay something they'd always longed for but couldn't ever grasp.

The only sure camouflage was unpredictability.

He could never get used to her, she was fresh every time, she was a casketful of secrets. Any moment now she would open herself up, reveal to him the essential thing, the hidden thing at the core of her life, or of her life, or of his life--the thing he was longing to know. The thing he'd always wanted.

One look at a banana and you can tell it came from outer space.

Now the flesh arranges itself differently. I'm a cloud, congealed around a center object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black. Pinpoints of light swell, sparkle, burst and shrivel within it, countless as stars. Every month there is a moon, gigantic, round, heavy, an omen.

The moon. Even though we know it's coming. Every time we see it, it makes us pause, and hush.

This murdered girl troubles me. After the first shock, nobody at school says much about her. Even Cordelia does not want to talk about her. It's as if this girl has done something shameful, herself, by being murdered.

From this distance it does resemble fun. Fun is not knowing how it will end.

Women, and what went on under their collars. Hotness and coldness, coming and going in the strange musky flowery variable-weather country inside their clothes -- mysterious, important, uncontrollable. That was his father's take on things. But men's body temperatures were never dealt with; they were never even mentioned....

I think that this is what God must look like: an egg. The life of the moon may not be on the surface, but inside.

But mostly she likes the fact that there's a reason for every death, and only one murderer at a time, and things get figured out at the end, and the murderer always gets caught.

It was a question now, rather than a statement; a question with no answer.

For it is not always the one that strikes the blow that is the actual murderer; and Mary was done to death by that unknown gentleman, as surely as if he'd taken the knife and plunged it into her body himself.

The ways of God are not the ways of man, and they are most emphatically not the ways of woman.

The story of Zenia ought to begin when Zenia began. It must have been someplace long ago and distant in space, thinks Tony; someplace bruised, and very tangled. A European print, hand-tinted, ochre-coloured, with dusty sunlight and a lot of bushes in it- bushes with thick leaves and ancient twisted roots, behind which, out of sight in the undergrowth and hinted at only by a boot protruding, or a slack hand, something ordinary but horrifying is taking place.

A man in a cloud, with icicle teeth and eyes of fire.

I'd like another dimension of space, and also the tombs and the dead women, please.