S Willy B. — via American Gods
Do You Believe? (12/7/05)
page 81:
Shadow had played checkers in prison: it passed the time. He had played chess, too, but he was not temperamentally suited to planning ahead. He preferred picking the perfect move for the moment. You could win in checkers like that, sometimes.
page 172:
[Sam] smiled at him, looking suddenly, and for the first time, vulnerable. She patted him on the arm. "You're fucked up, Mister. But you're cool."
"I believe that's what they call the human condition," said Shadow. "Thanks for the company."
page 220:
"The coins, man. The coins. I showed you, remember?" He raised two fingers to his face, stared at them, then pulled a gold coin from his mouth. He tossed the coin to Shadow, who stretched a hand out to catch it, but no coin reached him.
"I was drunk," said Shadow. "I don't remember."
Chapter 10 epigraph, page 260:
I'll tell you all my secrets
But I lie about my past
So send me off to bed for evermore— Tom Waits, 'Tango Till They're Sore'
page 285:
"You know," says the man in the light gray suit, when his drink arrives, "the finest line of poetry ever uttered in the history of this whole damn country was said by Canada Bill Jones in 1853, in Baton Rouge, while he was being robbed blind in a cooked game of faro. George Devol, who was, like Canada Bill, not a man who was averse to fleecing the odd sucker, drew Bill aside and asked him if he couldn't see the game was crooked. And Canada Bill sighed, and shrugged his shoulders, and said 'I know. But it's the only game in town.' And he went back to the game.
page 317:
As they set out, Brogan said, "On the one hand, I hope we find her. On the other, if she's going to be found, I'd be very grateful if it was someone else who got to find her, and not us. You know what I mean?"
Shadow knew exactly what he meant.
page 349:
"You play your cards so close to your chest," said Shadow, "that I'm not even sure that they're really cards at all."
page 363:
If he walked, he discovered, he did not have to think, and that was just the way he like it; when he thought his mind went to places he could not control, places that made him feel uncomfortable. Exhaustion was the best thing. When he was exhausted his thoughts did not wander to Laura, or to the strange dreams, or to things that were not and could not be. He would return home from walking, and sleep without difficulty and without dreaming.
page 370:
"... I was talking about you."
"I'm alive," said Shadow, "I'm not dead. Remember?"
"You're not dead," [Laura] said. "But I'm not sure that you're alive, either. Not really."
page 393-4:
"It's not easy to believe."
"I," [Sam] told him, "can believe anything. You have no idea what I can believe."
"Really?"
"I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody know if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen—I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men a re just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in move theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it." She stopped, out of breath.
Shadow almost took his hands off the wheel to applaud. Instead he said. "Okay. So if I tell you what I've learned you won't think that I'm a nut."
"Maybe," she said. "Try me."
page 396:
They were standing on the sidewalk outside the Buck Stops Here and Sam stopped. She looked up at Shadow, and her breath hung on the night air like a faint cloud. She said, "Just tell me you're one of the good guys."
"I can't," said Shadow. "I wish I could. But I'm doing my best."
page 480-1:
"We are on our way to the Hall of the Dead. I requested that I be the one to come for you."
"Why?"
"You were a hard worker. Why not?"
"Because …" Shadow marshaled his thoughts. "Because I never believed in you. Because I don't know much about Egyptian mythology. Because I didn't expect this. What happened to St. Peter and the Pearly Gates?"
The long-beaked white head shook from side to side, gravely. "It doesn't matter that you didn't believe in us," said Mr. Ibis. "We believed in you."
Chapter 19 Epigraph, page 545:
One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless.
The tale is the map that is the territory.
You must remember this.—from the Notebooks of Mr. Ibis
page 585:
He sat down on a grassy bank and looked at the city that surrounded him, and though, one day he would have to go home. And one day he would have to make a home to go back to. He wondered whether home was a thing that happened to a place after a while, or if it was something that you found in the end, if you simply walked and waited and willed it long enough.