Corvus

Better chaos than slow suffocation.

In God’s eyes whatever will happen has already ended.

Surely God wouldn’t mind people pretending life is better, even if it involves fictional pork.

When two people form a relationship online, it isn’t a fiction based on real life, it’s real life based on a fiction.

Alif found himself succumbing to the silence of the place, a quiet so open and broad that it seemed almost to roar, as though it was not silence at all but music in some ancient inaudible key.

“Belief,” said the man. “It doesn’t mean the same thing it used to, not for you. You have unlearned the hidden half of the world.”

Wonder and awe have gone out of your religions. You are prepared to accept the irrational, but not the transcendent.

I was afraid you’d turn into one of those literary types who say books can change the world when they’re feeling good about themselves and it’s only a book when anybody challenges them.

Alif understood her desire for secrecy. He had spent so much time cloaked behind his screen name, a mere letter of the alphabet, that he no longer thought of himself as anything but an alif—a straight line, a wall.

He, on the other hand, could do nothing but fall in love with a face he had never seen.