S. / SHIP OF THESEUS - DOUG DORST & J.J. ABRAMS

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 446

 Inside his head, the voices pulse with ancient agonies. This place must have been the site of unimaginable suffering, of hearts and souls and lives stolen from the people that these voices once were.*

*As I write this final note, sitting in the cramped and dusty office of Winged Shoes Press on New York's East 33rd street, it occurs to me that hearts and souls and lives can themselves be sites of unimaginable suffering.

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 443

 "We will thrive as long as you, our valued customers--and yes, we value you, despite your repellence, for you are the providers of grandeur and ease, you are the brandy-drowned ortolans whose bones gloriously lacerate our gums, you are the soft, yielding flesh beneath our thrusting hips--as long as you value power and profits and political gamesmanship over the search for love and serenity, over the lives and the dignity of all (including and especially those who are not you and are not known to you), over calm acceptance of your place as one--just one!--tiny and finite arrangement of molecules in a vast universe... 

 We will thrive... for as long as you choose extraction over creation, as long as you mistake commerce for art and destruction for progress, as long as you remain drunk on the juice that issues from the crush of a thing or place or person. We will thrive as long as you conflate power with influence, primacy with honor, goal with purpose, duty with responsibility, for thus is our business...perpetuated...thus does it hum with ever greater velocity. Our fondest hope is to continue to exploit your toxic dreams and to do so limitlessly, for thus may we claim our prenegotiated percentage of your--and, in many cases, your adversary's--personal infinity."

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 423

I haven't said this before but I've wanted to + now I want to say it all the time:I LOVE YOU.I love you on the page + I love you in the library + in the coffe shop + in the last row of the varsity. I love you here. I love you in negative space--ok, I don't know exactly what that means, but I'm pretty sure it's true-- + I love who you have been + who you'll be. I should say this to you in person, and I'm going to--over + over--but I think I needed to say it here first. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 423

 And there they are: artist and muse, assassin and abettor, two bodies pulled into middle age and beyond, and--most truly--two individuals swallowing their uncertainties, standing and facing each other in underclothes that are in grave need of washing. This is who we are, he thinks, and she nods, even though this time he is certain he has said nothing aloud. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 419

 I keep wishing we could've told her that it was Vaclac, she was in love with Vaclav. And then I remember that it hadn't mattered to her for a long, long time. The love mattered--not the name, not the date, not the facts. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 416 - Filomela's Letter

 I will tell you what matters most... it is love. When you fall in love, friends, let yourself fall. It is my fondest wish that this note finds you both happy, healthy, and falling.

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 411

 He hears the whispers of many thousands of restless souls and discerns the lost woman's voice among them. He listens to her closely, now not even daring to breathe, listens with the most intense concentration he can muster. He charms it upward from the surrounding din, brings it up to his ears until he can make out her words: les caves, les caves, il est dans les caves.

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 407

 At first came the sorts of phrases and images and details and ideas and feelings he has come to expect over the years: orphans and refugees from his forgotten life, and companions from whatever state he'd find himself in at the moment when ink was spilling into the grooves etched by the nib. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 407

 "Is this where I'll sleep?" S. asks. "If you sleep, yes." "What about my old cabin? Below the forecastle?" "That's where I'll be. That's where I've been." "I wrote about you there," S. says. "On the bulkhead. At least, I tried to write about you." "I know." "Can you still read the words?" "No," she says, "but I know them."

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 405

 He wants to sit down at that table, flip the sand glass, and lose himself in a sweet cloud of ink and images--wants it as much as an addict craves his laudanum, his cocaine--

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 394

And the memories? The feeling of being part of a family, the sense-impressions of a child, the minor epiphanies and heartbreaks of a teenager for whom the real world begins to resolve into focus as he spends day after day packing gunpowder into brass casings?... He may not be able to possess those moments, but they are around him, and from time to time they may shine brightly. He can see the stars; he no longer has a need for the constellations. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 388

You can't just leave because I told you my story. It's not fair. Leave later if you want. But please be here now. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 387

 The stairs are uneven, and they creak and groan under his feet as he climbs flight after flight. He ascends slowly, reminding himself to be calm, to conserve energy and focus. (O, for the time when such things were instinctive!)

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 381

We all want to be great--however you define that--and we so often aren't. We're all just in the muck trying to believe we're capable of greatness, but closer to breaking than we want to admit. And we tell ourselves stories--about ourselves, but maybe also all these stories about other people, about characters--as a way to hide from how small we are.

Maybe it's not hiding. Maybe they help us not be so small. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 377

 You can't just whistle and summon sense and order back into your mind. All you can do is button your coat, lace your boots, and trudge though the frigid business of being.

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 376 - Jen's Letter - Pg 3

 He gave me his flashlight, but the batteries died pretty quickly, so for most of that night it was me, alone, in a door factory in a town that wasn't mine, hating my parents and telling myself I wasn't as scared as I knew I was. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 376

 Gradually it dawned on him that no one there was part of anyone else's world. They all occupied the same space but did not occupy it together. Imagine a thousand leaves of tracing paper, each with one person lightly penciled on it, all stacked atop a scene of a frozen city block. A thousand discrete and solitary realities that appear to be occurring in the same location. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 372

You know it wasn't your job to save Griff either, right?

Sometimes. Not always. I'm a little raw right now. Worried I might be losing my shit again. If I am--I don't know--I'm sorry. Sorry, Jen.

Don't apologize. Because then I'll have to apologize for losing mine. 

S. - Ship of Theseus - Pg 367

 Really: we imagine ourselves to be so well-contained, so clearly defined, so individually integrious, yet it takes so little to open us up, to send us spilling outward or to introduce something foreign and toxic.