Finished reading: The Warm Hands of Ghosts A Novel by Katherine Arden 📚

Arden doesn’t miss. It’s her choice of phrases and poetic turns that does it for me. And the stories and plots, of course.

On with the highlighted passages…

This feels timely for a novel about WW1

Do not despair. Endings—they are beginnings too.

Try to understand them. Look at the world now. It’s terrifying, isn’t it? We have flying machines. Phonographs. Moving pictures, even. Everything is changing so fast. Mother’s frightened. In a way, it’s easier to imagine the world’s going to end. At least there’s a certainty to it. End—bam—done. But change—where does change stop?

Give people God’s power—to build ships like islands, or fly like birds, or set fire to the bowels of earth like the devil in his damned pit—it just writes their stupidity larger and larger until they drown the whole world. Our hands get bigger and our spirits shrink.

As does this

The whole world’s made up of systems now. Systems that are too big for any one person to understand or control, or stop. Like the timetables. Alliances. Philosophies. And so now we’re here, even though no one wanted to be.

What is God if not another system?

What happened when the celestial backers of one army encountered those of the other.

It was the poet’s alchemy , to seize the intangible or unspeakable and drag it, real, into the living world.

It was so much easier to hate a man than a system: vast, inhuman, bloodstained.

How do you go on from the end of everything?