John Manuel Arias > Quotes

“But it was bad luck to eat bananas grown from human ashes. They said those hands of bananas would taste real.”
― john manuel arias, Where There Was Fire

“These microcosms of time carved out by uncontrollable laughter… transported them back to a room in which everyone was still together—where there was no such thing as absence. In this elusive, fleeting moment of ebullience, all the world was whole again. Laughter a time machine in which happiness could reconstruct the past, and the present couldn’t do anything about it.”
― John Manuel Arias, Where There Was Fire

“Men confront horror head-on—that is what the last five thousand years of civilization had taught them. They were two little boys with something to prove. To the crab, to the viper. To each other, and to themselves.”
― John Manuel Arias, Crocodilopolis

“That’s what it was like being a man, Seth wanted to say: being an animal and having to pretend that he wasn’t.”
― John Manuel Arias, Crocodilopolis

“Seth had once been powerful, he wanted to explain to passersby. He wanted to grab their cheeks, gaze into their eyes, and allow his history to swallow them like it had swallowed him. The past and its insatiable gullet.”
― John Manuel Arias, Crocodilopolis

“When they brought you to me, that leg looked like a flower. The white, broken bone and its brown inner marrow, the bright red muscle, the yellow fat and your pale skin—all wrapped around each other like petals.”
― John Manuel Arias, Crocodilopolis

“Brothers betray brothers all the time. One might scam the other out of twenty bucks, and the wronged brother might get him kicked out of a holiday party. The rivalry will go on for their entire lifetimes. Most brothers wake up just to get back at each other. It’s a well-established, tedious affair. But the show really gets good when the scale is amplified. When those twenty dollars become twenty thousand, or instead of getting thrown out of a barbecue, one gets his brother exiled from a country.”
― John Manuel Arias, Crocodilopolis