Emily M’s Reviews > Acceptance > Status Update

“The biologist looks at you like you’re an opponent, not the person who can send her where she so obviously wants to go. You note again…That she has a kind of self possession that comes not just from knowing who she is but from knowing that, if it comes down to it, she needs no one. Some professionals might diagnose that as a disorder, but in the biologist it comes across as an absolute and unbending clarity.”

“‘I don’t think we’re looking at a plant,’ Whitby says, tentative…‘ Then why are we SEEING a plant, Whitby?…Why are we seeing a plant that looks like a plant…doing plant things, like photosynthesis…that’s going to be a problem, don’t you think? Having to reassert that things we think are the things they are actually are in fact the things they are and not SOME OTHER THING ENTIRELY.’”

“But Ghost Bird didn’t think those messages were being received. Another way people were bound by their own view of consciousness. What if an infection was a message, a brightness a kind of symphony?…Having to reach for such banal answers…because human beings couldn’t even put themselves in the mind of a…whale or a bumblebee. Did she want to ally herself to such a lack, and did she have a choice?”

“This beast should have been a dolphin with an uncanny eye, a wild boar that acted as if it were new to its body…But LOOKED like a mistake, a misfire by an Area X that had assimilated so much so beautifully…To disappear into the coastline…or the marshes, did not really disturb me…But this did - this blind, relentless questing.”

“‘What script are you running off of? Central or the L-word?’ ‘The L-word?’ Absurd thoughts. Lie? Lighthouse? Lesbian? Then he realized she meant Lowry. ‘Neither. I cut off hypnotic suggestion. I freed myself.’ Not sure he believed that.”

"Silence is the best response. Central sees the sophisticated version of Lowry. You see the dregs, whatever he can get away with. 'You've nothing to say to me, then. Nothing?...' 'I turned in my report.' He's half up out of his seat at that, but you don't move at all. Even at the age of nine on the forgotten coast you knew better than to run from a bear or wild dog. You stand your ground...Maybe even growl."

Dang, Saul’s dream! IDK if he’s sorta seeing the future, or somehow communicating with the probably-alien thing or what, but:
“When he woke up, he was sitting in a chair outside the lighthouse…The words still lived inside of him … Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms”

Ghost Bird re. Biologist
“I’m not her. She’s not me. Do you know what I’d say if I came face to face with her?…I’d tell her, ‘You made a lot of fucking mistakes…and yet I love you. You’re a mess and a revelation, but I can’t be any of that. All I can do is work things out myself.’ And then, knowing her, she’d probably look at me funny and try to take a tissue sample from me.” 😂

“‘How can you be so cheerful?’ [Control]’d asked [Ghost Bird], after she had noted their depleted food, water, in an energetic way, then pointed out a kind of sparrow she said was extinct in the wider world, an almost religious ecstasy animating her voice. ‘Because I’m alive…Because I’m walking through wilderness on a beautiful day.’.. a sideways glance he took to mean that she wondered if he was holding together.”

“Bodies could be beacons, too, Saul knew. A lighthouse was a fixed beacon for a fixed purpose; a person was a moving one. But people still emanated light in their way…opened up so they became a brightness, or they went dark. They turned their light inward sometimes…because they had no choice.”