American Gods by Neil Gaiman

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这本书一年前曾经打开看过，因为名气很大，获得了02年雨果奖和星云奖。「三体」也才获星云奖提名，获得雨果奖。我想着如果这个奖项比「三体」还大，那是不是意味着应该也好看。而且那时候是剧荒，本打算看剧，但是我又坐不下来；要不就看youtube里面的简介吧。打算点开之前，我劝住自己，这么好的机会不打算看看书尝试一下吗？于是就又拿起这本书来看，前后只在上下班路上看，花了1个月时间，是的算好长了，因为我看的上一本书「Project Holy Mary」只用了一个周末。

书是挺好看的，但没有可比性。我是个科幻迷，但这本书是个奇幻小说。所以，不要在这里期待会有什么科技、外星人之类的故事。很难持久看下去，如果没有耐心或者是网文爱好者。故事讲得非常慢，只能在和各个人物交谈过程中，才能慢慢揭露出美国众神的背景和面目。其实神也像人，人为了钱，神为了一根香；神把人身上所有的优缺点全部放大了。整本书反转还不多，但是到反转的时候，令我毛骨悚然。作者在结束时候，把开篇的每一个大坑都慢慢填上了。主人公Shadow就让我想起我以前在越南旅游时候，问同座车上的老外能不能一起搭伙玩时，回答我you can if you want的那个家伙。Shadow总会让人以为是很暴力，而实际上内心是一个无比温暖的人，对谁都恨不起来；对什么东西都无所谓。为了救自己老板，把自己生命献祭出去。复活后，也不知道是不是在死亡之地拿到的线索，就跳入湖中去找被献祭的尸体，即使这意味着会淹死。开篇答应了一个神在众神之战后过来让他用锤子敲自己脑袋，正常的人事后肯定都跑远远的，他也带着还愿的心态竟然也回去了。生命在他手上，感觉只是郭靖手中的汗血宝马，你喜欢，你就拿去吧。我没那么care。故事最后也没有说，但我觉得他自己也成了类神。

而Wednesday作为Shadow的生父，只在后半部分才能看出这个身份。作者让我们觉得他们一开始打的战是无法避免的，是新神和旧神的纷争。实际上战确实无法避免，但是原因却是更简单，Wednesday饿了，需要战争。作为Odin的分身，Wednesday活得够长，认识的神够多，世态炎凉也了解得够多。也正是因为这些，美国众神被他玩弄在手掌上。

Odin在德语中叫Woden，Odin's Day又叫Woden's Day, 念久了就变成了Wednesday了。

英文文字里面总是会说到一些nobody, nowhere啥的。但是在这本书中，所有的Nobody出现时候，我都可以很顺畅地把这想成一个名字叫Nobody的神，代入进去还很顺畅。也许这正是作者希望我们这么想。

I do not grant wishes.

书中突然插入一个短篇，看了让人感觉插入很奇怪，看完很有意思。Salim是Oman的销售，被派到纽约来卖厂里的工艺品。来了一个礼拜，啥也卖不出去。一个雨天，打了个的士，居然碰到一个God，过劳工作了30个小时。离开时给了20刀，告诉了hotel房间号码（哦，原来是这个暗示）。然后他们就make out了，是的就是这么秃然，这么gay里gay气的。第二天醒来时候，God把他所有的东西都偷走了。我以为这就是纽约吧。我想错了，God给他留下了出租车司机的身份。不知道为啥，我都替salim感到解脱。尽管God一直强调，I don't grant wishes. 呵呵，美国众神。

这本书开始好看了。

Wednesday在餐厅里讲了两个骗子的游戏。第一个是小提琴手的游戏，一人吃饭结账忘记带钱包，抵押了随身的小提琴外出取钱；第二人经过时候留下一句小提琴很值钱就离开了。等小提琴手回来会钞时候，贪婪的店主主动说要买小提琴，小提琴手还能扭捏一番提个价卖掉，每个人都皆大欢喜。第二个则是珠宝店的游戏，有人到珠宝店买最贵的珠宝，用沾了污渍的真钞支付，店家还把钱送到银行去鉴定。买定离手后，买家在出门时候被警察拿住，进来说他是骗子，店家还很高兴地挽回损失了。除了，警察留下一张清单，把钱和珠宝作为证据提走了。
能获得星云奖都是好书，看不下来是因为还没看进去。

Mr. Nancy 还记得吗？他鼓动了一整船的奴隶闹事，因此而死的奴隶就都是他的献祭。他是以7脚的蜘蛛作为原形现身的。那个奴隶的故事，看下来也是让人很莫名其妙的感动。一对双胞胎，哥哥和妹妹被奴隶船掠走，在市场卖出后两人就再也没有见过面了。哥哥在海地种庄稼，把非洲的神召唤而来，成功地带领奴隶进行反叛，失去了手臂。妹妹在路易斯安那州变成了神婆，神神叨叨，两人对同一个神的信仰把他们联系起来，在妹妹将死的那一刻，看见了失去了手的哥哥。

为何影子这么重要？

书中只点明影子是奥丁的儿子。而在电视的剧情里，影子的母亲还是非洲奥鲁巴神系的代表。影子是联系北欧诸神和非洲诸神的纽带，他自己就是一个半神。

为何这本书评价很高？

因为它建立了一个体系，就像乔治RR马丁设立的 A Song of Ice and Fire 的体系。这里每个事物、人物都是在体系里面服务的，全都能圆起来。

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After a while, a rib of sand beneath it was washed away and it tumbled over into a hollow, where it lodged among the swirling, muddy water. By nightfall, the lower half of the casing was already embedded in silt. By the following morning, the hollow had disappeared. Just one arm of the bracelet remained, standing up out of the sand below the rippling surface. The arm bore an inscription, which, if translated, would have read: KORIEL.

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  • 您在位置 #1510-1513的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月1日星期四 下午5:10:31

The two Zoryas nodded gravely. “Such a pity,” said Zorya Vechernyaya. “In my fortune for you, I should have said you would have a long life and a happy one, with many children.” “That is why you are a good fortune-teller,” said Zorya Utrennyaya. She looked sleepy, as if it were an effort for her to be up so late. “You tell the best lies.”

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  • 您在位置 #1621-1621的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月1日星期四 下午5:24:14

A narrow shaft of sunlight streamed in through the window, making the dust motes dance.

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  • 您在位置 #1647-1647的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月1日星期四 下午5:43:25

scullery.

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  • 您在位置 #1652-1652的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月1日星期四 下午5:44:55

squire’s

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  • 您在位置 #1772-1774的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月1日星期四 下午9:46:36

Freckled it was, and although Essie’s eyesight was going she could see each orange hair on the back of his hand, glowing golden in the afternoon sunlight. She bit her lip. Then, hesitantly, she placed her blue-knotted hand in his. She was still warm when they found her, although the life had fled her body and only half the peas were shelled.

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  • 您在位置 #1815-1816的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月1日星期四 下午10:08:41

“That,” said Wednesday, driving off, “is the eternal folly of man. To be chasing after the sweet flesh, without realizing that it is simply a pretty cover for the bones. Worm food. At night, you’re rubbing yourself against worm food. No offense meant.”

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  • 您在位置 #2060-2060的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月2日星期五 下午6:34:22

“A man’s fortune is his own affair,” said Wednesday, stiffly. “I would not ask to see yours.”

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  • 您在位置 #2062-2063的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月2日星期五 下午6:34:43

EVERY ENDING IS A NEW BEGINNING. YOUR LUCKY NUMBER IS NONE. YOUR LUCKY COLOR IS DEAD. Motto: LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON.

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  • 您在位置 #2135-2137的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月2日星期五 下午6:48:57

“Let me tell you somethin’,” said Mr. Nancy. “It can be a long time between meals. Someone offers you food, you say yes. I’m no longer young as I was, but I can tell you this, you never say no to the opportunity to piss, to eat, or to get half an hour’s shut-eye. You follow me?”

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  • 您在位置 #2181-2181的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月3日星期六 下午1:39:46

carousel.

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  • 您在位置 #2567-2568的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月3日星期六 下午2:40:55

want to feel blood moving through me—hot, and salty, and real. It’s weird, you don’t think you can feel it, the blood, but believe me, when it stops flowing, you’ll know.”

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  • 您在位置 #2605-2605的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月3日星期六 下午2:46:09

people could argue about whether he was crazy or not while he went to the chair…

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  • 您在位置 #2699-2699的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月12日星期一 上午9:03:38

mead.”

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  • 您在位置 #2848-2851的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月13日星期二 上午8:49:19

As soon as they say Odin’s name, the reed transforms into a spear and stabs the guy in the side, the calf intestines become a thick rope, the branch becomes a bough of a tree, and the tree pulls up, and the ground drops away, and the king is left hanging there to die with a wound in his side and his face going black. End of story. White people have some fucked-up gods, Mister Shadow.”

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  • 您在位置 #2895-2896的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月13日星期二 上午8:56:45

“Like the rest of your life is sane? Give me a fucking break.”

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  • 您在位置 #3140-3143的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月13日星期二 下午11:18:51

The taxi driver comes out of the shower, wet, with a towel wrapped about his mid-section. He is not wearing his sunglasses, and in the dim room his eyes burn with scarlet flames. Salim blinks back tears. “I wish you could see what I see,” he says. “I do not grant wishes,” whispers the ifrit, dropping his towel and pushing Salim gently, but irresistibly, down onto the bed.

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  • 您在位置 #3160-3160的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月13日星期二 下午11:20:42

“I do not grant wishes,” says Salim, tasting the way the words shape themselves in his mouth.

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  • 您在位置 #3173-3175的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月14日星期三 上午8:40:02

The week before Christmas is often a quiet one in a funeral parlor, Shadow learned, over supper. Mr. Ibis explained it to him. “The lingering ones are holding on for one final Christmas,”

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  • 您在位置 #3189-3193的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月14日星期三 上午8:44:43

But in all branches of industry—and death is an industry, my young friend, make no mistake about that—one makes one’s money from operating in bulk, from buying in quantity, from centralizing one’s operations. It’s not pretty, but it’s true. Trouble is, no one wants to know that their loved ones are traveling in a cooler-van to some big old converted warehouse where they may have twenty, fifty, a hundred cadavers on the go. No, sir. Folks want to think they’re going to a family concern, somewhere they’ll be treated with respect by someone who’ll tip his hat to them if he sees them in the street.”

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  • 您在位置 #3196-3196的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月14日星期三 上午8:45:55

stoop.

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  • 您在位置 #3196-3199的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月14日星期三 上午8:46:36

“So when the big companies come in they buy the name of the company, they pay the funeral directors to stay on, they create the apparency of diversity. But that is merely the tip of the gravestone. In reality, they are as local as Burger King. Now, for our own reasons, we are truly an independent. We do all our own embalming, and it’s the finest embalming in the country,

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  • 您在位置 #3216-3219的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月14日星期三 上午8:50:46

“How was your coffee-cake?” asked the waitress, refilling their coffees. “Best I ever had,” said Mr. Ibis. “You give my best to your ma.” “I’ll do that,” she said, and bustled away. “You don’t want to ask after the health of anyone, if you’re a funeral director. They think maybe you’re scouting for business,”

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  • 您在位置 #3243-3244的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月14日星期三 上午8:54:25

which is where I feel sorry for them, for as soon as something becomes impossible it slipslides out of belief entirely,

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  • 您在位置 #3361-3362的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月14日星期三 下午10:45:59

He scratched the side of his nose, was actually relieved when his reflection did the same.

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  • 您在位置 #3634-3635的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月15日星期四 上午8:55:15

It was the last time Shadow saw Mad Sweeney alive.

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  • 您在位置 #3662-3663的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月15日星期四 下午6:38:07

He squatted down and looked at the bottle in Mad Sweeney’s lap. Jameson Irish whiskey: a twenty-dollar ticket out of this place.

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  • 您在位置 #3684-3685的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月15日星期四 下午6:42:53

“I never killed you, Mad Sweeney,” said Shadow. It’s twenty dollars, he thought, for a ticket out of here. “It was the drink and the cold killed you, not me.”

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  • 您在位置 #3773-3774的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月15日星期四 下午10:07:49

Shadow realized it had only been a temporary reprieve, his time in the house of the dead; and already it was beginning to feel like something that happened to somebody else, a long time ago.

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  • 您在位置 #3821-3821的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月15日星期四 下午10:23:26

fiddle

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  • 您在位置 #3977-3979的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月16日星期五 上午8:44:16

“This land was brought up from the depths of the ocean by a diver,” said the fire. “It was spun from its own substance by a spider. It was shat by a raven. It is the body of a fallen father, whose bones are mountains, whose eyes are lakes.

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  • 您在位置 #4027-4027的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月16日星期五 上午8:52:59

pasty

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  • 您在位置 #4059-4061的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月16日星期五 下午6:24:48

He was close enough that Shadow could see his face: old but contented, the face of a man who had sipped life’s vinegar and found it, by and large, to be mostly whiskey, and good whiskey at that.

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  • 您在位置 #4104-4106的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月16日星期五 下午10:10:50

You do much ice-fishing, Mr. Ainsel?” “Never.” “Best thing a man can do. It’s not the fish you catch, it’s the peace of mind that you take home at the end of the day.” “I’ll

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  • 您在位置 #4121-4121的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月16日星期五 下午10:15:04

hide

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  • 您在位置 #4131-4133的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月16日星期五 下午10:17:58

The old man scratched his chin. “Tell you what,” he said. “Sometime in the next week or so I’ll come by and sell you some tickets. For our raffle. Charity. For now, young man, you can be getting on to bed.”

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  • 您在位置 #4255-4256的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月17日星期六 下午1:45:23

This was beyond a joke. This had moved beyond foolishness, slipped over the line into genuine twenty-four-karat Jesus-Christ-I-fucked-up-big-time territory.

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  • 您在位置 #4635-4635的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月18日星期日 上午12:41:10

And America was so damn big that with so many people there was always bound to be somebody.

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  • 您在位置 #4645-4645的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月18日星期日 上午12:43:00

Mead.”

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  • 您在位置 #4863-4864的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月18日星期日 下午6:39:15

It was a trick he had found in Perplexing Parlour Illusions but the instructions were infuriating, unhelpful, and vague. Phrases like “then vanish the penny in the usual way” occurred every sentence or so.

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  • 您在位置 #4937-4939的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月18日星期日 下午9:42:15

“Indeed it is. They may share certain cultural signifiers—money, a federal government, entertainment; it’s the same land, obviously—but the only things that give it the illusion of being one country are the green-back, The Tonight Show, and McDonald’s.”

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  • 您在位置 #5060-5060的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月19日星期一 上午8:54:50

gonorrhea,”

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  • 您在位置 #5202-5204的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月20日星期二 上午8:43:54

We need individual stories. Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, “casualties may rise to a million.” With individual stories, the statistics become people—but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless.

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  • 您在位置 #5275-5276的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月20日星期二 下午6:56:25

some of the captives who were dropped over the side had not yet died, but the green chill of the ocean cooled their final fever and they went down flailing, choking, lost.

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  • 您在位置 #5352-5354的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月20日星期二 下午8:58:20

She had been beautiful for a while. Then the years of pain had taken their toll, and she was no longer beautiful. Her face was lined, and there was too much pain in those brown eyes.

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  • 您在位置 #5443-5443的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月20日星期二 下午9:51:43

“Stay, stay a while,” she whispered. “I will be there. I will be with you soon.”

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  • 您在位置 #5774-5774的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月21日星期三 上午12:03:47

brooding.

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  • 您在位置 #5815-5817的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月21日星期三 上午8:53:54

Marguerite Olsen screwed the top back onto the gallon jug. “I hope she’s dead,” she said, matter-of-factly. Shadow was shocked. “Why?” “Because the alternatives are worse.”

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  • 您在位置 #5831-5834的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月21日星期三 上午9:03:08

when he thought, his mind went to places he could not control, places that made him feel uncomfortable. Exhaustion was the best thing. When he was exhausted, his thoughts did not wander to Laura, or to the strange dreams, or to things that were not and could not be. He would return home from walking, and sleep without difficulty and without dreaming.

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  • 您在位置 #5860-5861的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月21日星期三 上午9:06:33

“Who’s there?” but there was no reply, only a sudden silence and then the faraway sound of laughter, so faint he was not certain he was not imagining it.

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  • 您在位置 #5907-5908的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月21日星期三 下午6:47:36

He was scared, and what scared him was the normality of the moment.

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  • 您在位置 #5973-5973的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月21日星期三 下午6:54:41

girder

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  • 您在位置 #5997-5998的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月21日星期三 下午11:21:13

She is proud that she owes nothing to anyone. The other girls on the street, they have pimps, they have habits, they have children, they have people who take what they make. Not her.

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  • 您在位置 #6222-6222的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月23日星期五 上午8:46:05

centennial

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  • 您在位置 #6340-6341的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月23日星期五 下午6:33:03

I believe that life is a game, life is a cruel joke and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.”

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  • 您在位置 #6390-6392的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月23日星期五 下午6:38:19

It was a strange kiss, Shadow thought, as her lips pressed against his: it wasn’t intended for him. It was for the other people in the bar, to let them know that she had picked sides. It was a flag-waving kiss. Even as she kissed him, he became certain that she didn’t even like him—well, not like that.

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  • 您在位置 #6393-6396的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月23日星期五 下午6:45:16

Still, there was a tale he had read once, long ago, as a small boy: the story of a traveler who had slipped down a cliff, with man-eating tigers above him and a lethal fall below him, who managed to stop his fall halfway down the side of the cliff, holding on for dear life. There was a clump of strawberries beside him, and certain death above him and below. What should he do? went the question. And the reply was, Eat the strawberries. The story had never made any sense to him as a boy. It did now.

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  • 您在位置 #6500-6501的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午3:27:08

“Yes. Not really. Kinda. They’re sending someone up from Milwaukee to collect you.

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  • 您在位置 #6558-6559的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午3:34:52

think your promises were made to be broken and your oaths to be forsworn. But I will keep my word.”

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  • 您在位置 #6565-6565的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午3:35:59

The glint left a phosphor-dot after-image as he moved.

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  • 您在位置 #6585-6585的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午3:41:40

He wondered if he’d get to be one of those guys who got life for something they didn’t do.

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  • 您在位置 #6592-6594的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午3:43:04

“It stinks in here.” “Tell me about it.” “Okay. Folk are here to pick you up. Seems you’re a matter of national security. You know that?”

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  • 您在位置 #6631-6634的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午4:19:38

“Wednesday,” said Shadow. “Is he really dead? This isn’t some kind of trick is it?” He realized that he had been holding on to some kind of hope, foolish though it was. But the expression on Nancy’s face told him all he needed to know, and the hope was gone.

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  • 您在位置 #6794-6798的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午4:41:47

“Aren’t you worried about lung cancer?” he said. “I am cancer,” said Czernobog. “I do not frighten myself.” He chuckled, and then the chuckle became a wheeze and the wheeze turned into a cough. Nancy spoke. “Folk like us don’t get cancer. We don’t get arteriosclerosis or Parkinson’s disease or syphilis. We’re kind of hard to kill.”

() ()

  • 您在位置 #6811-6813的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午4:43:40

“They lie,” said Czernobog. “They want to lure us in, and then they will kill us. What they did to Wednesday. Is what I always used to do,” he added, with gloomy pride. “Promise them anything, but do what you

() ()

  • 您在位置 #6838-6840的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午5:13:48

Then they waited for the tourists and the holidaymakers to come: all the people who wanted to tell the world they’d been at the center of America, and marveled, and prayed. The tourists did not come. Nobody came.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #6869-6869的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午5:18:29

gesticulating.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #6891-6891的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午5:21:39

“Profane,”

() ()

  • 您在位置 #6910-6910的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午5:25:08

coiffed.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #6966-6967的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午5:42:19

“It is only a gesture,” he said, turning back to Shadow. “But gestures mean everything.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #6971-6971的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午5:43:13

rasp,

() ()

  • 您在位置 #6974-6975的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午5:43:58

gallows,

() ()

  • 您在位置 #6981-6982的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午5:45:31

“Three days on the tree, three days in the underworld, three days to find my way back.”

() ()

  • 您在位置 #6999-7000的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午5:56:09

Shadow realized he wanted to hit the kid. He’d wanted to hit him since the kid had his goons hurt him in the limo, after Laura’s funeral.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #7025-7026的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午6:03:16

Brahma creates, Vishnu preserves, Shiva destroys, and the ground is clear for Brahma to create once more.”

() ()

  • 您在位置 #7078-7079的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午6:10:24

“This place is turning into Grand Central Station,” said Shadow. “Okay, so I guess you’re here to offer me the freedom of the Internet if I come over to your side of the fence. Right?”

() ()

  • 您在位置 #7104-7106的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午6:15:45

Prison friendships are good things: they get you through bad places and through dark times. But a prison friendship ends at the prison gates, and a prison friend who reappears in your life is at best a mixed blessing.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #7117-7118的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午6:17:17

“And then one day they forget about you, and they don’t believe in you, and they don’t sacrifice, and they don’t care, and the next thing you know you’re running a three-card monte game on the corner of Broadway

() ()

  • 您在位置 #7114-7115的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午6:17:22

It’s about focus. It’s about being you, but the you that people believe in. It’s about being the concentrated, magnified essence of you. It’s about becoming thunder, or the power of a running horse, or wisdom.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #7127-7128的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午6:18:23

With him gone, the rest of them are going to have to face up to the facts: it’s change or die, evolve or perish. I’m all for evolution—it’s the old change-or-die game. He’s dead. War’s

() ()

  • 您在位置 #7135-7137的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午6:19:51

“You’re an investment,” said Loki. “You were important to us because you were important to Wednesday. As for the why of it…I don’t think any of us know. He did. He’s dead. Just another one of life’s little mysteries.”

() ()

  • 您在位置 #7202-7204的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午6:36:07

You work for me. You protect me. You help me. You transport me from place to place. You investigate, from time to time—go places and ask questions for me. You run errands. In an emergency, but only in an emergency, you hurt people who need to be hurt. In the unlikely event of my death, you will hold my vigil…

() ()

  • 您在位置 #7202-7202的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午6:36:13

mead

() ()

  • 您在位置 #7233-7233的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午6:39:19

roundabout.”

() ()

  • 您在位置 #7259-7260的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午6:41:46

kids—they figure they know everythin’, and you can’t teach them nothin’ but the hard way.”

() ()

  • 您在位置 #7281-7281的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午6:46:54

meadowland.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #7300-7301的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午6:50:03

They were sharing a cigarette, and they smoked it down to the filter before one of them stubbed it out against a root. Czernobog

() ()

  • 您在位置 #7303-7303的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午6:50:34

trunk.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #7336-7337的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午6:58:08

The women placed the body, wrapped in its motel-sheet shroud, at the foot of the tree, and they left him there. They left him there alone.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #7353-7354的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午6:59:36

The chill of the afternoon on his naked skin made him shiver, made his flesh prickle and goose.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #7359-7360的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午7:00:07

It’s easy, there’s a trick to it, you do it or you die.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #7358-7360的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午7:00:13

It’s easy, there’s a trick to it, you do it or you die. It’s easy, there’s a trick to it, you do it or you die. It’s easy, there’s a trick to it, you do it or you die.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #7368-7370的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午7:02:21

In close-up, he learned, a squirrel looks a lot less cute than it does from a distance. The creature was rat-like, and dangerous, not sweet or charming. And its teeth looked sharp. He hoped that it would not perceive him as a threat, or as a food source. He did not think that squirrels were carnivorous…but then, so many things he had not thought had turned out to be so…

() ()

  • 您在位置 #7381-7382的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午7:05:01

“Yes. In the trunk. You will forget many things. You will give many things away. You will lose many things. But do not lose this.”

() ()

  • 您在位置 #7382-7386的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午7:05:51

And then the rains began, and Shadow was awake once more. He tumbled, shivering and wet, from deep sleep to wakefulness in moments. The shivering intensified, until it scared Shadow: he was shivering more violently than he had ever imagined possible, a series of convulsive shudders which built upon each other. He willed himself to stop shaking, but still he shivered, his teeth banging together, his limbs twitching and jerking beyond his control. There was real pain there, too, a deep, knife-like pain that covered his body with tiny, invisible wounds, intimate and unbearable.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #7409-7410的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午7:10:54

Sometimes he imagined that he had stopped breathing, that his heart had ceased to beat. Then he would hold his breath until he could hear his heart pounding an ocean in his ears and he was forced to suck air like a diver surfacing from the depths.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #7472-7472的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午7:23:32

talons.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #7495-7495的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午8:53:43

bleak

() ()

  • 您在位置 #7581-7581的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午9:05:07

nobody was talking. And nobody was.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #7584-7585的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月24日星期六 下午9:05:15

Nobody talked about the money. Nobody even mentioned Laura, and that was all that Shadow had wanted.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #7712-7712的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月26日星期一 上午9:07:44

reproachfully

() ()

  • 您在位置 #7723-7725的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月26日星期一 上午9:09:23

“Are you scared?” asked Mr. Ibis. “Not really.” “Well, try to cultivate the emotions of true awe and spiritual terror, as we walk. They are the appropriate feelings for the situation at hand.”

() ()

  • 您在位置 #7751-7752的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月26日星期一 上午9:13:01

“Not only are there no happy endings,” she told him. “There aren’t even any endings.”

() ()

  • 您在位置 #7767-7768的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月26日星期一 上午9:14:32

Shadow accepted it, completely and without reservation, and he walked through the door into nothing with a strange fierce

() ()

  • 您在位置 #7767-7768的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月26日星期一 上午9:14:38

Shadow accepted it, completely and without reservation, and he walked through the door into nothing with a strange fierce joy.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #7799-7800的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月26日星期一 下午6:45:30

When they leave, they leave bemused, uncertain of why they came, of what they have seen, of whether they had a good time or not.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #7855-7855的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月26日星期一 下午6:56:34

dilapidated

() ()

  • 您在位置 #7896-7898的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月26日星期一 下午7:03:11

When Laura woke in the empty farmhouse room, she was shivering, and her breath actually steamed in the morning air. There was a scrape on the back of her hand, and a wet smear on the scrape, the red-orange of fresh blood.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #7934-7935的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月27日星期二 上午8:39:18

“I’m too old for this shit,” he said aloud, relishing the movie-star world-weariness of the line.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #7937-7938的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月27日星期二 上午8:39:52

Anyway, it was only when you got down to the joes on the street that anyone seemed to assume there was a difference.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #7941-7943的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月27日星期二 上午8:42:15

It was like cooking a frog, he thought. You put the frog in the water, and then you turn on the heat. And by the time the frog notices that there’s anything wrong, it’s already been cooked. The world in which he worked was all too weird. There was no solid ground beneath his feet; the water in the pot was bubbling fiercely.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #7951-7952的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月27日星期二 上午8:43:39

Mr. Town had noticed this on several occasions. It had amused him to play chauffeur, in Kansas, after all.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #7975-7976的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月27日星期二 上午8:48:06

Then he thought, First sign of madness. Talking to yourself.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #8142-8142的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月29日星期四 上午8:56:52

“While we can wait, we should wait.”

() ()

  • 您在位置 #8158-8160的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月29日星期四 上午9:00:36

Even Nothing cannot last forever. He might have been there, been Nowhere, for ten minutes or for ten thousand years. It made no difference. Time was an idea for which he no longer had any need.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #8216-8217的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月30日星期五 下午6:54:45

This is wild rice country. Moose country. What I’m trying to say is that America is like that. It’s not good growing country for gods. They don’t grow well here. They’re like avocados trying to grow in wild rice country.”

() ()

  • 您在位置 #8218-8218的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月30日星期五 下午6:54:58

“They may not grow well,” said Shadow, remembering, “but they’re going to war.”

() ()

  • 您在位置 #8233-8235的标注 | 添加于 2021年7月30日星期五 下午6:57:01

“There are a lot of good places,” said Whiskey Jack. “That’s kind of the point. Listen, gods die when they are forgotten. People too. But the land’s still here. The good places, and the bad. The land isn’t going anywhere. And neither am I.”

() ()

  • 您在位置 #8399-8399的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月2日星期一 上午9:02:11

if she was indeed a walking corpse, she was freshly dead.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #8417-8417的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月2日星期一 上午9:04:22

mistletoe.”

() ()

  • 您在位置 #8458-8459的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月3日星期二 上午8:38:45

She did not recognize the words he spoke, nor the language he said them in. She pushed the shaft of the spear further in, forcing it through her body, into and through his.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #8527-8528的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月3日星期二 上午8:49:33

His voice was faint—not actually quiet, but there was a quality to it that made Shadow think of an old radio not quite tuned in to a distant station.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #8530-8534的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月3日星期二 上午8:50:28

“No,” said Shadow. “You were the Judas Goat.” The wraith-shape in the shadows swirled and shifted. “Not at all. That implies that I was betraying the old gods for the new. Which was not what we were doing.” “Not at all,” whispered Loki. “I can see that,” said Shadow. “You two weren’t betraying either side. You were betraying both sides.” “I guess we were at that,” said Wednesday. He sounded pleased with himself.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #8574-8576的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月4日星期三 上午8:55:59

It was like pushing through a membrane, like plunging up from deep water into air. With one step he had moved from the tourist path on the mountain to… To somewhere real. He was Backstage.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #8583-8585的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月4日星期三 上午8:56:50

It was lightning, Shadow realized. Lightning held in one frozen moment that stretched into forever. The light it cast was harsh and unforgiving: it washed out faces, hollowed eyes into dark pits.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #8603-8604的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月4日星期三 下午7:35:30

They were afraid that unless they kept pace with a changing world, unless they remade and redrew and rebuilt the world in their image, their time would already be over.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #8604-8605的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月4日星期三 下午7:35:47

Each side faced the other with bravery. To each side, the opposition were the demons, the monsters, the damned.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #8629-8631的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月4日星期三 下午7:40:12

“The battle you’re here to fight isn’t something that any of you can win or lose. The winning and the losing are unimportant to him, to them. What matters is that enough of you die. Each of you that falls in battle gives him power. Every one of you that dies, feeds him. Do you understand?”

() ()

  • 您在位置 #8673-8673的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月4日星期三 下午7:45:09

“I guess,” he said. “I know one way, anyway.”

() ()

  • 您在位置 #8702-8702的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月5日星期四 上午8:37:18

“Call no man happy until he is dead. Herodotus.”

() ()

  • 您在位置 #8704-8705的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月5日星期四 上午8:37:46

“The Herodotus thing. It doesn’t mean that the dead are happy,” said Shadow. “It means that you can’t judge the shape of someone’s life until it’s over and done.”

() ()

  • 您在位置 #8722-8722的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月5日星期四 上午8:41:01

rasping.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #8883-8885的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月6日星期五 下午6:18:06

Each one, he knew, without any question, had a dead child in the trunk. There were scores of them down there. Each had sat out on the ice, in front of the eyes of the world, all through the cold winter. Each had tumbled into the cold waters of the lake, when the winter was done.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #8896-8898的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月6日星期五 下午6:20:01

There was a rushing sensation but no sense of up, no sense of down, and he was choking and the pain in his chest and in his head was too much to bear, so that he was certain that he was going to have to inhale, to breathe in the cold water, to die. And then his head hit something solid.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #8934-8939的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月6日星期五 下午6:29:28

“Dumbest thing you can do with a fellow freezing to death is to put him in front of a fire. The second-dumbest thing you can do is to wrap him in blankets—especially if he’s in cold wet clothes already. Blankets insulate him—keep the cold in. The third-dumbest thing—and this is my private opinion—is to take the fellow’s blood out, warm it up, and put it back. That’s what doctors do these days. Complicated, expensive. Dumb.” The voice was coming from above and behind his head. “The smartest, quickest thing you can do is what sailors have done to men overboard for hundreds of years. You put the fellow in hot water. Not too hot. Just hot. Now, just so you know, you were basically dead, when I found you on the ice back there. How are you feeling now, Houdini?”

() ()

  • 您在位置 #8967-8968的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月6日星期五 下午6:44:03

“You did a good thing,” he told Hinzelmann, and the old man beamed all over his goblin face.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #8986-8990的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月6日星期五 下午6:46:29

Hinzelmann peered at him, surprised. “Yes,” he said. “I made the lake. They were calling it a lake when I got here, but it weren’t nothing more than a spring and a mill-pond and a creek.” He paused. “I figured that this country is hell on my kind of folk. It eats us. I didn’t want to be eaten. So I made a deal. I gave them a lake, and I gave them prosperity…” “And all it cost them was one child every winter.” “Good

() ()

  • 您在位置 #8997-8997的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月6日星期五 下午6:47:49

Nothing happens here that I don’t want to happen.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #9018-9018的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月6日星期五 下午6:50:43

poker

() ()

  • 您在位置 #9209-9210的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月7日星期六 下午2:49:30

He watched them walking away from him down the street, and felt a pang, like a minor chord being played inside him.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #9327-9330的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月7日星期六 下午3:04:03

He sat down on a grassy bank and looked at the city that surrounded him, and thought, one day he would have to go home. And one day he would have to make a home to go back to. He wondered whether home was a thing that happened to a place after a while, or if it was something that you found in the end, if you simply walked and waited and willed it long enough.

() ()

  • 您在位置 #9437-9437的标注 | 添加于 2021年8月7日星期六 下午9:54:12