SA4QE 2017 - Chris Bell - Twitter/Facebook, New Zealand

I haven't 4Qated anything from Soonchild before, so it seemed to good year to change that. I chose the first good, 'complete' quote I could find by riffling through the pages of my copy, which seemed as good a method as any. I like this one and hope you do, too - if you haven't read Soonchild yet, perhaps this quotation will persuade you that 2017 is the year to do it.

“What are World Songs?”
“My father, Go Anywhere, told me about them,” said John, “the same as his father, Whatever Works, told him. The world is made up of ideas that live in the Mind of Things but before the idea comes the song. In these songs are such things as the taste of starlight on the tongue, the colors of the running of the wolf, the sound of the raven’s blackness, the voices of blue shadows on the snow, the never-stopping stillness of sea-smoothed stones, and the memory of ancient rains that filled the oceans. Without those songs there would be no world.”
“I’ve never heard those songs,” said No Problem.
“You’ve heard them but you don’t remember them. These songs are heard only by children in the belly — that’s why they come out into the world — the songs are so powerful and enticing. Once the children have the actual world in front of them they forget the songs, it would be too sad to remember them — the children would die of sadness because the world has so many bad things in it that aren’t in the songs, only soonchildren hear these songs, no one else.”
Russell Hoban, Soonchild, WHAT SOONCHILD TOLD JOHN, page 23-23, Candlewick Press (2012)

Soonchild (Novel, 2012)