Book: American gods. Page 3

You must understand what God is. Magic in this no. You're just you, but this is what people believe. It's like being the concentrated, magnified essence of himself. This is how to become the thunder, or the power of a running horse, or wisdom. You absorb all the faith and become higher, steeper, become something more than human. You kristallizuetsya.
And then the day comes and you forget, you won't believe, you do not bring victims and they don't care about, and you're playing thimbles at the corner of Broadway and Forty-Third.

That's when I most miss you. When you're here. When you're not when you're just a Ghost from the past or a dream about another life, all simple.

I can believe in truth and falsehood, and in such things about which no one knows at all whether this is true or false. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, and Marilyn Monroe, and the Beatles, and Elvis, and Mr. Ed. Listen: I believe that people can become better, that knowledge is infinite and limitless, that underground banking cartels rule the world and that good aliens who look like shriveled lemurs and evil aliens who mutilate cattle and who need our women and our water supplies. I believe that our future is rock and roll, that there is no future at all, and that one day the Great White Bison will return and give everyone an asshole. I believe that all men are boys who have grown up but have not matured, and who have awesome communication problems, and that as soon as the number of cinemas in any state decreases, theaters can watch movies without leaving their cars , then with sex there begin big problems. I believe that all politicians are an unprincipled crook, and I believe that if they are replaced by an implacable opposition, it will be even worse. I believe that a big wave will come and California will go under water as is, and that Florida will be filled with madness, alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap violates the body’s natural resistance and that for this reason we will all die out from a common cold someday, just like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Markis, that malachite is a petrified dragon sperm, and that a thousand years ago, in a past life, I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that the future of man is in the stellar worlds. I believe that when I was little, the candies really were much tastier, and that from the point of view of aerodynamics, a bumblebee cannot fly, that light is both a wave and a particle, that somewhere in the world there is such a box, in which the cat sits, and this cat is alive and dead at once (although if they don’t open this box to feed the cat, the result will be two types of dead cats), and that there are stars in the universe that are billions of years older than herself the universe. I believe in my personal god, who cares about me, worries about me and oversees everything that I do. I believe in the impersonal god, or rather, in the goddess who launched the movement into the world, and then went to have fun with her friends and even has no idea that I live in this world. I believe in a universe empty and devoid of any divine principle, in primordial chaos, white noise and blind luck. I believe that every person who claims that the importance of sex is greatly exaggerated simply does not understand anything. I believe that every person who undertakes to claim that he understands what is happening in the world will also lie by the little things. I believe in absolute honesty and deliberate falsehood if it is justified by the situation. I believe in the right of a woman to choose, in the right of a child to life, and that human life is sacred, but there is nothing unnatural in a death sentence, if only you can trust the justice system, and even that the justice system can trust only a complete idiot. I believe that life is a game, that life is a bad joke, that life is what happens while you are alive, and that you have every right to relax and enjoy it.

People believe, thought Shadow. That's what this is all about. People believe. And then refuse to take responsibility for what you believe in; they create and then trust is created. People populate the darkness with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales. And this faith, rock solid faith, forcing to rotate the Earth.

The shortest way is sometimes the longest.

Even at the very bottom there are holes into which you can fall.

Cockroach he left lying where it was - out of respect to the dead.

Everyone wants to know that their grief and mourning set in the context of their home town and not turned into a show on the national level. But in all sectors of the economy - and death it is also a sector of the economy, do not be deceived on that score, my young friend - the money is made in wholesale sales for a major procurement, the centralization of the transactions.

Beautiful Life like a rose in bloom, Death goes about her - all day long. Life is a lady that sits in the bedroom, Death - to the bedroom running bandit...

You know, I think I prefer to be a man and not God. We don't need no one who would believe in us. No matter what happens, life continues.

Gods die when they are forgotten. The people, too.

In the end, all religions are essentially metaphors: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, a Mocker, a father, a city, a house with a thousand rooms, a watchmaker who left in the desert is priceless chronometer, someone who loves you, even, perhaps - in spite of all the evidence, celestial, whose only concern is to make your football team, army, business or marriage have succeeded, prospered and prevailed over any opponent.

And yet, long ago, a little boy, he was reading a story: the story of the traveler who, having slipped, fell into the abyss, on the trail, he waited for the tigers, cannibals, bottom sharp rocks; but he managed to grab a ledge and hold onto it with all his strength. Beside him on the ledge grew a Bush of strawberries, and below the top and waited for certain death. "What to do now?" - asked in history.
And the answer was: "Have a strawberry".

The gods are great, but the heart of man all the more. From our hearts they are people, in our hearts and come back...