No one could make a fool of himself in dying, regardless of his delusions; life was the stage for fools, and no one earned mockery by going to his grave.
She never annoyed the bookstore customers and never let on that some of them had literary tastes she found unfortunate.
He would never claim to be a hero. However, there were moments when you had to show up, be there, assume risks, take bold action, if you still wanted to call yourself a man.
However, as there is no end to the beauty that some can create, so there also is no end to the horrors that others.
He takes dinner in a likable-looking roadhouse. Because he’s off duty for the night, he has an extra-dry martini with a twist before dinner, another with an ahi appetizer, plus a glass of cabernet sauvignon with his steak.
In time, that festival of flesh is going to inspire a butt-horn serenade, and Jergen lacks a gas mask.
She stiffened her resolve with a line of Eliot’s verse: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.
The only monsters were people.
Under her restlessness and licentious pose is a repressed wholesomeness that will always make her regret devaluing herself, which, even in these strange times, he believes is true of more people than not.
Like a pair of looms, using sunshine and their own silhouettes, two enormous California live oaks wove veils of gold and purple, which they flung across the driveway.
The vision has passed, but he feels as though he is standing above a void, with nothing to support him, that his fall is about to begin, that he’ll shatter his bones on the bloody rack and ruin below.
Our illusion is that we travel through life on a calculated and straight trajectory, from the past through present into future, on a journey to understanding, truth, reward. But by Brownian movement we progress, sent angling off this way and that by the impact of everyone we meet and every event that we cannot foresee.
The cold tide of evil rises relentlessly. Although the dikes that resist it can be built higher, the power of such an insistent tide is greater even than the power of a deep sea of water; though perhaps nothing can stand against Evil forever, there is at least a kind of honor in undertaking the effort to restrain the ultimate flood as long as possible.
I didn’t mind dying – and being reunited with Stormy, whether in Heaven or in the unknown great adventure she calls “service” – but not until the threat to the children had been identified and met.
Nobody wanted to read sucky novels, and those people who wanted deep meaning didn’t want it in every damn story.
Intuition alone determined for her what the patterns meant and what they suggested she should do. To her way of thinking, intuition was a word for perceptions that were received on a level far below the subconscious. Intuition was seeing with the soul.
Life is so fragile and uncertain that every daybreak is a miracle, almost a triumph.
While he watched, the phenomenon diminished. The whirl of leaves settled, and the night grew still once more. As the last leaves floated to rest on the grass, John thought he heard a familiar sigh of pleasure, one he hadn’t heard for a long time. If this had been a ghost, it had been a blithe spirit. Filled with sudden wonder, remembering their golden retriever that had died two years earlier, John whispered, “Willard?
Lively conversation would have helped her remain alert, but Trahern was not a raconteur with a trove of sparkling anecdotes.
About sixty feet ahead, Chang ran along a surfline of gray shadows, where the waves of light dissolved against the shore of night.