In eighty-six years, child, I’ve learned the world is a far more mysterious place than most people realize and that every moment of life is woven through with meaning.
Too many years of watching old Warner Bros. cartoons by Chuck Jones can instill in you a silliness gene by proxy.
Remember, there are cookies waiting here for you.
I don’t know if this deception qualified as a half-step down the slippery slope. I had no sensation of sliding. But of course we never notice the descent until we’re rocketing along at high velocity.
They found her with a nearly empty snifter of brandy on the nightstand, a book by her favorite novelist turned to the last page, and a smile on her face.
Finally turning his head, he regarded me appraisingly, with contempt so thick that I expected to hear it drizzle to the floor with a spattering sound.
Denial couldn’t be maintained.
We are fallen in a broken world, and one thing that occurs to me is that after thousands of years, when we think of fallen angels, we think of them as we always have: busy spreading misery on Earth. But the universe in its immensity is nevertheless of a piece, and what applies at one end of it applies at the other. No doubt misery, like happiness and hope, is found throughout the stars.
I needed more time to think. And a better brain with which to do the thinking.
The crazy thing is, Mother, after more than twenty years of this crap, down at the bottom of my heart, where it ought to be the darkest, I think there’s still this spark of love for you. It may be pity, I’m not sure, but it hurts enough to be love.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure you’ve got a fabulously dark, twisted, and perhaps even deeply sick imagination. I’m not trying to devalue the dementedness of your imagination and do not mean to diminish your pride in it.
My imagination is as rich as my bank account is empty.
Everything barbarians do is nothing, no matter how loudly they insist it’s something.
If you let the news spoil your appetite, there wouldn’t be a day you could eat.
Give the narrative a lighter tone than you think it deserves, dear boy, lighter than you think you can bear to give it,” he instructed before I began to write, “because you won’t find the truth of life in morbidity, only in hope.
When you keep a secret from those closest to you, even with the best of motives, there is a danger that you will create a smaller life within your main life. The first secret will spin off other secrets that also must be kept, complicated webs of evasion that grow into elaborate architectures of repressed truths and subterfuge, until you discover that you must live two narratives at once.
Regardless of how hard the winds of chance might blow or how heavy the weight of experience might become, Stormy always stays on her feet...
War,” Pax said, “either dulls the mind to despair or sharpens it toward intuitive truths.
Nothing supernatural has ever harmed me. My wounds and losses have all be at the hands of human beings...
With human beings, a natural death was a death with dignity. But animals were innocents, and as their stewards, people owed them mercy.