Life had not taught me to distrust ministers, but it had taught me to trust no one more than dogs.
Evil men often easy to mislead, because they have spent so long deceiving that they no longer recognise the truth and mistake deseption for it.
If one’s friends do not openly laugh at him, they are not in fact his friends.
Death came, Death went, but Commerce flowed Eternal.
I know it’s hard being a single mother baby, he said, but we’re talking fundamentals here. Homemade cookies are one of the best parts of christmas. It’s an absolute fundamental.
Guilt is a tireless horse. Grief ages into sorrow, and sorrow is an enduring rider.
Life, Stormy says, is not about how fast you run or even with what degree of grace. It’s about perseverance, about staying on your feet and slogging forward no matter what.
We are not strangers to ourselves, we only try to be.
Rub-a-dub-dub. Cerebrum in a tub.
The hard rain nailed the night to the city.
At the core of every ordered system, whether a family or a factory, is chaos. But in the whirl of every chaos lies a strange order, waiting to be found.
The primitive in each of us climbs closer to the surface during the night, for the moon sings to it, and the cold void between the stars speaks its language. To that savage self, evil can look lovely in too little light.
On the Road that I have taken, one day walking I awaken, amazed to see where I’ve come, where I’m going, where I’m from.
The things we worry about the most are never the things that bite us. The sharpest teeth always take their nip of us when we are looking the other way.
The broom wasn’t as comforting as a flamethrower would have been, but it was better than a mop and certainly more threatening than a feather duster.
Tommy told Sal about the strange white-cloth figure with black stitches that he had found on the front porch. “Sounds like Pillsbury Doughboy gone punk,” Sal said.
Or maybe they were just doing it for fun. A lark. Their religion is tolerant of extreme forms of recreation. Boys will be boys, after all, and sociopathic boys will be sociopathic.
A man begins dying at the moment of his birth. Most People live in denial of Death’s patient courtship until, late in life and deep in sickness, they become aware of him sitting bedside.
He once told me that an August evening was “as hot as three toads in a Cuisinart,” a comparison that left me blinking two days later.
Not an insult sweetie. That was a thirteen word kiss.