Even in chaos, there is order, purpose, and strange meaning that invites – but often thwarts – our investigation and our understanding.
The sky, an inverted blue ceramic cauldron, poured out a hot dry brew.
Although experience has taught me to trust my feelings, I did not go inside to stand guard near her. She had asked me to wait on the bench. I had no intention of crossing her. Like most men, I find it mortifying to be ass-kicked by a woman who doesn’t even weigh 110 pounds after Thanksgiving dinner.
His love was an architect that entirely remade the reality of the chapel, transforming it into a cathedral as grand as any in the world.
You’ve always been stone solid until now, like Joe Friday with no Y chromosome. Now you’re Nancy Drew on a sugar rush.
Unlike the beasts of the wild, the many cruel varieties of human monsters, when at last cornered, seldom fight with greater ferocity. Instead, they reveal the cowardice at the core of their brutality.
I’d probably long ago have gone seven kinds of crazy, one for each day of the week, if I didn’t simplify my life in every area where I do have some control.
I sure hope she’s wrong, because one of the implications of her cosmology is that the many terrors we know here are an inoculation against worse in the world to come.
Until then, there is joy, which by the way does not, as was once thought, require contrast with fear and pain to keep its zing.
If she could seldom bring herself to touch me and even more seldom look at me directly, she nonetheless made a place for me in her life.
Hope, however, isn’t all that’s needed to achieve change. Hope is a hand extended, but two hands are required to be pulled out of this deep hole. The second hand was faith...
Writing isn’t a source of pain. It’s psychic chemotherapy. It reduces your psychological tumors and relieves your pain.
Houses are not haunted. We are haunted, and regardless of the architecture with which we surround ourselves, our ghosts stay with us until we ourselves are ghosts.
The sane understand that human beings are incapable of sustaining conspiracies on a grand scale, because some of our most defining qualities as a species are inattention to detail, a tendency to panic, and an inability to keep our mouths shut.
Darkness dwells within even the best of us. In the worst of us, darkness not only dwells but reins.
The only thing I know for sure is how much I do not know.
Evil is no faceless stranger, living in a distant neighborhood. Evil has a wholesome, hometown face, with merry eyes and an open smile. Evil walks among us, wearing a mask which looks like all our faces.
I’ve always operated with a great deal of self-doubt. Every time I start a new book it’s like, well, this one will destroy the career and I have to overcome that feeling especially in the first hundred pages of the book.
There’s lots of law these days, but not much justice.
The destruction that barbarians leave behind has a grim fascination, doesn’t it? We’re reminded how thin is the veneer of civilization.