My own aches and bruises and cuts and wounds pained me, but it was an honest, stretchy pain, something that was healing.
Octokongs,” I pronounced grimly. “Why did it have to be octokongs?
Chicago. It’s insane and violent and corrupt and vital and artistic and noble and cruel and wonderful. It’s full of greed and hope and hate and desire and excitement and pain and happiness. The air sings with screams and laughter, with sirens, with angry shouts, with gunshots, with music. It’s an impossible city, at war with itself, every horrible and wonderful thing blending together to create something terrifying and lovely and utterly unique. I.
Evil’s afoot.” “Well, sure,” Bob said, “because it refuses to learn the metric system. Otherwise it’d be up to a meter by now.
The energy of night was far different than that of the daylight – not inherently evil, but wilder, more dangerous, more unpredictable.
Your death doesn’t belong to me. We flipped a coin. I lost.
Never again. Tell them that. Never again. Or Hell itself will not hide you from me.
Fighting is never good. But sometimes necessary.
More than anything, I wanted to crawl into a hole and pull it in after me. I wanted to be not.
With your head, the wall breaks first.
Does it hurt to be as suave as you, boss?” “It’s agonizing.” “Looks it.
One more tip, kids. If you had any real talent, the air would practically have been on fire when you got ready to throw down. But you losers don’t have enough magic between you to turn cereal into breakfast.
Children have their own kind of power. When you’re teaching them, protecting them, you are more than you thought you could be.
That’s kind of awesome,” I said. “Children frequently are,” Michael said.
He died in his sleep one night. An aneurysm, the doctors said. I found him, cold, smiling. Maybe he’d been dreaming of Mother when he went. And as I looked at him, I suddenly felt, for the very first time in my life, utterly, entirely alone. That something was gone that would never return, that a little hole had been hollowed out inside of me that wasn’t ever going to be filled again.
Hi, God, it’s me, Harry. Please don’t turn me into a pillar of salt.
Sometimes, son,” Count Calderon said, “you have to acknowledge that your future is in someone else’s hands.
We wizards are terrific at brooding.
MY NAME IS Mouse and I am a Good Dog. Everyone says so.
What is teaching but the art of planting and nurturing power?” Lea replied. “Mortals prattle on about lonely impulses of delight and the gift of knowledge, and think that teaching is a trade like metalsmithing or healing or telling lies on television. It is not. It is the dissemination of power unto a new generation and nothing less. For her, as for you, lessons demand real risk in order to attain their true rewards.