The biggest life change any man would ever experience was the ending of it.
Nazism was, at heart, a criminal enterprise, a product of which was the Holocaust. The Nazis were gangsters and thugs. As much as they were ideologically driven, they were also greedy. Pure ideologues don’t pull gold teeth from the mouths of the dead.
Deborah Mercier couldn’t have looked more like a WASP if her coat had been striped with yellow and her eyes had been on the sides of her head. She.
What do you believe in?” asked David. “I believe in those whom I love and trust. All else is foolishness. This god is as empty as his church. His followers choose to attribute all of their good fortune to him, but when he ignores their pleas or leaves them to suffer, they say only that he is beyond their understanding and abandon themselves to his will. What kind of god is that?
We lose ourselves by degrees: our youth, our souls.
They listened to the Beatles for most of the journey, and Hynes explained to Gackowska why Abbey Road was the band’s best record, and how Sgt. Pepper’s wasn’t really a concept album, no matter what anyone claimed to the contrary. Then he had to explain to Gackowska what a concept album was, and a B side, until pretty soon he felt about a hundred years old and was tempted to check himself into a nursing home.
After all, no relationship could function or survive under the burden of total honesty.
He knew there were some who said that those who kept dogs had to resign themselves to their eventual loss because of the animals’ relatively short lives. The trick – if “trick” was the right word – was to learn to love the spirit of the animal, and to recognize that it transferred itself from dog to.
Okay,” I said hoarsely as the blood left my head and headed south for the winter.
A man is a very small thing, and the night is very large and full of wonders. –.
Stories were different, though: they came alive in the telling. Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by flashlight beneath a blanket, they had no real existence in our world.
I knew that his God – for each man has his own God – let him wander there sometimes, perhaps with the ghost of one of the many dogs that had kept him company through his life yapping at his heels, flushing the birds from the rushes and chasing them for the joy of it. My grandfather used to say that if God did not allow a man to be reunited with his dogs in the next life He was no God worth worshipping; that if a dog did not have a soul, then nothing had.
There was a lot to be said for a man’s capacity to be comfortable while alone.
Parker felt, not for the first time, as though he had wandered into a ghost story.
She had not given me the cross to keep the bad men away, as a child might have been expected to do. No, in her mind the bad men could not be kept away. They were coming, and they would have to be faced.
Samuel understood at last why this being hated men and women so much: he hated them because they were so like himself, because the worst of the was mirrored in them. He was the source of all that was bad in men and women, but he had none of the greatness, and none of the grace, of which human beings were capable, so that by only by corrupting them was his own pain diminished, and thus his existence made more tolerable.
Most criminals were dumb, and he took the view that the whole science of criminology was essentially flawed, since much of its theory was based on the study of criminals who had been caught, and were therefore either stupid or unlucky, as opposed to the study of those who had not been caught, and were therefore smart and had a little luck on their side, but just a little. Luck ran out, but smart was for life.
The day passed, a poor, sluggish thing that departed almost gratefully as night took its place.
Being shot at for years by men of a particular nationality will tend to impact negatively upon one’s view of them.
He had counted so carefully. He had abided by the rules, but life had cheated.