He thought of the old commonplace about how giving up vices didn’t make you live longer, but just made it feel as though you were living longer.
Newspaper stories were like newly caught fish, worthy of attention only for as long as they remained fresh, which was not very long at all. They.
There were books everywhere: on the floors, on the stairs, on furniture both built for that purpose and constructed for other ends entirely. There were bookshelves in the main hallway, in the downstairs rooms, and in the upstairs rooms. There were even bookshelves in the bathroom and the kitchen.
A discarded newspaper skimmed the sidewalk with a sound like the whisperings of a dead lover.
It bore an expression he’d seen before: love poisoned by disappointment.
What’s seldom is wonderful.
The past never truly dies. It is there, waiting, just below the surface of the now.
Warraner looked pleasantly surprised at the question, like a Mormon who had suddenly found himself invited into a house for coffee, cake, and a discussion of the wit and wisdom of Joseph Smith.
Every individual spends a lifetime trying to disprove Copernicus by placing him- or herself at the heart of existence, but a small core of diehards manages to turn it into an art. Harpur Griffin was just such a man, spurred on by a suspicion, although he could never have expressed it in so many words, that he was just an emptiness with a name.
Perhaps, he considered, her hypocrisy had become so ingrained that she was no longer even capable of perceiving it as such.
People suffered all the time, and died badly. Many called on God to save them at the end, but if God heard their pleas, He chose not to answer. Maybe the pastor was wrong. Maybe God was imperfect, and men, by acting in their own interests, were reflecting only the reality of His nature.
I don’t think you can dial 911 for a literary emergency.
Most of the bad situations I’ve encountered began with the best of intentions.
Came from nothing- less than nothing, because the poor always enter this life with their account in deficit, and generally leave it in much the same condition...
But the measure of a man was the degree to which he was prepared to inconvenience himself for what was right;.
Look at you,” he said. “A fractured man, a broken thing. I asked for money to kill you, but none would give it. Now I understand why. There is no value to you. You’re nothing, and therefore nothing is what your life is worth. But I will kill you anyway, out of pity.
The law wasn’t a great business to be in if one valued truth, or even justice.
Because to ignore what had happened in the recent and distant pasts, to turn away and look elsewhere because it was easier to do so, was to be an accomplice to the crimes that were committed. To refuse to delve deeper would be to collude with the offenders.
I looked at him, at his unshaven profile, the wisps of dark hair curling out from under his dark wool hat, the empty coffee cup forgotten in his hand. He was a mass of contradictions. It struck me that I was taking life lessons from a five-six semiretired burglar whose boyfriend, not twentyfour hours earlier, had executed a man against a brick wall. My life, I reflected, was taking some strange turns.
In the old house, the past hung in the air like motes of dust waiting to be illuminated by the sharp rays of memory.