Sure, I know them. You can’t exactly get lost in Winnipeg.
Always be suspicious of easy work,” Dr. Wilbur Larch once said to Homer Wells.
Like the rooftop dogs, they were lost souls – they were running wild, or they drifted around town like ghosts.
It won’t take much of a city to be a city for me.
And what were the rules at St. Cloud’s? What were Larch’s rules? Which rules did Dr. Larch observe, which ones did he break, or replace – and with what confidence?
Treading water, a little dog-paddling – it’s a lot like writing a novel, Clark,” the dump reader told his former student. “It feels like you’re going a long way, because it’s a lot of work, but you’re basically covering old ground – you’re hanging out in familiar territory.
Garp didn’t want a daughter because of men. Because of bad men, certainly; but even, he thought, because of men like me.
What a power I had discovered! I felt certain I could refill those bleacher seats – one day, I was sure, I could “see” everyone who’d been there; I could find that special someone my mother had waved to, at the end.
Things often are as they appear. First impressions matter.
Even Clark French’s novels exerted a tenacious and combative goodwill: his main characters, lost souls and serial sinners, always found redemption; the act of redeeming usually followed a moral low point; the novels predictably ended in a crescendo of benevolence.
Without somehow destroying me in the process, how could God reveal himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt? If there was no room for doubt, there would be no room for me. – FREDERICK BUECHNER.
It had been an evening in the empty dance hall when not even that depth of stone and the constant stirring of the ceiling fans could cool the stifling and humid night air, which had entered the Duckworth Club as heavily as a fog from the Arabian Sea. Even atheists, like Lowji, were praying for the monsoon rains. After.
And the thing about being in love,” Wally said to Angel, “is that you can’t force anyone. It’s natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them, but you have to let everything happen to them. You can’t interfere with people you love any more than you’re supposed to interfere with people you don’t even know. And that’s hard,” he added, “because you often feel like interfering – you want to be the one who makes the plans.
Every American should be forced to live outside the United States for a year or two. Americans should be forced to see how ridiculous they appear to the rest of the world!
Well, that boy’s voice,” my grandmother told me, “that boy’s voice could bring those mice back to life!” And it occurs to me now that Owen’s voice was the voice of all those murdered mice, coming back to life – with a vengeance.
With women, Ernie Holm had some experience at taking no for an answer.
We all go through a phase – it lasts a lifetime, for some of us – when we’re embarrassed by our parents; we don’t want them hanging around us because we’re afraid they’ll do or say something that will make us feel ashamed of them.
If you want to worry about something, you ought to worry about how Guadalupe was looking at you. Like she’s still making up her mind about you. Guadalupe hasn’t decided about you,” the clairvoyant child had told him.
As often as I feel certain that God exists, I feel as often at a loss to say what difference it makes – that He exists – or even: that to believe in God, which I do, raises more questions than it presents answers. Thus, when I am feeling my most faithful, I also feel full of a few hard questions that I would like to put to God – I mean, critical questions of the How-Can-He, How-Could-He, How-Dare-You variety.
It was best not to ask Pepe if reading or Jesus had saved him, or which one had saved him more.