We live, we die. Somewhere along the way, if we’re lucky, we may find someone to help lighten the load.
Real courage is doing the right thing when nobody’s looking. Doing the unpopular thing because it’s what you believe, and the heck with everybody.
The lie had worked so far, but Lacey felt its softness, like a floor of rotten boards beneath her feet.
He knew what he’d see; one more slack face, one more pair of eyes that had barely learned to read, one more soul that had stared into itself too long.
By the time they were done Peter realized that something significant had occurred, an acknowledgment that once made, could not be unmade. The body they had buried might have been a viral, but the person they had buried was a man.
His son’s transformation cannot be stopped, or hastened, or adjusted; the man he will become is already present, like a form emerging from a slab of stone. All that remains is to watch it happen.
How stark everything became, at the end, all the wishes for one’s children distilled by the world’s swift cruelty into the desperate hope that death would take them fast.
It was in the waiting that a person experienced too much of himself. Memories, doubts, regrets, anxieties, the whole range of possibilities the future contained – they all swirled together in the mind like a soup.
This isn’t a question of odds. Of all the men in the world, that woman hose you. If she’s still out there, she’s waiting for you. Staying alive any way she can until you find her.
What were the living dead, Wolgast thought, but a metaphor for the misbegotten march of middle age?