There exists for each of us a geographical fulcrum, a place so saturated with memory that within its precinct the past is always present.
The floor was slick with blood, so much blood that he felt his feet sliding on it, the grease of human remains.
She would be a girl; Lila had seen her on the ultrasound. A baby girl. Tiny hands and tiny feet and a tiny heart and lungs, floating in the warm broth of her body.
A good death, everyone agreed, to die at home in bed as Prudence Jaxon had. But Peter had been at her side through the final hours and knew how terrible it had been for her, how much she’d suffered. No, there was no such thing as a good death.
The memory was unpleasant; he’d taken an instant disliking to the man. Compounding Peter’s distrust, Chase was wearing a necktie, the most incomprehensible article of clothing in the history of the world.
The end of the world, he’d thought. That’s where he was. The end of the world was Houston, Texas.
The world had a way of speaking to you if you let it; the trick was learning to hear.
Events can seem random while you’re living them, but when you look back, what do you see? A chain of coincidences? Plain old luck? Or something more? I’ll tell you what I see, Peter. A clear path. More than that. A true path.
I would not say I was a nonbeliever; rather, that I gave little if any thought to celestial concerns. It did not seem to me that God, whoever he was, would be the sort of god to take an interest in the minutiae of human affairs, or that this fact released us from the duty to go about our lives in a spirit of decency to others.
She took the disc in her hand, holding it by the edges. Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf conducting. ‘I just thought you should hear what you look like,’ said Elton.
The story was never the story, and it surprised you, how much another person could carry.
The only thing he could come up with was the story of Joseph and Mary and the flight into Egypt – a boyhood memory, because Grey hadn’t been to church in years. Joseph had always seemed like an odd duck, taking care of a woman who was carrying somebody else’s baby. But Grey was beginning to see the sense in it, how a person could become attached just by being wanted.
It was as if I’d lost some cosmic game of musical chairs; the song had stopped, I was left standing, and there was simply nothing to be dine about it.
Because the game was the world’s natural state. Because the game was war, it always was, and when wasn’t there a war on, somewhere, to keep a man like Richards in good employ?
Nothing lasts forever.” “Some things do.” “What kind of things?” “The things we like to remember. The love we’ve felt for people.
Would somebody please tell him whose idea it had been to kill the entire state of Colorado?
Weren’t the question the man had wrong, it was his way of asking it.
Drinking myself blind seemed like the next logical step.
The war – the real war, the one that had been going on for a thousand years and would go on for a thousand thousand more – the war between Us and Them, between the Haves and the Have-Nots, between my gods and your gods, whoever you are – would be fought by men like Richards: men with faces you didn’t notice.
Consider the species known as man. We lie, we cheat, we want what others have and take it; we make war upon each other and the earth; we harvest lives in multitude. We have mortgaged the planet and spent the cash on trifles.