Hank Peters woke up in the early hours of the next morning from a dream of huge rats crawling out of an open grave, a grave which held the green and rotting body of Hubie Marsten, with a frayed length of manila hemp around his neck. Peters lay propped on his elbows, breathing heavily, naked torso slicked with sweat, and when his wife touched his arm he screamed aloud. EIGHT.
There. I’ve not only given advice, I’ve made a speech. Old age is insidious.
Free samples are fine, but if you give people too much for-free, whether it’s clothes or food or information, they come to expect it.
The next evening she brought him the Royal. It was an office model from an era when such things as electric typewriters, color TVs, and touch-tone telephones were only science fiction. It was as black and as proper as a pair of high-button shoes. Glass panels were set into the sides, revealing the machine’s levers, springs, ratchets, and rods. A steel return lever, dull with disuse, jutted to one side like a hitchhiker’s thumb. The roller was dusty, its hard rubber scarred and pitted.
How long alone with your thoughts in an endless field of white? And then, when a billion eternities have passed, the crashing return of light and form and body. Who wouldn’t go insane?
All of Mid-World had become one vast haunted mansion in these strange latter days; all of Mid-World had become The Drawers; all of Mid-World had become a waste land, haunting and haunted.
Stupid to keep cash, there was no reason for it other than his dislike of credit cards and checks and stocks and instruments of transfer, all the tempting chains that tied people to America’s overwhelming and ultimately destructive debt-and-spend machine. But the cash might be his salvation. Cash could be replaced. The notebooks, over a hundred and fifty of them, could not.
Crazy was a hard state to define.
Those kids just wanted to rock, and most of them discovered they could... once they mastered a bar E, that was.
For readers, one of life’s more electrifying discoveries is that they ARE readers – not just capable of doing it... but in love with it... The first book that does that is never forgotten, and each page seems to bring a fresh revelation, one that burns and exalts...
Leo kind of sees into people. He’s not the only one, either. Maybe there were always people like that, but there seems to be a little bit more of it around since the flu.
Because we’re never the same from day to day or even moment to moment.
The greatest terror of Danny’s life was DIVORCE, a word that always appeared in his mind as a sign painted in red letters which were covered with hissing, poisonous snakes.
It wasn’t dark yet, but getting there; the shadows under the trees were thick and velvety, somehow luscious.
That’s right, buddy. You bought yourself a dime root beer this afternoon. You also put Carolyn Poulin back in a wheelchair.
Das ganze Leben ist ein Trick, und Liebe nichts als Glammer.
My score grows ever longer, and the day when it will all have to be totted up, like a long-time drunkard’s bill in an alehouse, draws ever nearer. However will I pay?
Spaghetti, Fleischsauce im Glas, vierzehn Fertiggerichte, ein Dutzend Eier und ein Netz Navelorangen zum Schutz vor Skorbut.
Diligence, word-lust, empathy equal growing objectivity and then what? Story. Story. Dammit, story!
Horror spawns horror.