I don’t believe in curses, you know. Nor in ghosts or anything precisely supernatural. But I do believe that emotions and events have a certain... lingering resonance. It may be that emotions can even communicate themselves in certain circumstances, if the circumstances are peculiar enough... the way a carton of milk will take the flavour of certain strongly spiced foods if it’s left open in the refrigerator.
When some people were in distress, you wanted to enfold them and say there-there as you patted them on the back. With others you wanted to slap them a hard one across the chops and tell them to man up.
Oh my fadder and I are one, ” she said, “just me, just him, and dear, if you are wise you will run, run back to where you came from, run quickly, because to stay will mean worse than your death. No one who dies in Derry really dies. You knew that before; believe it now.
But you have to remember, Fran, she’s too old to change, but you are getting old enough to understand that.
He felt gladness roar through his soul.
The three ages of the Great American Male – youth, middle age, and you look fuckin terrific.
The new wears off everything, and it usually doesn’t take long.
Such lack of understanding was frightening. He’s right, the gunslinger thought. We are broken. Gods help us.
He put the car in gear and went, feeling again how easy it had been to slip through an unexpected fissure in what he had considered a solid life- how easy it was to get over onto the dark side, to sail out of the blue and into the black.
Seen from the expressway at quarter to five in the morning, Boston seems a city of the dead brooding over some tragedy in its past – a plague, perhaps, or a curse.
Can an entire city be haunted? Haunted.
The Black Man grinned at her with his jackal mouth, and his scarlet eyes knew all the secrets of woman-blood.
I am what you might call a rambling man, and America is my beat.
The reason fantasy fiction remains such a vital and necessary genre is that it lets us talk about such things in a way realistic fiction cannot.
He was Naked. He sat in the chain with his bare feet neatly together and watched the program. He was waiting for it to get dark. After it got dark, he would begin waiting for it to get late. When it was late, he would begin waiting for it to get early. When it got early and the pulse of the hotel was at its slowest, he would stop waiting and go upstairs to Room 1317 and kill Dr. Wanlass.
As Orwell’s pigs might have said, blue jeans good, new dress better.
Nobody was really surprised when it happened, not really, not on the subconscious level where savage things grow.
Few techniques are so successful, lady and gentlemen, as the one where you boggle the target’s mind, freeze him with greed, then blitz him.
Garraty thought that memories were like a line drawn in the dirt. The further back you went the scuffier and harder to see that line got. Until finally there was nothing but smooth sand and the black hole of nothingness that you came out of. The memories were in a way like the road. Here it was real and hard and tangible. But that early road, that nine in the morning road, was far back and meaningless.
Deep below that rational part is an underground ocean – there’s one inside every head, he believes – where strange creatures swim.