But it is. It’s something you need, and that’s a long way from nothing. If you need it, Eddie, we need it. What we don’t need is a man who can’t let go of the useless baggage of his memories.
There’s no way you can prepare for a broken heart.
I’m a defense lawyer, son. I can believe anything.
Right now the Seiko claimed it was sixty-two minutes past forty on a Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday in both December and March.
This is the way he was when he still had wars to fight and men to lead and his old friends around him,” she thought. “How he was before the world moved on and he moved on with it, chasing that man Walter. This is how he was before the Big Empty turned him inward on himself and made him strange.
Now, sitting on his bed in the grip of this numbing hangover, rainwater spilling its lazy courses down the window beside him, his grief came for him fully, like some gray matron from Ward Nine in purgatory. It came and dissolved him, unmanned him, took away whatever defenses remained, and he put his face in his hands and cried, rocking back and forth on his bed, thinking he would do anything to have a second chance, anything at all.
Sooner or later, if there isn’t a turncoat, the people make one.
He had no psychic powers, but there was one power he did have: he was the grownup. The adult.
A man’s life was five dogs long, Cortland believed. The first was the one that taught you. The second was the one you taught. The third and fourth were the ones you worked. The last was the one that outlived you.
Twenty-five, maybe even thirty dollars a week, half of it just for reading, which was something I would have done for free!
The truth is that most writers are needy. Especially between the first draft and the second, when the study door swings open and the light of the world shines in.
If ka is a train – and it is, a vast, hurtling mono, maybe sane, maybe not – then this nasty little lycanthrope is its most vulnerable hostage, not tied to the tracks like little Nell but strapped to the thing’s very headlight.
Baseball is a good thing. Always was, always will be.
Terry gave him a look of which only high school teachers are capable: We both know you’re an idiot, but I will not embarrass you in front of your peers by saying so.
The Question was this: If you could jump into a time machine and go back to 1932, would you kill Hitler?
Life was a short shelf that came with bookends.
Here was the same murmuring quiet, broken only by an occasional whisper, the faint thud of a librarian stamping books or overdue notices, the hushed riffle of newspaper or magazine pages being turned. He loved the quality of the light as much now as then. It slanted through the high windows, gray as a pigeon’s wing on this rainy afternoon, a light that was somehow somnolent and dozey.
Be grateful for the time you’ve had with him. A little bit of grace. That’s what a good dog is, you know. A little bit of grace.
It was bad, but what in high school is not? At the time we’re stuck in it, like hostages locked in a Turkish bath, high school seems like the most serious business in the world to just about all of us. It’s not until the second or third class reunion that we start realizing how absurd the whole thing was.
The fundamental difference between the sexes is this: men make assumptions, but women rarely do.