Here’s something else I believe: if you’re going into a very dark place – like Wilf James’s Nebraska farmhouse in “1922” – then you should take a bright light, and shine it on everything. If you don’t want to see, why in God’s name would you dare the dark at all?
I must accept those things over which I have no control. I must turn my adversities into advantages.
The pain wasn’t tidal. That was the lesson of the dream which was really a memory. The pain only appeared to come and go. The pain was like the piling, sometimes covered and sometimes visible, but always there.
Although they had been honed like hawks toward the guns since early childhood, Cuthbert and Alain still carried an erroneous belief common to many boys their age: that their elders were also their betters, at least in such matters as planning and wit; they actually believed that grownups knew what they were doing.
He had begun business many years ago – as a wandering peddler on the blind face of a distant land, a peddler who carried his wares on his back, a peddler who usually came at the fall of darkness and was always gone the next morning, leaving bloodshed, horror, and unhappiness behind him.
She was my heart, and I guard what’s there. Nobody takes it away from me.
God always asks for a sacrifice. His hands are bloody with it. Why? I can’t say. I’m not a very smart man. P’raps we brought it on ourselves.
Detta thought he and Eddie were monsters of some species she called Honk Mafahs.
I believe in my consciousness and my unconscious, even though I don’t know what those things are.
It was the look of some woman in a third world country, watching as her village burned.
She’s looking at him with something like wonder. “Why do you weep, Jack?” “The past,” he says. “Isn’t that always what does it?” And thinks of his mother, sitting by the window, smoking a cigarette, and listening while the radio plays “Crazy Arms.” Yes, it’s always the past. That’s where the hurt is, all you can’t get over.
A man named Stephen King. Do you know that name?” And saw by Cullum’s eyes that he did.
If being a grown-up really meant knowing better, why did his father go on smoking three packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day?
Everything in the universe denies nothing; to suggest an ending is the one absurdity.
Sons figured out they were bigger and never forgot it. Sons didn’t care about the world they left for their sons or for their daughters, although they said they did when the time came to run for office.
It’s really just paint. I muse on that, sometimes, Jamie. When I can’t sleep. How a little paint can make shallow water seem deep.
Because – dig it – when it comes to death, what can you do but laugh?
There is no life here but the slow death of days, and so when the evil falls on the town, its coming seems almost preordained, sweet and morphic. It is almost as though the town knows the evil was coming and the shape it would take.
George Orwell knew when he wrote 1984: if you say a thing often enough, it will be accepted as truth.
For your family, you do all that you can.