How infinite was love, twining in and out of hope and memory like a braid with three strong strands, so much the Bright Tower of every human’s life and soul.
Someday, if your life is long and your thinking machinery stays in gear, you’ll live to remember the last good thing that ever happened to you. That’s not pessimism talking, just logic.
Philosophers have debated the meaning of life for centuries, rarely coming to the same conclusion.
There were other people here with at least some shreds of decency left, but working in a place like this destroyed your moral compass.
She said there are evil men in the world, truly evil men. Sometimes we hear of them, but more often they work in absolute darkness.
When you couldn’t sleep, when you were afraid to look around because of what you might see, time elongated and grew sharp teeth.
Hicks was examining the paperbacks Maura had culled from the shelves: Peter Straub, Clive Barker, Joe Hill.
The hawk does not fear you, boy, and the hawk never will. The hawk is God’s gunslinger.
At fifty-one you had to keep running just to escape the avalanche of your own past.
Pete said she didn’t like to read, and he could never get tight with a girl who didn’t like books.
Perhaps it wasn’t all Freud after all. Perhaps a large part of it had to do with the invention of the electric light, which had killed the shadows in men’s minds much more effectively than a stake through a vampire’s heart – and less messily, too.
Eddie got in. Roland paused for a moment to tap his throat three times. Eddie had seen him perform this ritual before when about to cross open water, and reminded himself to ask about it. He never got the chance; before the question occurred to him again, death had slipped between them.
He could not say goodbye to these three rooms as he could to a house he had loved: hotel rooms accepted departures emotionlessly.
Hearts were made to be broken and minds were made to be changed...
What I didn’t realize was how many doors the act of writing unlocks, as if my Dad’s old fountain pen wasn’t really a pen at all, but some strange variety of skeleton key.
Woody Allen was right: eighty percent of success is just showing up.
The author of so many evils,” he said.
The world is insane. You only have to watch the news to know it.
But she stayed where she was a moment longer, like an animal which has been kept in a cage so long it cannot believe in freedom even when it is offered.
A marriage was like a house under constant construction, each year seeing the completion of new rooms. A first-year marriage was a cottage; one that had gone on for twenty-seven years was a huge and rambling mansion. There were bound to be crannies and storage spaces, most of them dusty and abandoned, some containing a few unpleasant relics you would just as soon you hadn’t found. But that was no biggie. You either threw those relics out or took them to Goodwill.