What he knows now is that guilt isn’t the only reason people commit suicide. Sometimes you can just get bored with afternoon TV.
He wanted her, suddenly and completely, with a desperate depth of feeling that felt like sickness. Everything he was and everything he had come for, it seemed, was secondary to her.
Sometimes you can’t help people. Sometimes it’s better not even to try.
Why feel bad about what you couldn’t change? Why not embrace it?
When we grow up, concepts gradually get easier and we leave the images to the poets.
There are great drifting theatre curtains in the sky, and they change color as she watches: green goes to purple, purple to vermilion, vermilion to a queer bloody shade of red she cannot name. Russet perhaps comes close, but that isn’t it exactly. She thinks no one has ever named the shade she’s seeing.
I had a friend who used to tell me that all the time,” Holly said, and suddenly felt like crying. It was that phrase – I had a friend. Time had passed, and time probably did heal all wounds, but God, some of them healed so slowly. And the difference between I have and I had was such a gulf.
But storytelling always changes time. At least it does in my world.
You could feel weight, yes – when you were carrying too much, it made you ploddy – but wasn’t it, like time, basically just a human construct? Hands on a clock, numbers on a bathroom scale, weren’t they only ways of trying to measure invisible forces that had visible effects? A feeble effort to corral some greater reality beyond what mere humans thought of as reality?
Reverend was right about one thing: people always want a reason for the bad things in life. Sometimes there ain’t one.
If I may borrow from George R. R. Martin, she is my sun and stars.
People hurt the ones they love. That’s how it is all around the world.
You may wonder about long-term solutions. I assure you, there are none. All wounds are mortal. Take what’s given. You sometimes get a little slack in the rope but the rope always has an end. So what? Bless the slack and don’t waste your breath cursing the drop. A grateful heart knows that in the end we all swing.
All Frank knew was that the ones you really had to watch out for in this world were the ones that couldn’t love even a cat or a dog.
Dreams, after all, are insubstantial things, like mist itself.
I don’t think children ever forget the lies their parents tell them.
Is there hell, or do we make our own on earth?
When you get old, peace is about all you want.
I’ve become convinced that genius is a vastly overrated commodity. I think this country is full of geniuses, guys and gals so bright they make your average card carrying MENSA member look like Fucko the Clown. And I think that most of them are teachers, living and working in small town obscurity because that’s the way they like it.
That was one way in which the sexes had never been equal; they were not equally dangerous.