Get busy living or get busy dying.
Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.
You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.
Memory is the basis of every journey.
Only children tell the whole truth, you know. That’s what makes them children.
Outside, daylight was bleeding slowly toward dusk.
He understood well enough how a man with a choice between pride and responsibility will almost always choose pride – if responsibility robs him of his manhood.
And the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity.
A dimwit thinks nothing is funny unless it’s mean.
Life is fair. We all get the same nine-month shake in the box, and then the dice roll. Some people get a run of sevens. Some people, unfortunately, get snake-eyes. Its just how the world is.
The wife whose sweetly given reply in the face of any problem would be, “Whatever you think is best, dear.” Women, take note: a wife like that never needs to fear bubbling away the last of her life through a cut throat.
In the end we are all caught in devices of our own making. I believe that. In the end we are all caught.
This was the Darker Life, where every truth was written backward.
If God rewards us on earth for good deeds – the Old Testament suggests it’s so, and the Puritans certainly believed it – then maybe Satan rewards us for evil ones.
The quickest way to learn about a new place is to know what it dreams of.
Some birds are not meant to be caged, that’s all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure.
Show me a man or a woman alone and I’ll show you a saint. Give me two and they’ll fall in love. Give me three and they’ll invent the charming thing we call ‘society’. Give me four and they’ll build a pyramid. Give me five and they’ll make one an outcast. Give me six and they’ll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they’ll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.
Maybe there aren’t any such things as good friends or bad friends – maybe there are just friends, people who stand by you when you’re hurt and who help you feel not so lonely. Maybe they’re always worth being scared for, and hoping for, and living for. Maybe worth dying for too, if that’s what has to be. No good friends. No bad friends. Only people you want, need to be with; people who build their houses in your heart.
But when fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favorite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you.
Calling it a simple schoolgirl crush was like saying a Rolls-Royce was a vehicle with four wheels, something like a hay-wagon. She did not giggle wildly and blush when she saw him, nor did she chalk his name on trees or write it on the walls of the Kissing Bridge. She simply lived with his face in her heart all the time, a kind of sweet, hurtful ache. She would have died for him...