For the last time, I’m not a witch.” Miss Lillian smiled and patted Theta’s cheek. “Keep telling yourself that, dear.
That’s what he always did, tell a joke or find someone else when things began to feel like something genuine. Well, he was tired of feeling haunted – by Louis, by his father’s disappointment, and his mother’s illness. He’d let himself fill up with ghosts of shame until there was no room for love. No more. No more.
Sam grabbed one of Jericho’s Civil War soldier figurines and held it up to his mouth. “Oh, Jericho,” he said in a high-pitched voice. “Take me in your arms, you big he-man, you!
She would live every day fully. She was not the same girl she’d been nearly a year ago. She would never see things so blithely again. Even now, as Evie watched the parade and the people alight with pride and joy, she knew how easily that same crowd could become angry. The things that divided them. The things that brought them together, too. They couldn’t afford to become complacent.
In this life, you have to work with people you dislike. You find compromises. But sometimes you find that a person’s beliefs are so harmful that you must speak against them. You can’t let such harmful statements stand without challenge. They have a tendency to grow into tumors.
Looking for truth makes a man hafta look at himself along the way.
History was haunted by the ghosts of buried crimes, which required periodic exorcisms of truth. Actions had consequences. Will.
When did you become a cynic?” Sam asked. Evie smiled. “When I found out I was a little girl.
We’ve got about as much chance of communing with the dead as we do of sitting in Parliament.
Mabel did deserve to Rest In Peace, and Evie knew she was a terrible person, because of there was any ghost she longed to see, even for just a moment, it was Mabel’s.
If I have to look through one more of these, I’m throwing myself off that balcony,” he moaned. “Let me know if you need help,” Jericho said.
It was a machine that required constant feeding- Henry hated the machine, and he hated himself for wanting the sort of admiration it promised, as if he had no worth unless someone was there to applaud it.
Grinning, he grabbed his fisherman’s cap and coat. “I love you,” he whispered quietly. “Ikh hob dikh lib.” He kissed Evie’s head. She rustled in her sleep, turning away. “Fine. I see how it is. I just wasted my best Yiddish on you,” Sam joked to himself.
It was a thread woven through all of humankind: this need for story to explain the unexplainable, to comfort the hurting, to promise that no one was alone. Evie’s uncle Will had said there was no greater power on earth than story. And in this shared moment, Memphis knew that it was so.
See, the trouble with Nietzsche, besides his being a real killjoy, is that he thinks like a spoiled seven-year-old who doesn’t want to share his sandbox toys – ” “Sam!
Sam. Don’t make me kill you on a full stomach. I might get a cramp.
They wish, too, that they could warn them about the gray man in the stovepipe hat, about the King of Crows. For not all ghosts remember, and the citizens have need of warning.
If you would understand the present, you must come to know the past.
Nicole hated that she could never quite feel like she was just herself, just Nicole, but that she was somehow representing an entire race. That’s how they saw her, as a “they” and not a “she.
Didn’t they teach you how to go about research in that school of yours?” “No. But I can recite ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ while making martinis.” “I weep for the future.” “There’s where the martinis come in.