Make a better history.
Ain’t that the way of the world, now? Good luck turns bad. Bad luck turns good. Just a big rolling craps game played between this world and the next, and we the dice getting tossed around.
Even Evie believed in something, that something being Evie a lot of the time.
Alliteration. It’s when you repeat the same consonant in a phrase,” Memphis explained. “Huh. I was hoping it was something dirty.
It’s funny. I used to feel that I wouldn’t care if I died. I just kept throwing myself at life, hoping I’d hit a bull’s-eye eventually. I thought death would be a relief from all that feeling. A relief not to have all that pain. Not to care so much,′ Evie said.
People want to be safe, not free.
Unspeakable nightmares surround the men now. They would scream if they could. It’s no use. The dream has them, and it will not relinquish its hold. Ever. Back in their beds on Mott Street. the men’s bodies go limp. But behind their closed lids, their eyes move frantically as, one by one, they are pulled deeper and deeper into a nightmare from which they will never, ever wake.
Long shadows of evening creep up the walls, inching closer. Gradually, they reach fully across us, holding us in the stillness that only night can bring. In the hazy gloom of dusk, we are silhouettes of ourselves, reduced to our very essence. The night grows bolder. Unafraid, it opens its mouth and swallows us whole.
Why was there so much silence between men?
What I can’t figure out is why you gotta make yourself crackers trying to be somebody you can’t ever be instead of just letting yourself be the one and only Evie O’Neill.
Henry looked from Ling to Alma and back again. His mouth slid into a sly smile. “Oh my.
For the last time, I’m not a witch.” Miss Lillian smiled and patted Theta’s cheek. “Keep telling yourself that, dear.
Theta rolled over, facing Evie, their noses nearly touching. “Evil?” “Yes?” “I love you. Now, shut up and go to sleep.
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.