Denigrating free will by confusing it with ka was worse than blasphemy; it was tiresome and stupid.
But did not Shakespeare say a man can smile, and smile, and be a villain?
Here is yes, the voices said. Here is you may. Here is the good turn, the fortunate meeting, the fever that broke just before dawn and left your blood calm. Here is the wish that came true and the understanding eye. Here is the kindness you were given and thus learned to pass on. Here is the sanity and clarity you thought were lost. Here, everything is all right.
But a stake is only stupid wood; the mind is the mallet which drives it home.
He had never in his life felt so undecided about so many things, and he wanted to cry.
He was the other man, the other face, the hardcase, the dark man, the Walkin Dude, and his rundown bootheels clocked along the perfumed ways of the summer night.
The simplicity of noun-verb construction is useful – at the very least it can provide a safety net for your writing.
Who knows CPR?” asks the one who grabbed Hodges. A roadie with a long graying ponytail steps forward. He’s wearing a faded Judas Coyne tee-shirt, and his eyes are bright red. “I do, but man, I’m so stoned.” “Try.
Four young men in motorcycle jackets... set upon the man in khaki shorts and beat him unconscious with his own sandwich board.
Billy was walking up the hall, buckling his belt. His tanned face was now sallow and wet with sweat. “He says there’s a bulge in my aorta. Like a bubble in a car tire. Only car tires don’t yell when you poke em.
Have you ever loved someone without liking them?
The other piece of advice I want to give you before moving on to the next level of the toolbox is this: The adverb is not your friend.
Danny was still awake long after his parents’ false sleep had become the real thing. He rolled in his bed, twisting the sheets, grappling with a problem years too big for him, awake in the night like a single sentinel on picket. And sometime after midnight, he slept, too, and then only the wind was awake, prying at the hotel and hooting in its gables under the bright gimlet gaze of the stars.
In the grip of the nightmare, all fears will be remembered.
He who takes a tiger by the tail dare not let go.” A.
Home was the place where, when you have to go there, they have to chain you up.
What’s feeding in Derry? What’s feeding on Derry?
It occurred to him that he didn’t care much for these hedge animals. It had always seemed slightly perverted to him to clip and torture a plain old hedge into something that it wasn’t. Along one of the highways in Vermont there had been a hedge billboard on a high slope overlooking the road, advertising some kind of ice cream. Making nature peddle ice cream, that was just wrong. It was grotesque.
There was a lot of talk about old days and old times, the kind of chatter that’s fabulously interesting to those who were there and stupendously boring to those who weren’t.
Just don’t expect to get what you want unless we decide its what you need – this isn’t a hotel... This is a quiet place... You won’t work; mostly you’ll just sit. Give you a chance to think things over.