I feel that buzz of happiness, that sense of having found the right words and put them in a line. It’s like lifting off in an airplane: you’re on the ground, on the ground, on the ground... and then you’re up, riding on a magical cushion of air and prince of all you survey.
It has a way of eroding barriers-that famous Yankee reticence-which would otherwise be impregnable.
Depressives kill themselves. Psychotics, rocked in the poison cradles of their own egos, want to do everyone handy a favor and take them along.
You fought the fight over and over, and you never won the milkshake.
There is no life here but the slow death of days, and so when the evil falls on the town, its coming seems almost preordained, sweet and morphic.
He looked perhaps ten years younger than his actual age, which was thirty-eight.
At night, when i go to bed i still am at pains to be sure that my legs are under the blankets after the lights go out. I am not a child anymore but... Because if a cool hand ever reached out from under the bed and grasped my ankle, i might scream.
If I’m going to escape, Ralph thought, I’m going to have to do it by running forward so hard and fast I rip right out the other side. The.
The greatest mystery the universe offers is not life but size. Size encompasses life, and the Tower encompasses size.
To this point in his life, Jake had been aware of only three feelings about his father: puzzlement, fear, and a species of weak, confused love. Now a fourth and fifth surfaced. One was anger; the other was disgust.
It never really felt like work to me, although I called it that; it felt like some weird mental trampoline I bounced on. Those were the springs that took away all the weight of the world for awhile.
He watched groups of children in the play yard move their lips, raise and lower their teeth like white drawbridges, dance their tongues in the ritual mating of speech.
He supposed he was dying but he felt... ah, God, he felt so lucid, so clear, like a window-pane which has been washed clean and now lets in all the gloriously frightening light of some unsuspected dawning; the light, oh God, that perfect rational light that clears the horizon somewhere in the world every second.
Sometimes things work just because you think they work. It’s as good a definition of faith as any.
Eddie stuffed the aspirator into his mouth and, like a man miming suicide, pulled the trigger. A cloud of awful licorice taste roiled and boiled its way down his throat, and Eddie breathed deeply. He could feel breathing passages which had almost closed start to open up again. The tightness in his chest started to ease, and suddenly he heard voices in his mind, ghost-voices.
Time’s the thief of memory: that one he knew.
In that brief time between, the night had been a fragrant puzzle, a time when, looking up at the star-strewn sky and listening to the breeze that brought such intoxicating smells, you felt close to the heartbeat of the universe, to love and life.
The ass of a man is the piston that drives the world, and you have a good one.
Power had been passed in some way that none of them knew but all understood.
To this day I’m not entirely sure what hematocrit and hemoglobin are, but mine started to come back up and that pleased everybody.