Soft and sweet and mellow, the song came back and lingered, following her down into a deeper sleep where thought ceased and the faces that came in dreams went unremembered.
The world turns, that’s all. You can hold on and turn with it, or stand up to protest and be spun right off.
I suppose it doesn’t matter much. A lot of things don’t matter, but it doesn’t keep a man from wondering about them, I’ve noticed.
Life is short and pain is long and we were all put on this earth to help each other.
To him those last few crumbs, sucked slowly onto the tongue from between the tines of the fork, always seemed like the sweetest part of the slice.
Anger made men easy.
Sometimes parents needed to be protected.
Florida’s full of old people-they don’t call it God’s waiting room for nothing-but precious few of em grew up here.
When Hodges returns to his chair with his small bundle of mail, the fight-show host is saying goodbye and promising his TV Land audience that tomorrow there will be midgets. Whether of the physical or mental variety he does not specify.
Movies, they were the thing. Movies took you away. You could count on popcorn and happy endings.
When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.
He and Sully dared each other to go on the Wild Mouse and finally went together, howling deliriously as their car plunged into each dip, simultaneously sure that they were going to live forever and die immediately.
We all write fiction when we write about the past.
This tune is called “What She Don’t Know Won’t Hurt Her. ” But it hurts somewhere. In the spaces between people, maybe.
Some people say I am a terrible person. I’m not, I have the heart of a young boy... in a jar, on my desk.
The only stupid question, my cullies, is the one you don’t ask.
His mind is like that. On the inside, where he never smiles.
I think houses live their own lives along a time-stream that’s different from the ones upon which their owners float, one that’s slower. In a house, especially an old one, the past is closer.
They float, ” it growled, “they float, Georgie, and when you’re down here with me, you’ll float, too –.
Even when lightning flashes inside them... we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, next pain, next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.