He was amazingly light, as dehydrated as a November leaf from their long walk through the desert.
Now it’s at peace.” She shrugged, then laughed. “I’ll get my gun, Paul, shall I? Maybe the next world is better. For rats and people both – not that there’s much difference between the two.
The child, who is most at home with wonder, says: Daddy, what is above the sky? And the father says: The darkness of space. The child: What is beyond space? The father: The galaxy. The child: Beyond the galaxy? The father: Another galaxy. The child: Beyond the other galaxies? The father: No one knows.
Sometimes I take her food from the Iranian restaurant she and Ollie liked – the Sunny Acres kitchen staff is happy to warm it up – and sometimes I bring her a DVD or two. She likes the oldies, like with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. I always bring her something, and she’s always happy to see me. On her good days she does see me. On her bad ones, she’s apt to call me Olivia. Or Charlotte. That’s my aunt. I also have an uncle.
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.
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.