We’ve become so used to the idea of the flu – it seems almost like the common cold to us, doesn’t it? – that no one but the historians seems to know that a hundred years ago it didn’t exist.
What she discovered was mostly shelves of battered paperbacks, not exactly the insulation she’d had in mind, and when the dynamite bundle exploded in the room next door, she was pelted with Nora Roberts and James Patterson novels as the wall buckled.
He struck a light and for just a moment as cigarette smoke raftered up she clearly saw a man and a boy fighting for control of the same face.
I’m crying because we’re here,” he says. “On a beautiful fall day that feels like summer.
He combed his hair like Elvis and had a slightly dangerous look, like a sailor two drinks into a shore leave that will end badly.
Only you can save yourself. But the way of the gun is the way of damnation as well as salvation; in the end there is no difference.
Staring at the hedge animals, he realized something had changed while he had his hand over his eyes.
Other players and at least one great composer – Beethoven – had lived with deafness, but hearing loss wasn’t where Hugh’s woes ended. There was the vertigo, the trembling, the periodic loss of vision. There was nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, galloping pulse. Worst of all was the almost constant tinnitus. He had always thought deafness meant silence. This was not true, at least not in his case. Hugh Yates had a constantly braying burglar alarm in the middle of his head.
The ever-popular conspiracy theory. No home should be without one.
The interesting pyrotechnics of the day had played a part – how could you write while pocket thunderstorms kept coming and going over the water?
He was as surprised as anyone when the excrement hit the cooling device. He.
The editor is always right.
Why do people do that to gifted people? Is it jealousy? Fear? Both, maybe. But this kid had the advantage of knowing how good he was.
He used to watch NBC until he decided Brian Williams was a good-natured goof who’s too fond of YouTube videos.
It’s eternity in there.
And in the bug, which moved upward more surely on the gentler grade, he kept looking out between them as the road unwound, affording occasional glimpses of the Overlook Hotel, its massive bank of westward-looking windows reflecting back the sun. It was the place he had seen in the midst of the blizzard, the dark and booming place where some hideously familiar figure sought him down long corridors carpeted with jungle.
I doubt if this is God’s doing. I suspect he’ll keep right out of it as a consequence.
Few if any seemed to have grasped the truest principle of reality: new knowledge leads always to yet more awesome mysteries.
I often think, Cap, that we fought the war in Vietnam not to win but to perform feats of technology. We fought it in order to create the cheap digital wristwatch, the home Ping-Pong game that hooks up to one’s TV, the pocket calculator. I look at my new wristwatch in the dark of night. It tells me I am closer to my death, second by second. That is good news.
His hands had dropped to the worn butts of his guns. “Those do not open doors, gunslinger; those only close them forever.