You don’t stop being a kid all at once, with a big explosive bang, like one of that clown’s trick balloons. The kid in you just leaked out, like the air out of a tire. And one day you looked in the mirror and there was a grownup looking back at you.
Alcoholics build defenses like the Dutch build dikes.
I have spent a good many years since – too many, I think – being ashamed about what I write.
I think so but can’t say for sure, because passing time adds false memories and modifies real ones.
Shut up, Willy. Mister, you gonna buy anything? Pa says we can’t shut down for the day until we get thirty dollars’ worth of custom.” “I’ll buy a pumpkin. If you can give me some decent directions.” She gave a theatrical sigh. “One pumpkin. A buck-fifty. Big whoop.
Like attending the masquerade ball in Poe’s story about the Red Death. You know, ‘Come on, everybody! Kick out the jams, have another glass of champagne, and ignore all those people dropping like flies.
At nineteen, it seems to me, one has a right to be arrogant; time has usually not begun its stealthy and rotten subtractions.
Her face is seamed with a million wrinkles like the map of a state where the geography hasn’t settled down – rivers and canyons along her brown leather cheeks, ridges below the knob of her chin, the sinuous raised drumlin of bone at the base of her forehead, the caves of her eyes.
Maybe Timlin was wrong about the nothing. It was possible. In a world where you could look up and see an eternal hallway of stars, he reckoned anything was. Maybe – Maybe. Gandalf.
Not all of them who waded into the waters of Lethe found it necessary to take a bath in it, but there were enough – kids who had made dreams their protein.
I learned about the right jack, double runs, being stuck in the mudhole, and what Andy called “mystic nineteen” – the so-called impossible hand.
As for the reaction of his colleagues – all those hoicked eyebrows – Wesley discovered he relished the prospect. Which led to an interesting insight into human nature, or at least the human nature of the academic: one liked to be perceived by one’s students as Old School, but by one’s peers as New School. I.
The Werewolf crossed the rutted path just as Bill pedaled into the middle of Neibolt Street. Blood splattered its faded jeans, and looking back over his shoulder, filled with a kind of dreadful, unbreakable fascination that was akin to hypnosis, Richie saw that the seams.
It was a table that could seat six, but Ben was the only one there. She had never seen Ben with any of the other boys. It was too bad, because she believed Ben Hanscom had treasures buried inside. He would yield them up to a kind and patient prospector... if one ever came along.
Those eyes filled him with the paralyzed, hopeless horror that the hen feels for the weasel.
The rats are probably back already, a voice deep in my mind whispered. Eating her. They’ll finish the good parts, the tasty parts, the delicacies, and then.
I’m so glad to see someone, who cares if it’s a deaf-mute and a retard.
A feeling that all his hard decisions, all the pain and loss and spilled blood, had not been for nothing, after all. There was a reason. There was a purpose. There was life and love.
I buy the same ground chuck week after week. I’ve fed it to hundreds or thousands of people, in spite of those stupid catburger rumors, and it always renews itself.
Wegen meiner Pflicht bin ich verdammt. Und weshalb sollten sich die Verdammten abwenden?