He looked at the road quite a lot now. Sometimes the white line was solid, sometimes it was broken, and sometimes it was double like streetcar tracks. He wondered how people could ride over this road all the other days of the year and not see the pattern of life and death in that white paint. Or did they see, after all?
I’m not much of a believer in the so-called character story; I think that in the end, the story should always be the boss.
When he got to the tank’s flat, circular cap, it seemed that he must be standing directly under the roof of the world, and if he reached up he could scratch blue chalk from the bottom of the sky with his fingernails.
Go in peace, boys. And return in health.
And if you put your ear to that door, you could hear the winds of madness blowing outside.
Jesus, sometimes I can’t believe how dumb people can be. They ought to make it a law that you have to get a license, or at least a learner’s permit, before you’re allowed to talk. Until you pass your Talker’s Test, you should have to be a mute. It would solve a lot of problems.
The sludge caught in the mind’s filter, the stuff that refuses to go through, frequently becomes each person’s private obsession.
As W. H. Auden pointed out, the Reaper takes the rolling in money, the screamingly funny, and those who are very well hung. But.
Above the TV was a framed picture of Jesus bringing a boy and girl a puppy. I was in no way surprised. In flyover country, they have a way of getting Christ and Santa all mixed up.
I almost kissed her then, but lost my courage. Boys can be dopes.
Only, like most thieves who don’t get caught – our current governor might be a case in point – he called himself a businessman.
Was it possible, she wondered crazily, to prepare for a heart attack? Patty ran her tongue.
Still, his curiosity itched at him as maddeningly as poison ivy in a place you aren’t supposed to scratch.
I unrolled my window to get away from the cigarette smog a little and watched a different world roll by.
I’ve been worried about you,” she says when they’re settled in the kitchen. She has the bright, inquisitive gaze of a crow with its eye on a freshly squashed chipmunk.
He had never been a Boy Scout, but believed in being prepared.
For the first time in his life, Roland found himself hating his own childhood. He wished for the size and calluses and sureness of age.
This is one of Its places, all right, Ben thought. One of the places like the Morlock holes, where It goes out and comes back in. And It knows we’re out here. It’s waiting for us to come in. “Yuh-yuh-you.
Art consists of the persistence of memory.
You train and re-train, so that when six hours of absolute boredom become twelve seconds of maximum danger, you know exactly what to do.