No they’re not,” he said. It was the voice of a man stating a simple fact.
A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger. That is not, of course, the same thing as an affair or a marriage, but kisses can be sweet, and their very brevity forms their own attraction.
Tattoo Man in his fishtop cap and dark glasses and sandy blond goatee. You could see the bird tattoo on his hand because the rawhide gloves had stayed in his back pocket until he and Linda Gray were in.
Creepy as hell. You ever see that TV movie about the clown in the sewer?” Hodges shook his head. Later – only weeks before his retirement – he bought a DVD copy of the film, and Pete was right. The mask-face was very close to the face of Pennywise, the clown in the movie.
Cancer is the pitbull of diseases, and it had her in its jaws, biting and rending. It would not stop until it had torn her to pieces.
I was drunk and half killed with fuckin.
Books were his Achilles heel. She.
I feel like a man standing at the mouth of an old mine-shaft that is full of cave-ins waiting to happen, standing there and saying goodbye to the daylight.
You be careful. I’d take you myself, but I’m busy as a cat in a mess of guitar strings.
I hate the assumption that you can’t write about something because you haven’t experienced it, and not just because it assumes a limit on the human imagination, which is basically limitless.
In that moment she hated him, loathed him, this good man she had married. There was really nothing so terrible on the reverse side of his goodness, his steadiness, his mild good humor – just the belief, apparently grounded in the bedrock of his soul, that everybody was looking out for number one, each with his or her own little racket.
Do we understand the implications of the things we create? Underlying this is another: Once created, can anything be un-created?
Do you know if there’s a supermarket in this mall?” The voice is young. And white. Morris discovers he can breathe again. “Safeway,” he says, without turning. He has no idea if there’s a supermarket in the mall or not. “Oh. Okay. Thanks.
The great social, moral, and spiritual battles of the ages boiled down to Sandy McDougall slamming her snot-nosed kid in the corner and the kid would grow up and slam his own kid in the corner, world without end, hallelujah, chunky peanut butter. Hail Mary, full of grace, help me win this stock-car race.
It’s gonna be all right,” he told her, and rocked her, not really believing it, but it was the litany, it was the Psalter, the voice of the adult calling down the black well of years into the miserable pit of terrorized childhood; it was what you said when things went wrong; it was the nightlight that could not banish the monster from the closet but perhaps only keep it at bay for a little while; it was the voice without power that must speak nevertheless.
Emily Dickinson said her poem was her letter to the world that never wrote to her, they read that in school, but Barbara herself has never written a letter at all.
Keeping body and soul together is an annoying business, as I suppose you know.
It was over. We had once again succeeded in destroying what we could not create. Some of the folks in the audience had begun talking in.
In God we trust,” I said. “All others pay cash.
Nailed it. So okay. The media says, ‘Girls, women, you can be anything you want to be in this brave new world of equality, as long as you can still see your toes when you stand up straight.’” He has been watching me, Gwendy thinks, because I do that every day when I get to the top. She blushes. She can’t help it, but the blush is a surface thing. Below it is a kind of so-what defiance. It’s what got her going on the stairs in the first place. That and Frankie Stone.