Boring and unpleasant did not mean a task was unfruitful, a fact a lot of people seemed not to know, or to willfully ignore.
I felt pretty good, actually. When you’re still too young to shave, optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure.
Tommy died in 1969. He was a hippie with leukemia. Bummer, man.
The Echo was a rag specializing in yard sales, area sports, and town politics. The residents scanned those things, he supposed, but mostly bought the paper for the obituaries and Police Beat. Everybody liked to know which of their neighbors had died or been jailed.
You may be sorry later, but you’ll find them, and once a thing is found it can’t be unfound, can it?
The answer seems to be that we make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones. With the endless inventiveness of humankind, we grasp the very elements which are so divisive and destructive and try to turn them into tools – to dismantle themselves.
Dad-a-dhuck, dad-a-churtle, don’t worry, girl, you’ve got the turtle!
He did it with a teacher’s natural assumptions: lecturing was his responsibility, interruption his privilege.
Frankie and Carter Thibodeau would revert to what they’d been before: smalltown losers with little or no jingle in their pockets.
It is only a deep echo, perhaps a reverberation of her husband’s madness, as soft as a rustle of batwings in a cave.
Once I was chattel, but now that is obsolete. My days of slavery must be over; I need to be a slave no more than I need to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a tiny boat with sails. Jet planes are safer and quicker than little boats with sails and freedom makes more sense than slavery. I am not afraid of flying.
In southern Wales, dozens of teens hung themselves between 2007 and 2009, with messages on social networking sites stoking the craze. Even the goodbyes they left were couched in Netspeak: Me2 and CU L8er.
Sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and a coincidence is just a coincidence.
They are sitting in Gwendy’s bedroom after school, listening to the new Billy Joel album and supposedly studying for an English mid-term.
Maybe he sells fear because he’s got nothing else to sell.
May you live long, but not in good health.
He tapped the remaining pieces into place with a satisfaction that went all the way back to rainy days at summer camp. Where, he now realized, the common room had been quite a bit like this. Life was a short shelf that came with bookends.
No,” Roland said, “but it’s a fair tale. Tell it to the end, please.” Eddie did, finishing with the required They lived happily ever after, and the gunslinger nodded. “No one ever does live happily ever after, but we leave the children to find that out for themselves, don’t we?” “Yeah,” Jake said.
She reflected on how her caller had pronounced husband – almost husbun, as though Scott had been some exotic breakfast treat, now consumed.
The sleep you didn’t get one night sometimes came to you on the next, and then it came like a lover.