Understanding is vastly overrated, but nobody ever gets enough safety.
Storytelling always changes time.
I knew there were no ghosts in there, but on the other hand, what if there were?
And she’s got her old number. 19. We saved it for her special.
A little chill touched him and he looked down at the bright plastic grass, wondering why it had to be a part of every funeral. It looked like exactly what it was: a cheap imitation of life discreetly masking the heavy brown clods of the final earth.
Never tell to much. The monster is always scarier when it is still under the child’s bed.
Luke Ellis was the guy who went out of his way to be social so people wouldn’t think he was a weirdo as well as a brainiac. He checked all the correct interaction boxes and then went back to his books. Because there was an abyss, and books contained magical incantations to raise what was hidden there: all the great mysteries. For Luke, those mysteries mattered. Someday, in the future, he might write books of his own.
It’s like my mother used to say – people have more fun than anybody, except for horses, and they can’t.
I can’t explain. Or want to. Explanations are such cheap poetry.
In the end we always wear out our worries.
Love was over, and her man was sleeping beside her. Her man. She smiled a little in the darkness, his seed still trickling with slow warmth from between her slightly parted thighs, and her smile was both rueful and pleased, because the phrase her man summoned up a hundred feelings. Each feeling examined alone was a bewilderment. Together, in this darkness floating to sleep, they were like a distant blues tune heard in an almost deserted nightclub, melancholy but pleasing.
When I called it quits, I stopped in the lobby to thank the concierge again for letting me use Mr. Kipling’s beautiful desk. “I’m so glad you enjoyed it,” he replied. He was wearing a misty, reminiscent little smile, as if he had known the writer himself. “Kipling died there, actually. Of a stroke. While he was writing.
People. People drag you down.
A man’s life was five dogs long, Cortland believed.
Yes. And if you don’t start calling me Ralph, Holly, I’ll have to arrest you.
Shake the hand that shook the world.
He wandered off into the stacks, pulling a book here and there, looking at it, putting it back. Choosing books was serious business. You had to be careful. If you were a grownup you could have as many as you wanted, but kids could only take out three at a time. If you picked a dud, you were stuck with it.
I stayed, though, because boredom is good. People with a high tolerance for boredom can get a lot of thinking done.
It is the flush, Judge Beecher thinks, of a man who enjoys his tipple.
When a good animal gets run down in the road, a kid never forgets.