Loosen up, ” Mr. Keene said again. “Most of your trouble, Eddie, comes from being so tight and stiff all the time. Take your asthma, for instance. Look here.
It’s true what they say – sometimes the neuros are crazier than the patients.
I went into the can and shut the door before he had a chance to reply. And the next fifteen seconds or so were pure relief. Like beer, iced tea is something can can’t buy, only rent.
That done, he let his fingers play briefly over the magneto.
The energy you drew on so extravagantly when you were a kid, the energy you thought would never exhaust itself – that slipped away somewhere between eighteen and twenty-four, to be replaced by something much duller, something as bogus as a coke high: purpose, maybe, or goals, or whatever rah-rah Junior Chamber of Commerce word you wanted to use.
Did I grow a third eye?
Although emotionally delicate and eminently bruisable, teenagers are short on empathy.
The perception of a child who has not yet learned to protect itself by developing the tunnel vision that keeps out ninety percent of the universe.
Our greatest moments of triumph are always inarticulate.
Annie Wilkes was the perfect audience, a woman who loved stories without having the slightest interest in the mechanics of making them. She was the embodiment of that Victorian archetype, Constant Reader.
It’s hard for me to think of what happened next, let alone write it down, but I must, if only as a warning for anyone else who contemplates some similar experiment in damnation, and may read these words, and turn back because of them.
I opened the door of the Mercedes and got in. Man, that smell. It’s leather, but not just leather. You know how, in Monopoly, there’s a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card? When you’re rich enough to afford a car that smells like Mr. Sharpton’s gray Mercedes, you must have a Get-Out-of-Everything-Free card.
Puppies are God’s idea of a perfect workout program.
When they argue they’re like greyhounds chasing the mechanical rabbit. You go past the same scenery time after time, but you don’t see the landscape. You see the rabbit.
Once, in a kingdom called Delain, there was a King with two sons. Delain was a very old kingdom and it had had hundreds of Kings, perhaps even thousands; when time goes on long enough, not even historians can remember everything.
The thought that grieving for a fictional character was absurd did more than cross his mind during his tossings and turnings. For grieving was exactly what he was doing, of course.
Lips which lie are best kept silent.
While talking to Darla, another of Scott’s old maxims had occurred to her: the harder you had to work to open a package, the less you ended up caring about what was inside.
So it always has been; so shall it be, life sucks, then you die.
I think most people who have suffered great losses in their lives – great tragedies – come to a crossroads. Maybe not right then, but when the shock wears off. It may be months later; it may be years. They either expand as a result of their experience, or they contract. If that sounds New Age-y – and I suppose it does – I don’t apologize. I know what I’m talking about.