Because writers remember everything, Paul. Especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he’ll tell you the story of each small one. From the big ones you get novels, not amnesia. A little talent is a nice thing to have if you want to be a writer, but the only real requirement is that ability to remember the story of every scar.
Your mother has been using the old yardsticks all her life, and she can’t change now.
I woke up. I didn’t scream. That night I kept the scream in my throat. Just barely. I sat up in my bed, a cold puddle of moonlight caught in a lapful of sheet, and I thought, Died suddenly. That night I didn’t get back to sleep so quickly.
Then you start to see things, Lloydy-my-boy. Things you missed from the gutter. Like how the floor of the Wagon is nothing but straight pine boards, so fresh they’re still bleeding sap, and if you took your shoes off you’d be sure to get a splinter.
Pain skewered his guts again, and fresh blood squirted out into his hand. It felt like warm jelly. He put his head back.
All I have is intuition and a little hope.” “Don’t be such a pessimist. You’ve also got two tires, two garbage bags, and a hollow spindle.
They called him Mir, which to these people meant “the world beneath the world.
That was also true of Morris Bellamy, a crazy literature buff who had killed his favorite writer.
Was there even such a thing as normall? People had terrible things behing their faces sometimes. He knew that now.
How old did you have to be to put one over on your mother, anyway? Twenty? Thirty? Or did you maybe have to wait until she got old and a little chicken-soupy in the head?
They had been married so long that they had become almost exquisitely attuned to each other. Did that happen in every marriage? She didn’t know. She only knew her own. Except now she had to wonder if she even knew that one.
Billy Ederle’s leaning in the doorway, drinking a Nozzy.
As he was shaking off, it came to Jake Chambers that the Pere would never do this again, or grin at him and point his finger; or cross himself before eating. They had killed him. Taken his life. Stopped his breath and pulse. Save for dreams, the Pere was now gone from the story. Jake began to cry.
You could be stung, but you could also sting back. He believed that sincerely.
The dancing sickness took place during the latter part of the fifteenth century. Bubonic plague – the black death – decimated Europe near the end of the fourteenth. Whooping cough near the end of the seventeenth, and the first known outbreaks of influenza near the end of the nineteenth. We’ve become so used to the idea of the flu – it seems almost like the common cold to us, doesn’t it? – that no one but the historians seem to know that a hundred years ago it didn’t exist.
Auburn, catching up with his homies.
In one way, at least, our lives really are like movies.
Ghosts, in the end, adopt the motivations and perhaps the very souls of those who behold them. If they are malevolent, their malevolence comes from us.
Momma,’ he said, ’haven’t you thought that God’s will was for some doctor to invent that drug so you could live longer?
Bad news should always come after lunch... first thing in the morning everything left a bruise.