The miracle of returning consciousness. Not for the first time he wondered where it came from, and where it went when it departed. Death was no less a miracle than birth.
The graves and monuments were in rough rows. Somewhere there would be a caretaker’s building, and in it would be a map of Pleasantview’s twenty or so acres, neatly and sanely divided into quadrants, each quadrant showing the occupied graves and the unsold plots. Real estate for sale. One-room apartments. Sleepers.
Sane people don’t sacrifice children on the altar of probability. That’s not science, it’s superstition.
Some of these stories have been previously published, but that doesn’t mean they were done then, or even that they’re done now. Until a writer either retires or dies, the work is not finished; it can always use another polish and a few more revisions. There’s also a bunch of new ones. Something else I want you to know: how glad I am, Constant Reader, that we’re both still here. Cool, isn’t it? –.
But the people didn’t elect buffoons to Washington. Well – hardly ever.
Sane men will often take a hint,” Mr. Kenopensky said. “Crazy men rarely do.
He also had a version of Billy Goat’s Gruff where the troll under the bridge ended up the winner.
The stench in the air grew steadily stronger, and the dark about us seemed to press like wool, as if jealous of the light which had temporarily deposed it after so many years of undisputed dominion.
Do you see this heart-stopping beauty? Look closely, because in a moment your heart will stop.
It was the Tower. The Dark Tower. It stood on the horizon of a vast plain the color of blood in the violent setting of a dying sun. He couldn’t see the stairs which spiraled up and up and up within its brick shell, but he could see the windows which spiraled up along that staircase’s way, and saw the ghosts of all the people he had ever known pass through them. Up and up they marched, and an arid wind brought him the sound of voices calling his name.
He was a romantic, he knew it, and he guarded the knowledge jealously.
Selective memory is one of the chief sins of the old, and I don’t have time for it.
That look is all the rage among dead women this summer, I thought.
And watch out for the blade, Constant Reader. It is a Stephen King story, after all.
At the same moment a cold chill traced a finger down the middle of my back. Sometimes things come back to you, that’s all. Sometimes they come back.
It’s from Balzac. ‘Behind every great fortune there is a crime.’ That was the theme I saw, even though the fortune ran through his fingers long before he was shot down in Cicero.
You try to tell yourself that you’ve been lucky, most incredibly lucky, and usually that works because it’s true. Sometimes it doesn’t work, that’s all. Then you cry.
There were games and activities as well as sermons, because, as he pointed out regularly, most of Jesus’s preaching happened outside, and that meant there was more to Christianity than church.
He died of a heart attack two months later, in Tamazunchale’s open-air market, while dickering for fresh tomatoes. I thought there would be time, but we always think stuff like that, don’t we? We fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living.
When I made pictures, I fell in love with the world. When I made pictures, I felt whole.