Which is what most of our modern communications amount to, when you stop to think of it; chatter for the sake of chatter.
She came to him then and lifted her arms to be picked up, something he could not remember her doing for a long time-maybe two years. It was amazing how time got by, how quickly a child could change, change in front of your eyes with an unobtrusiveness that was nearly terrible.
The idea of ghosts gave his child’s mind no trouble at all... According to the Bible, God Himself was at least one-third Ghost.
Henry did not want to be fixed, was somehow convinced that the fix would be a lie, something that would lessen him.
One of the factors that made us powerful in those years was being raised with the same ideas, one of which was that you didn’t ask for help unless you absolutely had to, and maybe not even then...
Ralph reflected for a moment on the similarities between loneliness and insomnia – how they were both insidious, cumulative, and divisive, the friends of despair and the enemies of love.
And almost idly, in a kind of side-thought, Eddie discovered one of his child-hood’s great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.
That was it. In Annie’s view all the people in the world were divided into three groups: brats, poor poor things... and Annie.
Time passes and everything gets bigger except us.
Books are good, and I read my share, and TV’s okay if you’re stuck in a motel room during a rainstorm, but for Jamie Morton, there was nothing like a movie up there on the big screen.
For months – sometimes even years, as I tried to explain to you – time hardly seems to exist. Then everything comes in a gasp.
I don’t talk about this much, because it embarrasses me and it sounds pompous, but I still see stories as a great thing, something which not only enhances lives but actually saves them.
Thomas Ross appears to have been something of a rarity: a socially conscious young man.
No cancer, if that’s what you’re thinking, she’d say if anyone commented on her runway-model thinness, which she ordinarily disguised with billowing dresses or caftans. I’m just in training for the final lap around the track.
Terror – what Hunter Thompson calls “fear and loathing” – often arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment; that things are in the unmaking. If that sense of unmaking is sudden and seems personal – if it hits you around the heart – then it lodges in the memory as a complete set.
She was wearing a tank-top with torn-off sleeves. It gave an awfully generous view of her breasts for a girl worried about meeting Ted Bundy in a Ryder van.
All the same, you don’t do it for money, or you’re a monkey. You don’t think of the bottom line, or you’re a monkey. You don’t think of it in terms of hourly wage, yearly wage, even lifetime wage, or you’re a monkey. In the end you don’t even do it for love, although it would be nice to think so. You do it because to not do it is suicide.
And that’s where I want to finish out my life, Red. In a warm place that has no memory.
Everything seemed to stand out with a special dearness, and although I never could have said that out loud I didn’t think it mattered – maybe that sense of dearness was something I wanted just for myself.
Your friend the Turtle... He died a few years ago. The old idiot puked inside his shell and choked to death on a galaxy or two. Very sad, don’t you think? But also quite bizarre.