Their situation was becoming ever harder to deny: they were characters in someone’s story. This whole world –.
Go with your bad self.
I suspect that fright, like pain, is one of those things that slip our minds once they have passed. What I do remember is a feeling I’d had before when I was down here, especially when I was walking this road by myself. It was a sense that reality is thin. I think it is thin, you know, thin as lake ice after a thaw, and we fill our lives with noise and light and motion to hide that thinness from ourselves.
Ree was okay, but she was like a toddler, how silence made her anxious. Ree was in for credit fraud, forgery, and drug possession with intent to sell.
When you planned rough, you allowed room for improvisation.
Our lesson for today, boys and girls, is the more things change, the more things change. Whoever said the more things change the more things stay the same was obviously suffering severe mental retardation.
The human brain is finite – no more than a sponge of tissue inside a cage of bone – but the mind within the brain is infinite. Its storage capacity is colossal, its imaginative reach beyond our ability to comprehend. I think when a man or woman dies, a whole world falls to ruin – the world that person knew and believed in. Think of that, kiddo – billions of people on earth, and each one of those billions with a world inside. The earth their minds have conceived.
Try not to think of a polar bear, Fyodor Dostoyevsky once said, and you will see the cursed thing come to mind every minute.
Harold knew things. It was good that he did, but it was also rather spooky, as if they had a fifth-rate god traveling with them – more or less omniscient, but emotionally unstable and likely to fragment at any time.
It was only later, replaying the scene in her mind again and again, that she began to believe it was the expression of a man who was methodically unplugging himself from reality, one cord at a time. The face of a man who was heading out of the blue and into the black.
All is silent in the halls of the dead,” Eddie heard himself whisper in a falling, fainting voice. “All is forgotten in the stone halls of the dead. Behold the stairways which stand in darkness; behold the rooms of ruin. These are the halls of the dead where the spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet, one by one.
The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them. It’s hard to make strangers care about the good things in your life.
Jesus shined-up Christ on a trailer hitch.
My daddy used to tell me that God loved rocks, houseflies, weeds, and poor people above all the rest of His creations, and that’s why He made so many of them.
There are no atheists in the foxholes, I’ve been told, and precious few agnostics in the Intensive Care ward.
If you can’t afford a movie, go to the zoo. If you can’t afford the zoo, go see a politician.
Her heart was pounding hard, not with excitement but with fear. The head could tell the heart all that was eighteen years over, but in matters of emotion the heart had its own brilliant vocabulary.
Darkness loves him. He dances with it like a lover and the moon comes up over the purple hill and what was sweet smells sour. Smells like poison.
Lecture all you want, you picked me up when I was down and I guess I owe you that, but don’t tell me about pain. Nobody knows unless they’re on the inside.
His fingers were permanently yellowed with chalk dust rather than nicotine, but it was still the residue of an addicting substance.