For every thing you find that’s of comfort... there are two with the power to hurt.
Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right – as right as you can, anyway – it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it. If you’re very lucky... more will want to do the former than the latter.
Clay Blaisdell Western.
Once was memorable; twice would have been indelible. Maybe.
We never get so mad as when we get caught, do we?
Something lived in there, all right. He could smell it, a stench that made him think of damp plaster and moldering sofas and ancient mattresses rotting beneath half-liquid coats of mildew. It was familiar, that smell.
You know how, on a bright day, you can close your eyes and see an afterimage of whatever you were just looking at? It was like that.
It was as if the heart had been burned out of her and the sadness which remained was just another ghost, the memory of love haunting the bones of hate.
Because it was frightening, they swept it quickly from their minds.
Nice talk,” he hears Lennie say dimly from the insane universe where God has clearly died and lies stinking on the floor of a pillaged heaven.
Dan wasn’t bothered by the cold; nestled beneath two down comforters, he was warm as tea and toast. Yet the wind had found its way inside his head just as it found its way under the sashes and doorsills of the old Victorian he now called home. In his dream, he could hear it moaning around the hotel where he had spent one winter as a little boy. In his dream, he was that little boy.
They were American people and there was a kind of dirty, compelling romance about them whenever they were in groups – never.
You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair – the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.
Except you can’t put anything behind you. Nothing is lost until death. You wear your history like a necklace, a smelly one made of garlic. Whether you tuck it under your collar or let it dangle loose, nothing is lost.
Yeah,” he said. “When Tina came home, I made her peanut butter crackers.
I think telling stories is like pushing something. Pushing against uncreation itself, maybe. And one day while you were doing that, you felt something pushing back.
Driving is the only means of transportation that is not fully regulated by federal law. As a result, all the operators are amateurs. Many of these amateurs are suicidal.
Because the past isn’t just obdurate; it’s in harmony with both itself and the future. I experienced that harmony time and again.
Once Tim asked his father what civilized meant. “Taxes,” Big Ross said, and laughed –.
Something that sounded like an insect droned past Ralph’s ear. He had an idea it was a .45-caliber bug. Better hurry up, sweetheart, Carolyn advised. When bullets hit you on this level they kill you, remember?