It was that kind of story. The kind that’s like a sneeze which threatens but never quite arrives.
They stood on the porch in the fading light, Jack in the middle, his left arm around Danny’s shoulders and his right arm around Wendy’s waist. Together they watched as the decision was taken out of their hands.
In a real dark night of the soul, Scott Fitzgerald had said, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.
Life is short and pain is long...
Because ka was like a fish, ka was like a sand dune, ka was like a wheel that didn’t want to stop but only to roll on and on, crushing whatever might happen to be in its path. A wheel of many spokes.
So turn off the television – in fact, why don’t you turn off all the lights except for the one over your favorite chair? – and we’ll talk about vampires here in the dim. I think I can make you believe in them, because while I was working on this book, I believed in them myself.
But the pistol, this Walther... it was as if it had been made for the express purpose of shooting people. With a chill Richie realized that was why it had been made. What else could you do with a pistol? Use it to light your cigarettes?
May we have happy days, satisfied minds, and little or no low back pain.
There’s little good in sedentary small towns. Mostly indifference spiced with an occasional vapid evil – or worse, a conscious one.
God’s voice is still and small, the voice of a sparrow in a cyclone, so said the prophet Isaiah, and we all say thankya. It’s hard to hear a small voice clearly if you’re shitass drunk most of the time.
It seemed to him that if the wrong man stepped into the marriage-loop with a woman, it was a noose instead of a ring.
You laugh because what’s fearful and unknown is also what’s funny, you laugh the way a small child will sometimes laugh and cry at the same time when a capering circus clown approaches, knowing it is supposed to be funny... but it is also unknown, full of the unknown’s eternal power.
He bought her six dresses, and I brought her god-damned cat back from the dead, so who loves her more?!
The seeds sown in childhood put down deep roots.
It occurred to him later that this was when he began to love the boy – which was, of course, what the man in black must have planned all along. Was there ever a trap to match the trap of love?
My heart was full of hate and love and regret-all those things that have haunted me ever since.
If you can’t love anybody today, at least try not to hurt anybody.
She looked at Danny. His face was all eyes. His mouth was pressed into a frightened, bloodless slit.
I say, if you can’t laugh you might as well laugh anyway.
Sometimes you just have to do what you can and try to live with it.