They ought to make it a law that you have to get a license, or at least a learner’s permit, before you’re allowed to talk. Until you pass your Talker’s Test, you should have to be a mute.
We turn from all we know and all we fear.
His voice was a deep and quiet rumble. It made me think of a freshly tuned tractor engine... He didn’t sound illiterate, but he didn’t sound educated. In his speech as in so many other things, he was a mystery. Mostly it was his eyes that troubled me – a kind of peaceful absence in them, as if he were floating far, far away.
Roland opened his eyes and said, “Goodbye, Jake. I love you, dear.
Put not your trust in the princes of this world, for they will frig thee up and so shalt their governments, even unto the end of the earth.
There’s no tonic like an old friend.
There may be some truth in that idea houses absorb the emotions that are spent in them.
Sometimes death is natural, a mercy that puts an end to suffering. But all too often it comes as an assassin, full of senseless cruelty and lacking any vestige of compassion.
It’s the people who aren’t scared who die young.
The word is only a representation of the meaning; even at its best, writing almost always falls short of full meaning. Given that, why in God’s name would you want to make things words by choosing a word which is only cousin to the one you really wanted to use?
Like all sweet dreams, it will be brief... but brevity makes sweetness, doesn’t it? Yes, I think so. Because when the time is gone, you can never get it back.
Can a dead buck with good insurance make a little dough?
You realize that you are in a hell of your own making, but you go on nevertheless. Because there is nothing else to do.
Let it eat her; let it beat her. It could do both. But she would not beat herself.
There is a skull in every man, and I tell you there is a skull in the lives of all men. They saw it that day, those men. They saw what sometimes grins behind the smile.
Trump and his cronies took it all back. They understand culture no more than a donkey understands algebra.
Here’s something else I believe: if you’re going into a very dark place – like Wilf James’s Nebraska farmhouse in “1922” – then you should take a bright light, and shine it on everything. If you don’t want to see, why in God’s name would you dare the dark at all?
I must accept those things over which I have no control. I must turn my adversities into advantages.
The pain wasn’t tidal. That was the lesson of the dream which was really a memory. The pain only appeared to come and go. The pain was like the piling, sometimes covered and sometimes visible, but always there.
Although they had been honed like hawks toward the guns since early childhood, Cuthbert and Alain still carried an erroneous belief common to many boys their age: that their elders were also their betters, at least in such matters as planning and wit; they actually believed that grownups knew what they were doing.