One cannot increase one’s talent – that comes with the package – but it is possible to keep talent from shrinking.
What sad, short lives humans live! Each life a short pamphlet written by an idiot! Tut-tut, and all that.
For over a long period of time there’s little in life so disheartening as constant cold – not deep enough to kill, mayhap, but always there, stealing your energy and your will and your body-fat, an ounce at a time.
Some moments are beyond imagination.
Energy has a way of dissipating, you know; what can be done when you’re eleven can often never be done again.
And there he would either be mercifully annihilated or live forever, insane and yet conscious inside It’s homicidal endless formless hungry being.
Across the room was a mirror, and deep down in its silver bubble a single word appeared in green fire and that word was: REDRUM.
The world’s most brilliant confabulators are in asylums.
Most politicians lie for the same reason a monkey swings by his tail, which is to say because he can.
And so thinking, she slipped not into sleep, but into that umbilical cord which connects sleeping and waking.
I tried to take it back, but it was too late.
There’s really no just about it, is there?
It’s God’s nature to come on in the bottom of the ninth, Tom had told her.
Henry Thoreau said that we don’t own things; things own us. Every new object – whether it’s a home, a car, a television, or a fancy phone like that one – is something more we must carry on our backs.
When you thought about it, it was sort of a blue-eyed wonder that women could love the best of them, let alone the rest of them.
Thinking that if a person did begin considering supernatural possibilities, that person would no longer be able to think of himself as a completely sane person, and thinking about one’s sanity was maybe not a good thing. It was like thinking about your heartbeat: if you had to go there, you might already be in trouble.
You stole my story and something’s got to be done about it.
Pain was a tool, after all. Sometimes it was the best tool.
I never grew up all at once. I did it one place and another along the way.
What great wrong did you ever do that you should inspire such terrible loyalty in so many?