College was for people who didn’t know they were smart.
Harold glared sullenly at him again, the eyes those of a piggy little boy who wants the whole cookie jar to himself. Ain’t he going to be surprised, Stu thought, when he finds out a girl isn’t a jar of cookies.
Compared to the dullest human being actually walking about on the face of the earth and casting his shadow there,” Hardy supposedly said, “the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones.” I understood because that was what I felt like in those interminable, dissembling days: a bag of bones.
Tell you what, why don’t you think of whoever wrote your first good book? I’m talking about the one that got under you like a magic carpet and lifted you right off the ground. Do you know what I’m talking about?” They know. It’s on every face that faces his.
But it was a dreadful kind of curiosity, the kind that makes you peek through your fingers during the scariest parts of a scary movie.
If you want to write, you write. The only way to learn to write is by writing.
The way those old memories kept bubbling to the surface in the present tense was disturbing. It was as if the past had never died; as if on some level of time’s great tower, everything was still happening.
He used to say what you deserve has nothing to do with where you finish.
He wanted what evil men always want: to have power and use that power to make mischief.
I always wondered about growing up. I bet it’s mostly lies.
But of course it had hurt. It had hurt before, in the worst, rupturing way, knowing there would be no more you but the universe would roll on just the same, unharmed and unhampered.
Loss changes you. Sometimes that’s bad. Sometimes it’s good. Either way, you eat your goddam pork chop and go on.
The Black Angel came up from the roots and down from the branches. Her fingers are death and her hair is full of cobwebs and dream is her kingdom.
Oddly, the burned hand didn’t seem to hurt much anymore; it was only numb. It would have been better if there had been pain. Pain was at least real.
Save your hate for those who deserve it more.
There’s nothing I like better than a good book discussion with someone who can hold up his end of the argument.
In the end it was Tabby who cast the deciding vote, as she so often has at crucial moments in my life. I’d like to think I’ve done the same for her from time to time, because it seems to me that one of the things marriage is about is casting the tiebreaking vote when you just can’t decide what you should do next.
Stories are found things, like fossils in the ground... Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered, pre-existing world.
Having a breakdown was like breaking a vase and then gluing it back together. You could never trust yourself to handle that vase again with any surety. You couldn’t put a flower in it because flowers need water and water might dissolve the glue. Am I crazy, then?
Maybe this isn’t home, nor ever was- maybe home is where I have to go tonight. Home is the place where when you go there, you have to finally face the thing in the dark.