Writing does not cause misery, it is born of misery. – Montaigne.
Everything leads to this, he thought. To this elevation. If it’s how dying feels, everyone should be glad to go.
Now that he wanted to feel like he was having a bad dream, he wasn’t. He was having a bad reality, and that was something from which you could not wake.
But how you feel and how long you feel it doesn’t always have a lot to do with objective truth.
If fiction and politics ever really do become interchangeable, I’m going to kill myself, because I won’t know what else to do. You see, politics always change. Stories never do.
Women’s lib, Frannie had decided, was nothing more nor less than an outgrowth of the technological society. Women were at the mercy of their bodies. They were smaller. They tended to be weaker. A man couldn’t get with child, but a woman could – every four-year-old knows it. And a pregnant woman is a vulnerable human being. Civilization had provided an umbrella of sanity that both sexes could stand beneath.
We all die in time,” the gunslinger said. “It’s not just the world that moves on.
When all the normal patterns and routines of a person’s life fell apart – and with such shocking suddenness – you had to find something you could hold onto, something that was both sane and predictable.
Winnie, but I don’t believe in sin.” He smiled. It was a benevolent smile. Also unpleasant: sheep lips, wolf teeth. “That’s fine. But sin believes in you.
If someone had asked him, “Ben, are you lonely?, ” he would have looked at that someone with real surprise. The question had never even occurred to him. He had no friends, but he had his books and his dreams...
And fire was evil stuff that delighted in escaping the hands which created it.
The Internet is a bright house standing above a dark cellar with a dirt floor. Falsehoods sprout like mushrooms in that cellar.
I guess a sock is also a geometric shape – technically – but I don’t know what you’d call it. A socktagon?
The mild, spicy smell of old books hit him, and the smell was somehow like coming home.
People who call themselves realists are often the biggest optimists of all.
Hallorann saw a grave sort of beauty there that had been missing on the day he had first met her, some nine months ago. Then she had still been mostly girl. Now she was a woman, a human being who had been dragged around to the dark side of the moon and had come back able to put the pieces back together. But those pieces, Hallorann thought, they never fit just the same way again. Never in this world.
The story of their fellowship ends here, on this make-believe street and beneath this artificial sun; the rest of the tale will be short and brutal compared to all that’s gone before. Because when katet breaks, the end always comes quickly. Say sorry.
After that we’re going to be heroes. Not because we want to, but because there are no other options.
Curiosity is a terrible thing, but it’s human.
In those days I still believed the love of a man for a woman and a woman for a man was stronger than the love of drinkin and hell-raisin – that love would eventually rise to the top like cream in a bottle of milk. I learned better over the next ten years. The world’s a sorry schoolroom sometimes, ain’t it?