I was lost in the dark and you found me. I was hot – so hot – and you gave me ice.
It was so simple, but it was a revelation: what you did for yourself was what gave you the power.
Mothers were naturals for law enforcement, because toddlers, like criminals, were often belligerent and destructive.
Magic would not work on Henry. He was too stupid.
What if there were no grownups? Suppose the whole idea of grownups was an illusion? What if their money was really just playground marbles, their business deals no more than baseball-card trades, their wars only games of guns in the park? What if they were all still snotty-nosed kids inside their suits and dresses? Christ, that couldn’t be, could it? It was too horrible to think about.
You haven’t finished the key, but not because you are afraid to finish. You’re afraid of finding you can’t finish. You’re afraid to go down to where the stones stand, but not because you’re afraid of what may come once you enter the circle. You’re afraid of what may not come. You’re not afraid of the great world, Eddie, but of the small one inside yourself.
I would like to believe in God,” she said, “because I don’t want to believe we just end, even though it balances the equation – since we came from blackness, it seems logical to assume that it’s to blackness we return. But I believe in the stars, and the infinity of the universe. That’s the great Out There. Down here, I believe there are more universes in every fistful of sand, because infinity is a two-way street.
Of course it’s heavier, he thought. It’s got my grief in it. I pull it along with me everywhere I go, so I do.
It came to him, with the force of a revelation, that you had to have been imprisoned to fully understand what freedom was.
Children learn much more by mute example than by spoken rules, or so it seems to me.
It had that comfortably sprung, lived-in look that library books with a lively circulation always get; bent page corners, a dab of mustard on page 331, a whiff of some reader’s spilled after-dinner whiskey on page 468. Only library books speak with such wordless eloquence of the power good stories hold over us, how good stories abide, unchanged and mutely wise, while we poor humans grow older and slower.
It was no dream she said. Dreams fade. Reality doesn’t.
The snake said nothing in return. Snakes do not need to justify their behavior.
Being needed is a great thing. Maybe the great thing.
He was a coward at heart, you see, although I never said the word out loud to him – not then and not ever. Doing that’s about the most dangerous thing a person can do, I think, because a coward is more afraid of being discovered than he is of anything else, even dying.
If you kill what you love, you’re damned.
The world was full of monsters, and they were all allowed to bite the innocent and the unwary.
Back in the main corridor – what Luke now understood to be the residents’ wing – the little girls, Gerda and Greta, were standing and watching with wide, frightened eyes. They were holding hands and clutching dolls as identical as they were. They reminded Luke of twins in some old horror movie.
Well, you know what they say, Jamie: The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I am afraid, but I have been afraid before. All he can take from me is what I would have to give up someday anyhow – my life. I will not let him break me down. I will not let him make me less than I am, if I can possibly help it.