I believe there’s another dozen thoughts lined up behind each one I’m aware of.
Doesn’t look like a monster, does he?” “They rarely do.
It was how wars really ended, Dieffenbaker supposed – not at truce tables but in cancer wards and office cafeterias and traffic jams. Wars died one tiny piece at a time, each piece something that fell like a memory, each lost like an echo that fades in winding hills. In the end even war ran up the white flag. Or so he hoped. He hoped that in the end even war surrendered.
She laughed at the stars, frightened but free, her terror as sharp as pain and as sweet as a ripe October apple.
In a terrified world, false news was king.
One of the great things about tales is how fast time may pass when not much of note is happening. Real life is never that way, and it is probably a good thing.
And, of course, one of the great true facts of the world is this: for every old-timer who dies, there’s a new old-timer coming along. And a good story never dies; it is always passed down.
If you love me, then love me.
She suddenly realized she was sitting in an apartment by herself late at night, eating an apple and watching a movie on TV that she cared nothing about, and doing it all because it was easier than thinking, thinking was so boring really, when all you had to think about was yourself and your lost love.
But writing is a wonderful and terrible thing. It opens deep wells of memory that were previously capped.
For readers, one of life’s most electrifying discoveries is that they are readers – not just capable of doing it, but in love with it. Hopelessly. Head over heels.
A good novelist realizes he is a secretary, not God.
Love didn’t grow very well in a place where there was only fear, just as plants didn’t grow very well in a place where it was always dark.
But who knows how long a grief may last? Isn’t it possible that, even thirty or forty years after the death of a child or a brother or a sister, one may half waken, thinking of that person with the same lost emptiness, that feeling of places which may never be filled... not even in death?
The kid in you just leaked out, like the air out of a tire. And one day you looked in the mirror and there was a grownup looking back at you.
Doc,” Jack Torrance said. “Run away. Quick. And remember how much I love you.” “No,” Danny said. “Oh Danny, for God’s sake – ” “No,” Danny said. He took one of his father’s bloody hands and kissed it. “It’s almost over.
Between midnight and four, everyone should have permission to speak freely.
How do we remember to remember? That’s a question I’ve asked myself often since my time on Duma Key, often in the small hours of the morning, looking up into the absence of light, remembering absent friends. Sometimes in those little hours I think about the horizon. You have to establish the horizon. You have to mark the white. A simple enough act, you might say, but any act that re-makes the world is heroic. Or so I’ve come to believe.
Just promise me you’ll stop every once in a while and acknowledge the day, honey. It’s the only one you’ll have until tomorrow.
The lessons which I remember the longest are always the ones that are self-taught.