Stories were different, though: they came alive in the telling. Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by flashlight beneath a blanket, they had no real existence in our world.
Anyway, so he bounces in on his white horse like a big perfumed tea cozy, getting involved in affairs that are none of his business, and next thing you know she wakes up and – ooooh! – was she in a bad mood.
From high in the air, London would look just like a model, with toy houses and miniature trees on tiny streets. Maybe that was the only way you could drop the bombs: by pretending that it wasn’t real, that nobody would burn and die when they exploded below.
Stupidity, he knew, did not recognize boundaries of color or creed. But he had come to believe that, like driving a car, people should have to pass a test before being allowed access to the Internet.
Mrs. Abernathy frightened him, the way strong women will often frighten weak men.
They weren’t evil, or vicious, or cruel. They were just bored people with too much time on their hands, and such people will, in the end, get up to mischief.
Some words can only be spoken to those for whom we feel passionately and deeply, just as some silences can only be shared by lovers.
God would even have forgiven Judas Iscariot, had he asked for His forgiveness. Judas wasn’t damned for betraying Christ. He was damned for despairing, for rejecting the possibility that he might be forgiven for what he had done.
After all, evil was a kind of poison, an infection of the soul.
Are you sizeist?
They were so old, and so strange, that they had found a kind of existence independent of the pages they occupied.
In the end, we’ll all face oblivion.
There are places where years have no meaning, where only a hair’s breadth of history separates the present from the past. Standing there on that bleak hillside, a young man in a place where other young men had died, it was possible to feel a connection to that past, a sense that in some place further back on the the stream of time these young men were still fighting, and still dying, that they would always be fighting this battle, in this place, over and over again, with ever the same end.
A faint mist hung over the streets, creating penumbrae around the streetlights like the halos of saints, and making a dreamscape of the skyline.
Dogs were generally incompatible with melancholy.
Cresil leaned forward, his pupils shrinking to pinpoints of hate.
It’s good that you have someone that cares for you. It doesn’t make it easier, but it sure doesn’t make it harder.
Badness lingered, and if blood penetrated deep enough into wood, the stain became near permanent. The past gave substance to the present, and all old places were storehouses of memory: the more ancient the site, the greater the accumulation, and bygone atrocities called to new.
Suddenly, it seemed as if David was surrounded by short, unhappy men muttering about “rights” and “liberties” and having enough of “this sort of thing.
Most criminals are kind of dumb, which is why they’re criminals. If they weren’t criminals, they’d be doing something else to screw up people’s lives, like running elections in Florida.
There appeared to be only two types of business in the town: everybody’s business, and business that was not yet everybody’s but soon would be once the local gossips had got to work on it.