The Great Whore of Babylon is a commanding mistress. Once she widens her thighs and takes you inside her, she never lets go.
Sometimes when that kind of evil comes into our lives, we can’t explain it, so we blame it on God or ourselves. In both cases we’re wrong. Maybe it’s time you let yourself out of prison.
People were not what they said. They were not what they thought. They were not what they promised. People were what they did. When the final tally was done, nothing else mattered.
It’s always today, Jim, and it’s just going to get better and better, I said.
It was the poem that explained the nature of courage and turned the mystery of death into a heroic couplet. Ultimately, it was the poem that banished fear from the heart and transformed us from actors...
I would almost forget about Ida Durbin. But a sin of omission, if indeed that's what it was, can be like the rusty head of a hatchet buried in the heartwood of a tree -- it eventually finds the teeth...
I wanted to believe he was mad. Unfortunately, I no longer knew what madness was.
I don’t try to correct yesterday’s mistakes in the present. I mark them off. I truly mark them off. A person hurts me only once.
I didn’t mind being alone. Solitude and peace with oneself are probably the only preparation one has for death.
I believe the causes that create them [serial killers] are theological in nature, rather than societal. I believe they make a conscious choice to erase God's thumbprint from their souls.
How do you get mad at a man who speaks in Petrarchan sonnets?
Hackberry tried to convince himself that Collins was dead, his body long ago eaten by coyotes or lost inside the bowels of the earth. Regardless, Hackberry told himself, Collins belonged in the past o...
Get a lot of gone between you and this situation.
Forget morality tales and all the fury and mire of human complexity, and follow the money. It will lead you through urban legends about sex and revenge and jealousy and the acquisition of power over o...
But the rain gods went away. They ain’t coming back, either. How do you know that? They got no reason to. We don’t believe in them no more.
But every longtime cop will tell you that the criminals who scared him most were the ones who looked and talked like the rest of us and committed deeds that no one, absolutely no one, ever wants to ha...
But as John Steinbeck had said long ago, we had come to fear a man with a hole in his shoe.
But I was falling prey to that old self-serving notion that well-intended rhetoric can remove a stone bruise from the soul.
As a southerner I had been brought up to believe that through conditioning and experience you could accept with some measure of tranquility any of the flaws in the human situation. But death is one fl...
Albert never told anyone of what the guard did to him. But sometimes he smells the guard's stink in his sleep, a combination of chewing tobacco and hair oil and testosterone and dried sweat that had b...