No, said a voice from the dark doorway. A weary voice, a voice for speaking long after midnight, a voice to be used when all paths are blocked, when castles have fallen to ruins, when morning will not...
He wasn’t much for erasing anyway. Sometimes your mistakes showed you the really interesting connections between your brain, your hand, and your heart, the ones you might otherwise never know were the...
Atheists loved to use that term to describe some shadowy force that somehow controlled human destiny, but what the hell did they think the universe was? Did they think the stars and nebulae took an in...
And that's another thing. What if I were to talk to Tanker, find out if he's happy at the Polonius Room, see if maybe he wants to come back? He was always such a key part of this kitchen.Rickey pointe...
Never relinquish your terrors. That's when they catch you.
I'm your nightmare. Did you think you were done with nightmares, now you've become one?
I press my hands against my chest, wishing I could somehow be even closer to him. I hate skin; I hate bones and bodies. I want to curl up inside of him and be carried there forever.
All at once it hit him: this was power too, just as surely as smashing your fist into someone’s face, just as surely as putting a hammer through someone’s skull. The power to make another person crazy...
A chiropractor is a doctor who performs adjustments on the spine, Rickey told the class before bending Gary backward and adjusting him, ripping off the false arm and spraying red hair dye all over the...
Zillah took her arm and led her toward the van. Ann kept her arm squeezed against her body so that his fingers would come into contact with the sideswell of her breast. He didn’t move his hand away. S...
With the first kiss his mouth will taste of wormwood.
Rickey sometimes wondered what would have become of them if the Peychaud crew hadn't imploded one night in a marathon of apocalyptic drunkenness. No one remembered much of this night, but by the end o...
In every long-term relationship are a few pockets of deep and dangerous water into which one can step unaware if not careful. Eventually, somebody drowns or the interested parties post warning signs a...
Help the ones you love, his grandmother had told him, help them when you can, and after that, mind your business. Your gift doesn’t give you the right to go rearranging other people’s lives for them....
You hold onto what you have; you do not give it up easily, even when you know it is poisoning you.
The sky is purple, the flare of a match behind a cupped hand is gold; the liquor is green, bright green, made from a thousand herbs, made from altars. Those who know enough to drink Chartreuse at Mard...
Terry remembered a summer two or three years ago when there had been a plague of luna moths (...) One night Ghost has mused aloud that to the bats, the moths' blood must taste like crème de la menthe.
Out here the wild things are healthy, the old trees whose roots find sustenance far below the ill-used layer of topsoil, the occasional rosebush gone to green thicket and thorns, the unstoppable kudzu...
My grandmother told me you shouldn’t try to define evil, that the minute you think you’ve got it all pinned down, a kind of evil you never even thought of will sneak up behind you and jump inside your...
If you want something, you don't wait for the world to deal it out for you. You take it.