quotes from literature

The road of good intentions might end in hell. The people who try to fill the potholes along the way deserve some credit. - Stephen King in 4 Past Midnight

What is art but a way of seeing? - Thomas Berger in Being Invisible

Suggestive time stream. - Stephen King in The Body

You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down. - Ray Bradbury in Reader's Digest

Optimism is an intellectual choice. - Reader's Digest

New dimensions in wishful thinking. - Edwart Stewart in Deadly Rich

True luxury is only bestowed on children. - Armisted Maupin in Significant Others

It is soothing, somehow, to be so thoroughly a victim of chance and circumstance that all decisions are moot, all responsibilities void. - Armisted Maupin in Significant Others

On the proverbial path of life... - Armisted Maupin in Significant Others

Behave like a peer and they'll treat you like one. - Armisted Maupin in Sure of You

Their love was like an aura that surrounded them, protecting them from the crush of the crowd... This is possible, they seemed to be telling her. You can have what we have if you refuse to settle for less. - Armisted Maupin in Sure of You

Conspicious anonymity. - Highlights of the Off-Season

...credentially-oriented society. - Highlights of the Off-Season

We are on individual quests for what is ultimately satisfying in life. - Reader's Digest

Memories. Love's best preservative. - Reader's Digest

You never know when you'll be in need of them you've despised. - All the Pretty Horses

I'd rather make a good run as a bad stand. - All the Pretty Horses

Scars have a strange power to remind us that our past is real. - All the Pretty Horses

Is the shape we see in our lives there from the beginning or are those random events only called a pattern after the fact? - All the Pretty Horses

For me the world has always been more of a puppet show. But when one looks behind the curtain and traces the strings upward he finds they terminate in the hands of yet other puppets, themselves with their own strings which trace upward in turn and so on. - All the Pretty Horses

All courage is a form of constancy. It is himself that the coward abandons first. After this all other betrayals come easily. - All the Pretty Horses

Desire for courage is courage itself. This is true of nothing else. - All the Pretty Horses

The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. - All the Pretty Horses

In history, there are no control groups. - All the Pretty Horses

Value what is true not what is useful. - All the Pretty Horses

Scared money can't win and a worried man can't love. - All the Pretty Horses

No one beneath you can offend you; no one your equal would. - Jan Wells in Reader's Digest

All our lives are a shaggy-dog story. We're not missing as much as we're getting. - Before and After

...the constant taste of life on the tongue. - Before and After

Pure present tense... - Before and After

Little psychic nicks... - Before and After

We're all caught in the net together. - Before and After

So are acquaintances in small towns. Everyone plays at least two roles, usually more, in the drama of each others' lives. - Before and After

Nobody's troubles should be mocked because they don't measure up on the grief meter. - Before and After

Her sister flowed like water and she crystallized like rock. - Before and After

Children taste what their parents swallow. - Before and After

If irony were water, we'd be drowning in it. - Before and After

There's nothing wrong with choosing against loss. - Before and After

...as if one tree releases the breeze to another. - Anne Rice in The Witching Hour

...soft carressing southern wind. - Anne Rice in The Witching Hour

...tales remote enough to be romantic. - Anne Rice in The Witching Hour

Mysterious always, the mix of features that renders a man beautiful. - Anne Rice in The Witching Hour

As they die, the ones we love, we lose our witnesses, our watchers, those who know and understand the tiny meaningless patterns, those words drawn in water with a stick. - Anne Rice in The Witching Hour

Stay out til the sky is pure purple and the cicadas are really going in the trees. - Anne Rice in The Witching Hour

The death of another person is perhaps the only genuine supernatural event we ever experience. - Anne Rice in The Witching Hour

Love can achieve unexpected majesty in the rocky soil of misfortune. - Tony Shaw in Detroit News, reprinted in Reader's Digest

Life is about timing. - Carl Lewis in Reader's Digest

Give me a man or woman who has read 1,000 books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a dangerous enemy indeed. - Anne Rice in The Witching Hour

The lighted lamps in the room behind him grew brighter as the day died around him. - Anne Rice in The Witching Hour

Home. Where I belong. Where the sky looks as I remember it. Where the low country spreads out forever. And the air is my friend. - Anne Rice in The Witching Hour

The future is a fabric of interlacing possibilities. Some of which gradually become probabilities, and a few of which become inevitabilities, but there are surprised sewn into the warp and the woof, which can tear it apart. - Anne Rice in The Witching Hour

Life must be founded upon the infinite possibility for choice and accident. - Anne Rice in The Witching Hour

Plant a foot. Stay awhile. - Angels in America

In betraying what you belove, you betray what is truest in yourself. - Angels in America

Poor bohemians have more fun. - Life Drawing

An exciting, rotting highway to elsewhere. - Life Drawing, about the Mississippi River

To have someone understand why we cry or laugh, why we feel downcast for no apparant reason, is to have a friend. - Cherokee Feast of Days

A friend accepts our changes of mood without telling us to snap out of it. - Cherokee Feast of Days

When we stop fretting, we gain more ground. - Cherokee Feast of Days

These are only stray memories, last year's snapshots evoked by last year's pop song, not a true return of longing. - Tim & Pete

...while Barry sang the songs that made the whole world carsick. - Tim & Pete

I should dematerialize now. - Tim & Pete

A nightmare of repression. - Tim & Pete

I'll try not to mince. - Tim & Pete

Certain films are better in your mind than when you actually see them again. - Tim & Pete

That's like saying, "I do a little typing for the SS." - Tim & Pete

A throw-away compliment. - Tim & Pete

I'm having a nostalgia rush. - Tim & Pete

Do you have a bent we never explored? - Tim & Pete

I didn't dump on your songs. I criticized one or two of them as satirically off-target. - Tim & Pete

I more than like you. - Tim & Pete

Leave an old lady a flower to press in her poetry book. - Tim & Pete

They're queers of color. - Tim & Pete

San Francisco exists in another dimension. - Tim & Pete

Do you think physical locations contain the vibrations of past events? - Tim & Pete

But it's this possessive, obsessive, dance-of-death thing. - Tim & Pete

...upscale tract of large lot-filling homes that came in a choice of nuevo-kitsch architectural styles: Tudor, Chateau, Camelot, Miami Vice. [Bob's] house was classic Taco Bell Mild Mexican in beige stucco with a fake red rile roof and cheap looking wrought iron fixtures. - Tim & Pete

It's an art squad escapade. - Tim & Pete

It's a comic book situation. - Tim & Pete

I believe in the power of visualization. - Tim & Pete

In real life, coincidence is not the exception but the rule. - Stephen King in The Langoliers

Shit or git. - Stephen King in The Langoliers

He shits diamonds from a platinum asshole. - Stephen King in The Langoliers

You should never know what you are, or your magic will disappear. - Armisted Maupin in Tales of the City

You could feed it, care for it, and exclaim over its lovliness, but there was nothing to guarantee that it would stay home with you. - Armisted Maupin in Tales of the City

Underneath all that hair and patchoulie beats the heart of a true pig. - Armisted Maupin in Tales of the City

Solitude was no excuse for sloppiness. - Armisted Maupin in Tales of the City

Some people, the happy ones, probably, could deal with that knowledge the way they dealt with the weather. They skimmed along the surface of life exulting in their self-suffiency, and because of it, they were never alone. - Armisted Maupin in Tales of the City

He's protective, yet he treats me like an equal. - Armisted Maupin in More Tales of the City

Michael's forever never lasted for long. - Armisted Maupin in More Tales of the City

People he'd been hot for were not supposed to enjoy themselves in his absence. - Armisted Maupin in More Tales of the City

Mona's Law: You can have a hot job, a hot lover, and a hot apartment. But you can't have all three at the same time. - Armisted Maupin in More Tales of the City

Don't make me analyze it. When I analyze things they stop happening. It seems every time I start up with somebody new, I see the beginning and end all at once. I know how it'll die. I can play those scenes in my sleep. This time, though, well, I don't wanna know the end. Not for awhile anyway. - Armisted Maupin in More Tales of the City

Michael stopped reading and savored for a moment this rare form of inactivity. All his adult life, he had searched for someone to do nothing with in bed. And now he had found him, this bright, generous person whose love was so strong that sex was in perspective again. - Armisted Maupin in More Tales of the City

Christians are the only people on Earth who kneel before an instrument of torture. If Christ had been martyred in this century, I guess we'd all be wearing little electric chairs around our necks. - Armisted Maupin in More Tales of the City

Without the intense and all-excluding love of wife for husband, husband for wife, parents for children and children for parents, there would be no compassion for people in the larger community beyond the home. - Dean Koontz in Winter Moon

He was so far around the bend that he would meet himself coming the other way. - Dean Koontz in Winter Moon

He had lived a long time and had seen how many lives were ruined by people operating with the best intentions and a smug assurance of their own superiority and wisdom. - Dean Koontz in Winter Moon

...the killing kindness of the state. - Dean Koontz in Winter Moon

Beyond the Cherokee, the home lights of unmet families shone far out on the sea of night. - Dean Koontz in Winter Moon

It ascended out of the conflagration with all the panache of His Satanic Majesty on a day trip out of hell. - Dean Koontz in Winter Moon

Atlas isn't carrying the world on his shoulders, no giant muscular hulk with a sense of responsibility; the world is balanced on a pyramid of clowns, and they are always tooting horns and wobbling and goosing each other. - Dean Koontz in Winter Moon

Guilt is a great motivator. - Jonathon Kellerman in Bad Love

Life must fit comfortably, like bulky sweaters and tight, worn-out jeans. - Vampires Anonymous

You broaden your horizons through travel, but if you are curious enough to listen to other people, you can broaden your horizons without leaving your backyard. - Larry King in How to Talk to Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime

Where you are will not limit where you might go. - Gavin DeBecker in The Gift of Fear

Worry will almost always buckle under a vigorous interrogation. - Gavin DeBecker in The Gift of Fear

If you can bring yourself to apply your imagination to finding the possible favorable outcomes of undesired developments, even if only as an exercise, you'll see that it fosters creativity. - Gavin DeBecker in The Gift of Fear

Reality is fine, you know, but it can really get in your way when you're chasing a dream. - Angela Bowie in Backstage Passes

...a kettle exceptionally well acquainted with the various shades of black. - Angela Bowie in Backstage Passes

I hate the girlfriend-getting-in-the-way role. - Angela Bowie in Backstage Passes

Wherever you've got a roadie, of course, you've also got a van (until, that is, you've got a truck, or a bus, or a bus and a truck, or several trucks and buses, or an airplane, or an airplane and several trucks and buses, or several airplanes, trucks and buses.) - Angela Bowie in Backstage Passes

History is not destiny. - Dr. Laura in The 10 Things Women Do to Mess up Their Lives

Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic. - Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray

Perhaps one should never put one's worship into words. - Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray

The man is an undeveloped homicidal maniac.- Dr. Seward in Bram Stoker's Dracula

So it will be until the Great Recorder sums me up and closes my ledger account with a balance to profit or loss.- Dr. Seward in Bram Stoker's Dracula

...it is like whispering to one's self and listening at the same time.- Mina Harker in Bram Stoker's Dracula about journaling

For life be, after all, only a waitin' for somethin' else than what we're doin'; and death be all that we can rightly depend on.- Mr. Swales in Bram Stoker's Dracula

Chasing an errant swarm of bees is nothing to following a naked lunatic when the fit of escape is upon him!- Dr. Seward in Bram Stoker's Dracula

He went to the door and opened it; a most unnecessary proceeding it seemed to me. I have always thought that a wild animal never looks so well as when some obstacle of pronounced durability is between us.- newspaper article in Bram Stoker's Dracula

I heard once of an American who so definied faith: "that which enables us to believe things which we know to be untrue."- Dr. Seward in Bram Stoker's Dracula

Men of such passionate nature, when goaded by injustice into action, lose all sense of anything save their own misery.- Roger Byam in Mutiny on the Bounty by Nordhoff & Hall

One's sense of time is largely a matter of mood.- Roger Byam in Mutiny on the Bounty by Nordhoff & Hall

Science may be described as the art of systematic oversimplification. - John Darnton in The Experiment

Being observant is just a question of being observant. - John Darnton in The Experiment

....and, bingo, your life cuts to another movie... - John Darnton in The Experiment

Phantasmal shifting labryinth. - John Darnton in the The Experiment

The rain had turned into a downpour, a solid curtain of water pounding onto the pavement. Looking at it from inside was like looking out through a waterfall — everything was blurred and smudgy, an Impressionist painting. - John Darnton in The Experiment

He looked deeply into his peaches... - John Darnton in The Experiment

That's what life's all about: little by little, day by day, with excruciating stubbornnes, each of us learning how to be less screwed up. - Dean Koontz in Icebound

...as though psychotic tendencies ought to be evident in the way a man walked, talked, and gestured. - Dean Koontz in Icebound

Everyone was a mystery within a mystery, wrapped in an enigma. - Dean Koontz in Icebound

Fear DID have a pungent odor of its own: the tang of an unusually acrid sweat. - Dean Koontz in Icebound

Except for professional mannequins and British Prime Ministers, no one ever accomplished anything by standing still. - Dean Koontz in Icebound

He wasn't claustrophobic, but he had a logical and healthy fear of being confined in an extremely cramped place ninety feet beneath the ice, in the Arctic wilderness, while surrounded by fifty-eight enormous packages of explosives that were ticking rapidly toward detonation. He was funny that way. - Dean Koontz in Icebound

Fools and heroes, he saw now, were separated by a line so thin that it was the next thing to invisible. - Dean Koontz in Icebound

There were two basic forms of heroism: Heroism that was sought, as when a man climbed a mountain or challenged an angry bull in one of Madrid's rings — because a man had to know his limits, heroism sought was important. It was far less valuable, however, than heroism UNSOUGHT. - Dean Koontz in Icebound

Maybe his thought processes were affected by pressure or exhaustion, but the Pogodin [submarine] seemed too gaudy to be substantial. After so much darkness, the boat resembled a damn slot machine or a Christmas tree. It seemed delicate, fragile, a construction of dark cellophane. - Dean Koontz in Icebound

...cuisine for public consumption. - John & Patsy Ramsey in The Death of Innocence

Faith is the ultimate armor for the battle of life. - John & Patsy Ramsey in The Death of Innocence

Whatever happened to the Ten Commandments? Specifically, "Thou shalt not bear false witness." Am I mistaken, or don't they predate the First Amendment by several thousand years? - John & Patsy Ramsey in The Death of Innocence

Anonymity on the Internet is a debatable quality. While it seems to invite participation, the unknown aspect begs the slanderous, destructive, and hateful elements in our society to speak out without fear of accountability. We seem to act differently when we can speak without having to take responsibility — or even be known. We, as a people, are lazy and won't spend the time necessary to check out the information being fed to us. Instead, opinions fly as fact like an unaimed machine gun. People don't stop to make sure that what they are about to say is the truth. People don't listen with a critcal ear. What's missing? At the very least, a good editor to check the facts before they are "published" on the Internet. - John & Patsy Ramsey in The Death of Innocence

Observe how your boyfriend's mother and father treat each other. You'll learn a great deal about how this man will be in his later years. - John & Patsy Ramsey in The Death of Innocence

We are all renters in this life. - John & Patsy Ramsey in The Death of Innocence

Couple an inexperienced and poorly led police force with a flagrantly abusive and irresponsible entertainment media, and the scaffold is built from which innocent people will be hung. The only thing missing is the beer keg and rope. - John & Patsy Ramsey in The Death of Innocence

Some things have to be believed to be seen. - The Skylarks and Other Poems

Give me a man that is not passion's slave. - Hamlet

Reality often flies in the face of expectations. - Dorothy Tannen in That's Not What I Meant

There is no hate such as that born out of love betrayed. - V.C. Andrews in Flowers in the Attic

Love is proud of itself. It leaks out of us even with the tightest security. - Merrit Malloy in Things I Meant to Say to You When We Where Old

There is something terrible yet soothing about returning to a place where you once lived. You are one of your own memories. - May Morris in Crossroads

Until you make peace with who you are, you'll never be content with what you have. - Doris Mortman in Circles

Calm weather makes seasoned mariners nervous. It's like pitching a no-hitter in baseball. You don't talk about it, you just watch it happen. - Dr. Robert Ballard of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in his book The Discovery of the Titanic

Quakers with a vengeance. - Herman Melville in Moby Dick

It is not whaling, of course, that brings the tourists to [Nantucket], but the romantic glorification of whaling -- the same kind of myths that historically important places all across America have learned to shine and polish to their economic advantage. - Nathaniel Philbrick in In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex

We can never know many of the people in our lives, not truly KNOW them, regardless of how deeply we believe that we see into them. Most of them are murky ponds, containing infinite layers of suspended particles, stirred by strange currents in their greatest depths. - Dean Koontz in Fear Nothing

Sometimes there is no darker place than our own thoughts: the moonless midnight of the mind. - Dean Koontz in Fear Nothing

As long as he remains only a name to me and is otherwise a mystery, he can be whatever I want him to be, and I can vicariously experience his long, long life in the sun. - Dean Koontz in Fear Nothing

An inhuman cry issued from him, primitive and psychotic, a caterwaul of the sort that sometimes wakes you in the night and leaves you wondering about the species of origin. - Dean Koontz in Fear Nothing

The hands of every clock are shears, trimming us away scrap by scrap, and every timepiece with a digital readout blinks us toward implosion. - Dean Koontz in Fear Nothing

On the other hand, intelligence and flakiness aren't mutually exclusive, are they? - Dean Koontz in Fear Nothing

Cancel the call to Mr. Spielberg. There is no movie here. - Dean Koontz in Fear Nothing

A lot of the time, reality is what you make it. - Dean Koontz in Fear Nothing

...his eyes were servings of bitter brew in cups of bone. - Dean Koontz in Fear Nothing

I would rather be a bone worn to dry splinters by the teeth of sorrow than a sponge wrung ceaselessly in its hands. - Dean Koontz in Fear Nothing

For a ruthless killer, I was far too jumpy. Maybe the caffeine-laden Pepsi, which I'd drunk to sweeten my vomit-soured breath, was to blame. Next time I killed someone and threw up, I'd have to use a caffeine-free beverage and lace it with Valium, in order to avoid tarnishing my image as an emotionless, efficient homicide machine. - Dean Koontz in Fear Nothing

A good dog is a medicine for melancholy and a better stress reliever than Valium. - Dean Koontz in Fear Nothing

Put no stock in the opinions of anyone but those closest to you. Forget about leaving a mark on the world. Ignore the great issues of your time and thereby improve your digestion. Don't dwell in the past. Don't worry about the future. Live in the moment. Trust in the purpose of your existence and let meaning come to you instead of straining to discover it. When life throws a hard punch, roll with it - but roll with laughter. Catch a wave, dude. - Dean Koontz in Fear Nothing

Music heard when half-asleep transformed itself into some nearly shameful language. - Paul Russell in The Coming Storm

...he took no initiative on his own; he was purely reactive. - Paul Russell in The Coming Storm

All existence takes place at the expense of some other existence. - Paul Russell in The Coming Storm

There was something moving about a fifteen year old boy. Not so much the individual boy himself, but rather some quality that attached itself to him, the simple fact of youth, the territory he was passing through. Some light that shone about him that made him, for a moment, crazily special. How strange that you could fall so hard for that trick of light. - Paul Russell in The Coming Storm

He'd seen those ruins on the way down; they caught his imagination, an inexplicable romantic folly out there interrupting the ordinary run of scenery. - Paul Russell in The Coming Storm

He had way too many different lives going on at once. - Paul Russell in The Coming Storm

Nothing made him feel stupid like numbers made him feel stupid. - Paul Russell in The Coming Storm

The long strange journey is, alas, over. - Paul Russell in The Coming Storm

Claustrophobia was no pretty thing. - Paul Russell in The Coming Storm

Lie still long enough and the forest, forgetting you were even there, went about its business without any longer noticing you in its midst. - Paul Russell in The Coming Storm

...his tormentors didn't even make it across the threshold of his attention. - Paul Russell in The Coming Storm

I value your weirdness. - Paul Russell in The Coming Storm

It really was incredibly hard, wasn't it, to try to talk to another human being. Not the free kind of talk that happened around the dorm room but talk that cost you, talk you staked not twenty dollars but your life on. - Paul Russell in The Coming Storm

The savagery would arrive here as well — not tomorrow, perhaps, but the day after tomorrow. And when it came, it would come quickly; it would take everyone by surprise. - Paul Russell in The Coming Storm

There are a few scattered moments in one's life when everything seems possible. - Paul Russell in The Coming Storm

But they had never roamed their own country the way they roamed the back roads and walking paths of Germany and Austria and Switzerland, leisurely and aimless voyages of discovery that had formed, through the years, an archipelago of happy memories. - Paul Russell in The Coming Storm

The romance of all those world-lost little towns... - Paul Russell in The Coming Storm

Nothing was sadder than a flower garden in autumn. - Paul Russell in The Coming Storm

It had exactly the kind of reality that guaranteed just how real it had been. - Paul Russell in The Coming Storm

Whose image had burned for days like a votive candle lit at the altar of a cult scarcely to be named. - Paul Russell in The Coming Storm

Louis could never shake the suspicion that some people, whether consciously or not, called the storm to themselves. - Paul Russell in The Coming Storm

You have to examine what kind of privilege informs your views of the so-called facts. Depending on where you stand, the facts can look very different. - Paul Russell in The Coming Storm

This was a place ghosts would return to, seeking the paths they had walked and the dorms they had made love in and the classrooms where they had dreamed of the unimaginable future. - Paul Russell in The Coming Storm

The angel descended when you were least expecting it. - Paul Russell in The Coming Storm

...great blanketing storms that put the whole landscape to enchanted sleep. - Paul Russell in The Coming Storm

The world, when you got down to it, was disturbingly full of close calls. - Paul Russell in The Coming Storm

He'd never been any good at filling empty time, entertaining himself while he waited. And most of life, he'd concluded, was about waiting. Waiting for the class period to end, the schoolday to finish, the game to be over, waiting for the train, waiting to grow up, to be old enough, waiting to be done with whatever boring thing he was doing at the moment. For getting rid of boring, empty, useless, depressing time, there was nothing so good as sleep; jump ahead fast-forward, get on with the plot, such as it was. Even the animals knew that. - Paul Russell in The Coming Storm

Loneliness brings forth what is original, daringly and shockingly beautiful: the poetic. But loneliness also brings forth the perverse, the disproportionate, the absurd, the illicit. - Paul Russell in The Coming Storm

How fragile relationships were between people, how easily upset — especially friendship, that delicate alliance bereft of the formal bonds that at least gave marriages a fighting chance. - Paul Russell in The Coming Storm

...the lost little one-stoplight towns... - Paul Russell in The Coming Storm

The instant you stop loving him because you're scared is the instant it's all over. - Paul Russell in The Coming Storm

Love takes us over. It ruins us and never looks back. - Paul Russell in The Coming Storm

In the air before him his breath coalesced like the balloons in comic strips that hold the words. - Paul Russell in The Coming Storm

But there was no FINALLY — that's what he was finding out; you got to a place you really wanted to be, and no sooner were you there than you had to move on. - Paul Russell in The Coming Storm

Hell was no doubt an immense waiting room before an ominous appointment to which one was never called. - Paul Russell in The Coming Storm

He had been a thawing sun in the late winter of her long marriage, a brief but much-needed change in seasons. - Paul Russell in The Coming Storm

[He] no longer yearned in mute frustration for things somehow to reconfigure themselves into the world as he wished it. - Paul Russell in The Coming Storm

His memories were stored in his things, as if they were dry-cell batteries he could reach for should his energy start to fade. - Ulysses G. Dietz in Desmond

The sun was at the horizon now, and it bathed the city in a strange ruddy light, as if the fires of hell were peeking up to check on their handiwork. - Ulysses G. Dietz in Desmond

Then all of my carefully locked-away fears and doubts began to rattle their tin cups on the bars of their cells. - Ulysses G. Dietz in Desmond

It is not possible for me to believe that God sees any true love as evil, no matter what the words of man might tell you. Hate is the only truly evil thing in the world. Second only to it is false love, followed by its twin, hypocrisy. If your love was true, then it was blessed. - Ulysses G. Dietz in Desmond

Definitely say no. Make up some excuse. Say that you're asthmatic and have to go to your iron lung. - Alex Sanchez in Rainbow Boys

To read them today is to cradle myself in my own arms. - Vincent Virga in Gaywyck on journals

How easily the tenses shift the weight of years. - Vincent Virga in Gaywyck

There was something about the place that intrigued me — the romantic connotations of large, empty houses with a prevailing aura of sadness over lost opportunities. But since no lives had been shared there, it seemed aglow with possibilities of promises yet to be exchanged. - Vincent Virga in Gaywyck

Whimsy can be a dangerous thing. - Vincent Virga in Gaywyck

The weather, calm and cold, was held at bay by thick fur blankets and flasks of hot chocolate and plum brandy. - Vincent Virga in Gaywyck

No genres have genders. It's no accident that Cupid is blindfolded. - Vincent Virga in the Afterward of Gaywyck

Never confuse tolerance with acceptance. - Vincent Virga in the Afterward of Gaywyck

The French government - the original immovable object. - Mel Keegan in Ice, Wind & Fire

...twilight thickened into night proper. - dusk in Mel Keegan's Ice, Wind & Fire

I wanted to memorize his face so I could avoid him for the rest of my life. - Michael Jensen in Frontiers

Frankly, I hoped I never saw this easygoing, smark-alecky walking complication again. - Michael Jensen in Frontiers

Already dark clouds the color of ugly bruises and hateful intentions were closer, bearing down on us as surely as winter on autumn. - Michael Jensen in Frontiers

The dead lived outside of time, so they could not be in any hurry for blood. - Mel Keegan in An East Wind Blowing

Singing that song again won't change the words. - Mel Keegan in An East Wind Blowing

...when autumn fetched mist and cold and hoar frost along the river, and when the forest was like a thousand skeletons clawing at the sky. - Mel Keegan in An East Wind Blowing

You can separate people into types by what part of a house they like the most. - Bart Yates in Leave Myself Behind

If Beowulf could have had a kitchen, this is the one he'd have chosen. - Bart Yates in Leave Myself Behind

Just put him under bright lights and attach electrodes to his nipples. - Bart Yates in Leave Myself Behind

It's like walking into a room full of strangers and all of a sudden seeing someone you love. - Bart Yates in Leave Myself Behind about libraries

The only problem with library books is the covers. Too many hands have touched them and they feel like they have boogers on them. It doesn't matter if the book is by Virginia Woolf or Agatha Christie - the booger monster doesn't discriminate between literature and pulp fiction. - Bart Yates in Leave Myself Behind

The problem with death is that it kills so much more than just the person who actually dies. - Bart Yates in Leave Myself Behind

Maybe physical intimacy isn't always about touching. Maybe it's also about being able to sit next to someone at dinner and not care if he takes something off your plate or reaches across you for the salt....Maybe it's about sharing the same space with another person and not going fucking crazy because you can't get away from them. - Bart Yates in Leave Myself Behind

...true intimacy is really just the run of the mill, day to day stuff that happens without thinking - thousands of simple, meaningless, comfortable ways you can be close to someone, never dreaming how shitty you'll feel when you wake up one morning with all of it gone. - Bart Yates in Leave Myself Behind

It seems strangers are the only people who know how to get along with other human beings. - Bart Yates in Leave Myself Behind

Familiarity may not breed contempt but it sure as hell breeds bad manners. - Bart Yates in Leave Myself Behind

You can count on the sky to hold still and be what you need it to be. - Bart Yates in Leave Myself Behind

Someone call an exorcist. Mom's been possessed by a nice person. - Bart Yates in Leave Myself Behind

I guess he's kind of cute, in a lost-puppy-who's-just-peed-on-your-lap sort of way. - Bart Yates in Leave Myself Behind

High school is a farce. For every good teacher there are five shitty ones; for every meaningful assignment there are twenty brain-numbing, time-killing, stupor-inducing exercises in futility. - Bart Yates in Leave Myself Behind

Modern high schools are really just drone factories, churning out legions of half-literate buffoons with every bit of creativity stamped out of them. - Bart Yates in Leave Myself Behind

Is there anything harder than telling somebody how much they mean to you? - Bart Yates in Leave Myself Behind

Decent human beings and perfect summer nights don't come along all that often. Only an ingrate or a retard shits on a good memory. - Bart Yates in Leave Myself Behind

I think it's more likely the Buddhists have it right: heaven and hell both exist simultaneously, right here on Earth, and all most of us do it step from one to the other, day in and day out, too damn stupid and mean to know the difference. - Bart Yates in Leave Myself Behind

I feel like I'm living in The House That Stephen King Built. - Bart Yates in Leave Myself Behind

My body likes what it likes and has absolutely no qualms about dragging my mind and soul along for the ride. - Bart Yates in Leave Myself Behind

...when you look into space you're also looking back in time, so everything you see - all that light, all that drama - happened a long time ago. - Bart Yates in Leave Myself Behind

Secrets suck. They're like cancer in the person who carries them around, and they grow and grow until there's not a single healthy cell left in the whole fucking body. - Bart Yates in Leave Myself Behind

Consensual or not, steeped in love or distorted by hate, sex fucks things up. It's too volatile, too all-consuming, too emotionally and spiritually loaded for human beings to handle with any kind of grace. - Bart Yates in Leave Myself Behind

And for one eternal instant, I swear to God I swallowed the sun. - Bart Yates in Leave Myself Behind

It was an infinity of harshness. - Ronald Donaghe in The Salvation Mongers

Sometimes a brief encounter with a stranger can bring the most rapid and lasting changes in a person's life. - Ronald Donaghe in The Salvation Mongers

It's a smaller world in a small town. - Ronald Donaghe in The Salvation Mongers

You have the subtlety of a commercial for used cars. - Josh Thomas in Murder at Willow Slough

Sometimes life should be looked at from just one spot. - Josh Thomas in Murder at Willow Slough regarding trees

Don't stare at the stink, just flush the toilet. - Josh Thomas in Murder at Willow Slough

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him literate. - Josh Thomas in Murder at Willow Slough

The young are eternally desperate. And books, they offer one hope—that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into a new universe, one is saved. - Anne Rice in Blackwood Farm

Her words ran as if written on ribbons being pulled through my mind. - Anne Rice in Blackwood Farm

The stuff of poetry and photography captions. - Anne Rice in Blackwood Farm

We live in houses that were built by people's dreams, and we have to accept that. We have to revere the dream and realize that someday the house will go to others after us. These houses are personalities in our lives. They have their roles to play. - Anne Rice in Blackwood Farm

I don't know how those who have no fascination live. - Anne Rice in Blackwood Farm

He had a feline way of moving and speaking in a hushed tone that commanded respect and loyalty of me. - Anne Rice in Blackwood Farm

Sometimes only nature felt real, while all human monuments and actions seemed to be the settings of plots of dreams. - Dean Koontz in The Face

The universere didn't always operate like the clockwork mechanism of cause and effect that the scientists so confidently described. Anomalies abounded. Deviations from the common rule, strange conditions, incongruities. - Dean Koontz in The Face

He nevertheless passed along these streets with complete anonymity drawing as little notice as might a ghost whose substance was but a twist of ectoplasmic mist. - Dean Koontz in The Face

Entropy favors the rambler. - Dean Koontz in The Face

Gradually but profoundly, the loss of her—just knowing that she was no longer out there somewhere in the world—had affected him, had changed him forever. - Dean Koontz in The Face

In a sense, Ethan HAD died with her: the Ethan who would have been a loving father to the children blessed with her grace, the Ethan who would have known the joy of her company for decades yet to come, who would have known the peace and the purpose of growing old at her side. - Dean Koontz in The Face

Misery - more often it takes a lifetime to arrive, and then at the end, there's a great roaring sea of it. - Dean Koontz in The Face

Every palace and every work of art is only dust as yet unrealized, and time is the patient wind that will wither it away. - Dean Koontz in The Face

I travel by mirrors, by mist, by smoke, by doorways in water, by stairways made of shadows, on roads of moonlight, by wish and hope and simple expectation. - Dean Koontz in The Face

Like a growling hellhound loose in the halls of Heaven, thunder barked and grumbled through the low gray sky. - Dean Koontz in The Face

Crying out to him not from a third-floor room but from the far side of a blind turn on the highway to eternity. - Dean Koontz in The Face

The bones of my sisters litter history and prehistory. - Kathy Reichs in Fatal Voyage

Women are conditioned to be wary. Walk faster at the sound of footsteps. Peek through the hole before opening the door. Stand by the controls in the empty elevator. - Kathy Reichs in Fatal Voyage

Barstool brilliance. - Kathy Reichs in Fatal Voyage

I'd rather be sorry for something I did, than for something that I didn't do. - Kathy Reichs in Fatal Voyage

Time did indeed heal all wounds, but it left a nasty, unforgiving scar. - James Rollins in Amazonia

An unexamined life is not worth living. - James Rollins in Amazonia

It's like someone shattered a stained-glass window and showered the slivers over the treetops. - James Rollins in Amazonia

Her husband could sleep like the dead, not Birdie. She needed to be eased into that dark place with mugs of warm milk, extra pillows on the couch and plenty of late night TV. - Alice Blanchard in The Breathtaker

Bad news came like that, accompanied by signs. And all the while, he'd felt a creepy sense of foreboding he shouldn't have ignored. - Anne Blanchard in The Breathtaker

But she'd had to say good-bye, anyway. And then everything changed. The world got darker. Nobody seemed to care. Nobody understood what she was going through. Not even her best friend, Katlin, who could only talk about Sophie's grief for so long before she started to fidget or change the subject. "You have to get over it. You've gotta move on." That was Sophie's hardest lesson—that people didn't like to wallow in other people's misery, no matter how much they loved you. - Anne Blanchard in The Breathtaker

Grief flattened you like a freight train, and sometimes the only answer was a tall bottle and a short glass. He knew from experience that, just as the pain was about to heal over, something else would come along and trigger another memory and the bounce would leak right out of your step again. - Anne Blanchard in The Breathtaker

Raindrops flurried out of the mist like a thousand doubts. - Anne Blanchard in The Breathtaker

That's the way it is with mental illness. You think a person's trying to needle you on purpose. You think they're in control of their emotions. - Anne Blanchard in The Breathtaker

The monotony of the landscape got into your blood like a slow-acting poison. - Anne Blanchard in The Breathtaker

Then he heard it: the sound of hell clawing for a handhold. The sound of space collapsing. - Anne Blanchard in The Breathtaker

History was just another place the wind blew through. - Anne Blanchard in The Breathtaker

We are all the sum total of not only what we have personally experienced in life but also of what we have heard along the way. - Jim Marrs in Alien Agenda

On the evolutionary scale, we're not much more evolved than the ordinary pissant. - former U.S. marshall Leslie D. Weisenhorn in Jim Marrs' Alien Agenda

Consciousness creates form. It is not the other way around. All personalities are not physical. It is only because we are so busily concerned with daily matters that you do not realize that there is a portion of you who knows that its own powers are far superior to those shown by the ordinary self. You have lived other existences, and that knowledge is within you though you are not consciously aware of it. - Jim Marrs in Alien Agenda

The fact is that each of you create your own physical reality; en masse, you create both the glories and the terrors that exist within your earthly experience. Until you realize that you are the creators, you will refuse to accept this responsibility. Nor can you blame a devil for the world's misfortunes. You have grown sophisticated enough to realize that the Devil is a projection of your own psyche, but you have not grown wise enough to learn how to use your creativity constructively. - Jim Marrs in Alien Agenda

Blind faith eliminates understanding, and without understanding there can be no growth or agape, which is the goal. - Jim Marrs in Alien Agenda

It is a universe where space exists in 10 dimensions, where one can travel through time into the past, where holes in the fabric of space and time pop up and serve as shortcuts to other parts of the universe, and where the visible universe may be only one of myriad mini-universes that coexist like so many soap bubbles in a cosmic froth. - Jim Marrs in Alien Agenda

A consistent message is becoming clear—we are all free-willed multidimensional beings composed of both the physical and the spiritual. Our individual bodies are made up of physical matter that must conform to physical laws. But our bodies are energized by a thinking form of energy—the soul, if you prefer—which, like all energy, can neither be created nor destroyed, only change form. Many researchers into our spiritual side believe that mankind is in the process of shifting into a higher plane of existence—one that deals from the heart, not the intellect. - Jim Marrs in Alien Agenda

Many feel that organized religion is about the control of understanding. It is the mind of man trying to interpret the heart of God—and not doing a very good job of it. - Jim Marrs in Alien Agenda

Love, said to flow from God, is of the heart. Fear is a product of the mind. - Jim Marrs in Alien Agenda

...as ruined as a harlot's good name... - Michael Jensen in Firelands

It was colder outside than a hangman's smile. - Michael Jensen in Firelands

...it would be less living than merely existing. I might as well be adrift at sea the rest of my life, for that was how lonesome I would feel. - Michael Jensen in Firelands

By the calendar the month of May should by all rights and predictions be charitable if not merry, but this May had entered like a grim-lipped miser pinching out candles in church. - Robert McCammon in Speaks the Nightbird Vol. 1

As the clay of history was being reshaped... - Robert McCammon in Speaks the Nightbird Vol. 1

He lifted his chin a fraction, as if daring a blow from the first of fate. - Robert McCammon in Speaks the Nightbird Vol. 1

...sometimes he had to wonder if there was indeed a God who reigned over this earthly arena of fury and brutality. Matthew could sing the hymns and mouth the platitudes with the best of them, in the stiffly regimented Sabbath church services that basically consisted of the minister begging for five or six hours that Jehovah show mercy on His wounded and crippled Creation. But in his life Matthew had seen very little real evidence of God at work, though it seemed he'd seen much of Satan's fingermarks. It was easy to sing praise to God when one was wearing a clean white shirt and eating from china platters, much less easy when on lay on a dirty mattress in an almshouse dormitory and heard the shrill scream of a boy who'd been summoned after midnight to the headmaster's chambers. - Robert McCammon in Speaks the Nightbird Vol. 1

His dedication to the intellectual—indeed his slavery to the appetite of his own mind— - Robert McCammon in Speaks the Nightbird Vol. 1

At a glance you see the picture, the frame, the nail, and the wall. - Robert McCammon in Speaks the Nightbird Vol. 1

Poison can be served from many cups. I'd beware the one from which I chose to drink. - Robert McCammon in Speaks the Nightbird Vol. 1

The 'theory tree' is one eplant that's taken firm root. - Robert McCammon in Speaks the Nightbird Vol. 1

The question of why was rooted in the tree of forbidden fruit. - Robert McCammon in Speaks the Nightbird Vol. 1

Life was so complicated now, so filled with strange twists and turns like a road that wandered across a wilderness no man could completely tame, much less understand. - Robert McCammon in Speaks the Nightbird Vol. 1

It seemed to him, in his observations, that if one could not catch and conquer an object of desire, it often served the same to destroy it. - Robert McCammon in Speaks the Nightbird Vol. 1

...his mind struggling with a question inside a mystery within an enigma. - Robert McCammon in Speaks the Nightbird Vol. 1

He feared the future. Not just the turn of the century, and what a new age might bring to this strife-burnt earth, but tomorrow and the next day and the day after that. He feared all demons of the unknown tomorrows, for they were creatures who destroyed the shape and structure of yesterday for the sake of a merry fire. - Robert McCammon in Speaks the Nightbird Vol. 1

She has a knife for a tongue. She only apologizes when it cuts herself. - Robert McCammon in Speaks the Nightbird Vol. 2

A greater, truer love was the desire to open a cage and set the nightbird free. - Robert McCammon in Speaks the Nightbird Vol. 2

Damnation and salvation are brothers separated only by direction of travel. - Robert McCammon in Speaks the Nightbird Vol. 2

The display of blighted agriculture seemed to stretch on and on like a preview of the harvests of Hell. - Robert McCammon in Speaks the Nightbird Vol. 2

A human being in this world made no more permanent impression than does a hand thrust in water. Remove the hand, and water rushes in to fill the void as if nothing had ever been there. - Dan Simmons in Summer of Night

Water doesn't pour off a ghost's hat. - Dan Simmons in Summer of Night

The sunset was that long, achingly beautiful balance of stillness in which the sun seemed to hover like a red balloon above the western horizon, the entire sky catching fire from the death of day, a sunset unique to the American Midwest and ignored by most of its inhabitants. - Dan Simmons in Summer of Night

People always pay a lot of money for things that make them stupid. - Dan Simmons in Summer of Night

Silence is as dangerous as chaos because silence is blind and therefore more easily misinterpreted. - Fiona Patton in The Stone Prince

What made him realize he was growing old was the passing of his cultural touchstones into irrelevance, the knowledge that his frames of reference were no longer recognized by the younger generation. - Bentley Little in The Resort

Ironic icing on a dark and evil cake. - Bentley Little in The Resort

Playing hooky agreed with him, always had, and he felt the way he had when ditching a class in high school or calling sick to work: free. - Bentley Little in The Resort

His mind brought it all back to high school. He had sometimes wondered in the intervening years how the practically sociopathic kids who'd terrorized the hallways had been able to dial it down enough to get along in regular society, how they'd managed to find jobs and wives and a life in the real world when, deep down, they were the same assholes they had always been. - Bentley Little in The Resort

...gravity-challenged shape-shifting. - Ben Tyler in One Night Stand

Money's a great aphrodisiac. -Ben Tyler in One Night Stand

...parade float pace. - Ben Tyler in One Night Stand

I saw us from above as we traversed a glittering island at the bottom-left-hand corner of the country, separated from its neighbors by miles of black desert. The rest of the country had already given up the night, but soon the last midnight on earth would sweep across the two of us. - Christopher Rice in Light Before Day

I had hung my moon on a sinking ship, and I wasn't quite sure how to avoid going down with it. - Christopher Rice in Light Before Day

You're hearing things I haven't said. - Christopher Rice in Light Before Day

Each morning saw the departure of another piece of reality on the retreating tide. - Christopher Rice in Light Before Day

I figured I would help out. That way, if Jimmy gets ready to throw shit at a fan, I can step in and unplug the fan first. - Christopher Rice in Light Before Day

I put two and two together too late to get a sum. - Christopher Rice in Light Before Day

The only way the truth can set you free is if you give it to someone else and they do something with it. Something good. - Christopher Rice in Light Before Day

This wasn't the first time I had been chased home by the sunrise. - Christopher Rice in Light Before Day

It was a matchstick supporting a ten-pound theory. - Christopher Rice in Light Before Day

Grief fills the world with shadows, and when the world is full of shadows, it looks like there are no limits at all. All your old rules no longer apply. - Christopher Rice in Light Before Day

We are not the product of what is done to us - we are the product of our response to it. - Christopher Rice in Light Before Day

He's a gangrenous leg attached to my psyche, and I need to hack him off before he infects my whole fucking soul. - Bart Yates in The Brothers Bishop

The only people in the world worth knowing are people with attitude. - Bart Yates in The Brothers Bishop

I'm with Hollywood: If there are ghosts in the world, they live in cornfields. - Bart Yates in The Brothers Bishop

Walls and roofs may keep you warm and dry, but they don't give you much room to run if you need it. - Bart Yates in The Brothers Bishop

Yeah, I know what the shrinks say: "Conflict and conflict resolution are the mainstays of human intimacy." That fatuous little axiom may be true, but it presupposed that human intimacy is a desireable thing. I have never been nearly as happy with somebody else in the room as I am when I'm by myself. It seems to me that loneliness is a small price to pay for peace and quiet. - Bart Yates in The Brothers Bishop

Love and pride don't count for shit if they're interspersed with random punches. - Bart Yates in The Brothers Bishop

Why is it that people who need the most forgiveness are always the least forgiving? - Bart Yates in The Brothers Bishop

How many kinds of an idiot can I be? - Bart Yates in The Brothers Bishop

Love doesn't "grow." It doesn't wait for you to discover it, it doesn't fall like a gentle rain from the sky, it doesn't tiptoe into your heart like a happy little bunny, and it doesn't have a fucking thing to do with familiarity. Love is neither patient nor kind. Love attacks. It sneaks up like a pride of lions or a pack of hyenas and eats your heart out while you watch. Love is the bully on the playground who takes your lunch money and gives you a black eye in return, the arsonist who burns your house down with you in it, the witch who lures you into her home with candy and boils you alive for dinner. Love is raw, and violent, and instantaneous. You don't fall in love: you get trampled by it. - Bart Yates in The Brothers Bishop

It it doesn't drop you to your knees and make you shake like a wet dog, it's not love...that's another thing about love. It's always hit and run. - Bart Yates in The Brothers Bishop

...that warm, glowing-in-the-fireplace-in-a-mountain-cabin-in-January smile grandparent's make that crackles. - Tom Nussbaum in The Boy in the Book

Every moment in our lives, every person we meet, every experience we have, every decision we make is just a whistle-stop on the train route called Destiny. - Tom Nussbaum in The Boy in the Book

The frustration and confusion he felt trying to sort out his feelings...were imprinted on his face like a dusty book print on the seat of well-worn jeans. - Tom Nussbaum in The Boy in the Book

Scar tissue is thick and numb. - Scott & Scott in Spare Parts

The easy route was never that easy. The straight and narrow was always backed up. - Scott & Scott in Spare Parts

[She] blew into the garage like a dust bunny full of glitter or a moth in butterfly's clothing. - Scott & Scott in Spare Parts

Reason and emotion bumped into each other around every corner of his mind. - Scott & Scott in Spare Parts

Everything in the darkroom was clean and still. It was probably some Freudian symbol for the womb with darkness and warmth and liquid creation. - Scott & Scott in Spare Parts

There wasn't enough liquor in the world to make this combination mix. - Scott & Scott in Spare Parts

It had already begun, the litany of time. Soon it would be an hour ago that Rob was here; then this time yesterday; and then this time last week. - Jay Mandal in The Dandelion Clock

Abstinence makes the part grow stronger. - Jay Mandal in The Dandelion Clock

Puberty isn't supposed to last for two presidential terms. Especially when one of them is Carter's. - Steve Kluger in Almost Like Being in Love

Still as gracious and hospitable as a yeast infection. - Steve Kluger in Almost Like Being in Love

Why do they entrust youth to kids? - Steve Kluger in Almost Like Being in Love

Motel 6 is a terrific place for staring at the ceiling in the dark. - Steve Kluger in Almost Like Being in Love

James Dean is what happens when you Zerox Marlon Brando. Badly. - Steve Kluger in Almost Like Being in Love

My biological clock is running on fumes. - Steve Kluger in Almost Like Being in Love

Being [you] was a full-time job, yet that never kept [you] from teaching me how to be [me]. - Steve Kluger in Almost Like Being in Love

Premeditated spontaneity. - Steve Kluger in Almost Like Being in Love

His pat on the back is as hard as his kick in the butt. - Ari Fleischer in Taking the Heat

Enough emotional baggage there to ground United. - Robin Tamlyn in Velocity

Religion, the last bastion of many a desperate man. - Robin Tamlyn in Velocity

Immoral support. - Robin Tamlyn in Velocity

You give great rant. - Robin Tamlyn in Velocity

There's a fine line between 'persistent' and 'restraining order.' - Robin Tamlyn in Velocity

Why was there never an Estonian translator handy when you needed one? - Robin Tamlyn in Velocity

[He] willed himself to find haven in slumber. - J.P. Bowie in The Journeyer

Only keep quiet at such a time and look like nothing, and you will see men reveal themselves. In the presence, they have had to show respect adn keep half their thoughts unspoken; outside, each will turn to whoever he felt to share his mind; and intrigue begins. - Mary Renault in The Persian Boy

Knowledge can alter memory. - Mary Renault in The Persian Boy

The sons of dreams outlive the sons of seed. -Mary Renault in The Persian Boy

What we imagine buckles and crumbles so easily, after all, under the sheer massive weight of the real. - David Leavitt in While England Sleeps

...like chunks of plaster from a ceiling of questionable integrity. - David Leavitt in While England Sleeps

Life at that age is a banquet at which many dishes are served: we choose what tastes best, oblivious to nutrition, not to mention the starving hordes outside the door. - David Leavitt in While England Sleeps

I bought a notebook...[that] exuded a comforting, musty aroma, the aroma of stationers' shops on rainy days. - David Leavitt in While England Sleeps

Some people march to a different drummer. Lucy marches to a different orchestra. - David Leavitt in While England Sleeps

The worse thing they ever did to us was die. - David Leavitt in While England Sleeps

A lavatory, the flushes of which sounded like the coughing fits of a dying emphysemic. - David Leavitt in While England Sleeps

Chaos reigned in the little theater of my private life. - David Leavitt in While England Sleeps

Love makes us young, but the world makes us old. -David Leavitt in While England Sleeps

You hurt people desperately in order to protect your lies, which have become like children to you — gnawing, desperate children not content to suck every drop of milk from your breast, because they are always hungry. So they bite into the nipple itself, they devour the flesh itself, and still you protect them. The problem ceases to be that you cannot live without your lies so much as that your lies cannot live without you. - David Leavitt in While England Sleeps

...hills so smooth they might have been upholstered in green velvet... - David Leavitt in While England Sleeps

Not mentioning things is like repeating them loudly - Martin Hyatt in The Scarecrow's Bible

No minute is without potential for momentous hange, and each tick of the clock might be the voice of Fate whispering a promise or a warning. - Dean Koontz in The Good Guy

Given enough time, you could convince yourself that loneliness was something better, that it was solitude, the ideal condition for reflection, even a kind of freedom. - Dean Koontz in The Good Guy Appearances are not reality, but they often can be a convincing alternative to it. - Dean Koontz in The Good Guy Under a lot of chronic anger is a sewer of self-pity. - Dean Koontz in The Good Guy This was a moment when you could believe that one day no traffic would ever again ply the roads, that no human being would walk the coastal hills or any land, anywhere. When the fallen had failed beyone hope of any rise, wind and rain would in time lick away every trace of what the dumb machine of Nature had not built, and the earth would enfold all the wicked bones to hide them forever from the sun, the moon. Under cold stars would lie a solitude from which had been purges all desire, expectation, and hope. The silence would seem never to have been broken by song or by laughter. The stillness would not be that of prayer or even contemplation, but of a void. And then the work would be done. - Dean Koontz in The Good Guy

When he retreated to tradesman's labor and simple pleasures, when his greatest purpose was mortaring stone to stone and brick to brick, when his deepest satisfation came from finishing a book of crossword puzzles or having dinner with friends, weariness lifted from his heart. In this smaller life, no longer committed to any grand enterprise, he had nothing about which to become disallusioned, no challenge great enough to raise doubts to foster feelings of futility. - Dean Koontz in The Good Guy

Sudden falls can come to societies that know too little history or that have furnished their minds with easy one-note propaganda in place of the true complexity and terrible beauty of the storied past. - Dean Koontz in The Good Guy

Pack up the act and make it a roadshow. - Tami Hoag in Dust to Dust

How else could some stranger in a bus station know the part of him that was hidden in the masking-taped shoebox buried inside his head? - Nick Nolan in Strings Attached

...as he ran the dream through his conscious mind the details began disintegrating like wet toilet paper. - Nick Nolan in Strings Attached

They moved outside, where desert winds blew in circles like nosy ghosts. - Nick Nolan in Strings Attached

We just believe what we want to, no matter what the signs and the earth and our friends and parents are saying from the outside. We just veer into danger like a drunk driver on our own blind paths of least resistance, steering toward tragedy, heartbreak, and being totally alone so that no matter how hard we scream, no one will care. We're able to ignore everything we've ever learned and just abandon our intuition and careen into the face of hell. - Blair Mastbaum in Clay's Way

At least Jessica showed a true color, even it was an ugly shade of passive-aggressive. - Robin Reardon in Thinking Straight

There: that little flash of movement in the shadows in the back of my mind. What was it? - The Hired Man by Dorien Grey

I like libraries. They remind me in an odd way of cemeteries — very calm, very peaceful — and I am almost palpably aware of being surrounded by the spirits and words of people long since gone, but who have much to tell those who will listen. - The Popsicle Tree by Dorien Grey

No matter how often I go to airports, the almost palpable air of anticipation always impresses me. I suppose that's true in any place devoted to comings and goings of large numbers of people: bus stations, train stations, boat docks. Even if you weren't going anywhere, you could pretend. - The Paper Mirror by Dorien Grey

There's a definite difference between having a big prick and being one. - The Bar Watcher by Dorien Grey

The room lived up to the parking lot. - Jane Davitt in Wild Raspberries

One's own obnoxious flaws seen in others can often provoke irrational dislike for them. - Grant Michaels in Dead on Your Feet

Once you have a name, people know who you are. Once people know who you are, they expect things from you. And that can be more trouble than it's worth. - Rowan McBride in Warm Rush Book 1: Chasing Winter

I wish the whole day were like breakfast, when people are still connected to their dreams, focused inward, and not yet ready to engage with the world around them. - Peter Cameron in Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

.... at about two o'clock the sky went dark in a weird green swampy way that gave me a creepy end-of-the-world feeling. - Peter Cameron in Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

... as soon as he opened his mouth, he left innocence standing on a corner by a bus stop on the seedy side of Cleveland. - K.A. Mitchell in Regular Scheduled Life

She couldn't have looked much younger without splitting into an egg cell and a puddle of sperm. - Marshall Moore in The Concrete Sky

...in addition to working full-time as a temp, a professional juggler of administrivia... - Marshall Moore in The Concrete Sky

He didn't need to read flashing electric headlines off the side of the Goodyear Blimp to guess what they were up to. - Marshall Moore in The Concrete Sky

...stuck without a visa in the border state between reality and anesthesia. - Marshall Moore in The Concrete Sky

The moment had a Terry Gilliam feel to it. - Marshall Moore in The Concrete Sky

If Susan had ever been pregnant, no doubt the fetus had been burnt to a crisp in the kiln of her womb. - Marshall Moore in The Concrete Sky

The moment had a stupid sort of reverse Romeo and Juliet, Wherefore art thou quality, in retrospect. - Marshall Moore in The Concrete Sky

Sometimes the difference between a lie and the truth is only a matter of perspective. - Marshall Moore in The Concrete Sky

I spent most of my childhood believing I'd have been happier as wads of nonspecific fetal tissue splattered around inside an abortionist's suction device. - Marshall Moore in The Concrete Sky

It's a straw. I'm going to grasp it. - Marshall Moore in The Concrete Sky

The inherent consolation of liftoff. - Marshall Moore in The Concrete Sky

Coughing up secrets like bits of lung. - Marshall Moore in The Concrete Sky

Visiting hours on the psycho ward were something like Halloween in reverse... Well-dressed normal people came and knocked on doors, and the scary creatures answered, hoping for handouts. - Marshall Moore in The Concrete Sky

Silence fell like a truckoad of fish. - Marshall Moore in The Concrete Sky

I find Beltway politics amusing. Once you get past the bleakness, senselessness, stupidity, and horror, it's quite entertaining. - Marshall Moore in The Concrete Sky

"Don't be such a side effect." - Marshall Moore in The Concrete Sky

A life of mediocrity spun itself out like spider silk. - Marshall Moore in The Concrete Sky

The road to recovery hadn't been paved and there were times when he wanted a permanent detour, if not a nice commuter train with upholstered seats. - Marshall Moore in The Concrete Sky

Southern Gothic homodrama. - Marshall Moore in The Concrete Sky

What do your dreams look like when you fondest hope is for someone to pull the fucking plug? A blank screen i a dark movie theater? - Marshall Moore in The Concrete Sky

I'll law his ass until he squels like the fat boy in Deliverance. - Marshall Moore in The Concrete Sky

That was the cherry on the cake of my day. - Marshall Moore in The Concrete Sky

I could use an ocean right now. - Marshall Moore in The Concrete Sky

Mona wouldn't turn over in her grave, but her ashes would spin in their urn like cat litter being flushed down the toilet. - Marshall Moore in The Concrete Sky

There's nothing wrong with wiping the slate clean when it's too covered with dust to be useful. - Marshall Moore in The Concrete Sky

It was horrible. It was beyond horrible. It was a whole new word that hasn't been invented yet. - Marshall Moore in The Concrete Sky

The world is my bottle of oyster sauce. - Marshall Moore in The Concrete Sky

The best lies are the ones you've seasoned with elements of truth. - Marshall Moore in The Concrete Sky

"You live in the tiny locked room that is your own mind." - Tomb of the God King by Julia Talbot