Bag of Bones

by Stephen King

but in dreams, perhaps everyone is a novelist. How is one to know?

Grief is like a drunken houseguest, always coming back for one more goodbye hug.

but any good marriage is secret territory, a necessary white space on society’s map. What others don’t know about it is what makes it yours.

This is how we go on: one day at a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time. Dentists go on one root-canal at a time; boat-builders go on one hull at a time. If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind us as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things – fish and unicorns and men on horseback – but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightning flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.