A Game of Ghosts (Charlie Parker, #15)

by John Connolly

Then again, maybe nostalgia was an understandable response to a world that appeared to be going all to hell, as long as everyone remembered that the past was a nice place to visit but nobody should want to settle in it.

Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today, I wish, I wish he’d go away . . . —William Hughes Mearns, “Antigonish”

He thought of himself as a good man, but truly good men never think of themselves in that way at all.

“I do it because I’m afraid that if I don’t, nobody else will. I do it because if I turn away, someone else might suffer the way I have. I do it because it’s an outlet for my anger. I do it for reasons that even I don’t understand.

Lennon could only ever really write about himself, and Parker felt that he lacked empathy.

his physician had advised him not to be overly concerned about forgetting facts and names, and he should begin to worry only if he stopped noticing that he couldn’t remember them—if, in essence, he forgot that he was forgetting.

but like all duplicitous, unreliable men, Philip saw his own moral imperfections reflected in every face he met.

wouldn’t solve the underlying problem, which was her rage at the damage that had been done to her world by the events of the previous year.

He was, to all appearances, just another businessman with a wife who had been forced to make the aging woman’s choice between her face and her body, and had, judging by the photographs accompanying the article, opted for the body. She was okay from the lower neck down—a bit scrawny for Sumner’s liking, and with the kind of raised veins on her arms that would have given him the shivers to touch—but her features had the drawn, rapacious look of someone who spent too much time wishing she could eat more.