Elsewhere

by Dean Koontz

Amity took Snowball from her shoulder and cradled him in her hands. He was just a mouse, but he was hers to keep safe in a world where nothing lasted forever, not even who you were.

Sometimes, however, common sense required paranoia. It seemed that the political elites were striving, with admiration for George Orwell and rare unanimity, to ensure that the totalitarian state in the novel 1984 would be realized no later than fifty years after the author predicted.

“Nostalgia is a dead end. We either progress or slide backward. Slide far enough backward, everything collapses.”

Indeed, all his life, as far back as he could remember, he had known that laws were for others, not for him. He was born wise to the truth of the world: The only virtue is vice, and the acquisition of power justifies all things.

this was an America where fascists didn’t pretend to be antifascists, didn’t conceal their faces behind black masks, operated openly and boldly; this was an America ruled by brute intimidation, harassment, and violence.

If a man can’t understand a monster’s suffering, then he’s something of a monster himself.

‘the heart is deceitful above all things.’”

“The mind and the heart—intellect and emotions, facts and feelings. They’re both important. But to live well, we need to make decisions based on logic and reason modified by emotion. If we’re guided only or even largely by emotion . . . Well, the heart often wants what it doesn’t really need, and sometimes it wants what it

shouldn’t have, something with the potential to ruin your life. It wants something so intensely that we find it easy to do what the heart wants even if we know it’s reckless.”

Amity knew that the heart was deceitful above all things, but she also knew that the heart was a lonely hunter, that the heart was slow to learn, that the heart was an open house with its doors widely flung.

In this world where rodents did not use sewing needles as swords or save princesses from imprisonment, where magic was not common, lessons still could be learned from a mere mouse.

she had learned the primary lesson of The Princess Bride: As wondrous as life was, it was also full of sadness, and the best way to get past the sad parts and enjoy all the rest was to find the humor in even the darkness. Laughter wasn’t just a medicine for melancholy, but also a sword raised against evil.

I don’t want to be changed more than I’ve already been. I don’t want the multiverse. All I want is a home, books, and the peace to read them.”