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he felt like an astronaut who’d moonwalked too long and missed the flight home.
The air was blue with tobacco smoke, the walls and the ceiling vaults covered with hand-painted quotations from e. e. cummings, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, even Jesus, and with more inscrutable, unattributed lines, such as Why guess? Get the facts. DEATH KILLS. Before
It was a crash course in the fundamental economy of Crossroads: public display of emotion purchased overwhelming approval.
He sensed that the sum of his identity, in that house, consisted of being the dude who was boning the little chick on the fourth floor, which was uncomfortably close to a fair summation.
She’d bought him the cheapest of cassette recorders, the kind of thing that an appliance store displayed to assure the buyers of other cassette recorders that they weren’t getting the worst one.
Her first Christmas alone wasn’t so bad that it didn’t later seem good.
On the day a person was born, only one date on the calendar, her birthday, was significant, but as she proceeded through life other dates became permanently exalted or befouled, the date her father killed himself, the date she married, the dates her children were born, until the calendar was densely checkered with significance.
And Larry, he wanted to be an astronaut, but he wasn’t exceptional at sports, wasn’t a straight-A student, and Bobby was constantly yelling at him. ‘Do you think you get to be an astronaut by not sliding hard into second base? Do you think John Glenn ever got a B on an algebra test?’
“I understand what you’re saying,” he said to Reverend Walsh. “But what if a person isn’t able to have faith?” “Not everyone finds faith overnight. Faith is rarely easy. But if you’ve ever done a good thing, and felt a glow in your heart, then that’s a little message from God. He’s telling you that Christ is in you, and that you have the freedom and capacity to pursue a closer relationship with him. ‘Seek, and ye shall find.’” “It’s approximately the same if you’re a Jew,” the rabbi said, “although we tend to emphasize that you’re a Jew whether you like it or not. It’s more a matter of God
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“Not everyone finds faith overnight. Faith is rarely easy. But if you’ve ever done a good thing, and felt a glow in your heart, then that’s a little message from God. He’s telling you that Christ is in you, and that you have the freedom and capacity to pursue a closer relationship with him. ‘Seek, and ye shall find.’”
“It’s approximately the same if you’re a Jew,” the rabbi said, “although we tend to emphasize that you’re a Jew whether you like it or not. It’s more a matter of Go...
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Doris Haefle had a grossly inflated sense of the importance of a pastor’s wife, was sensitive to every slight to it, and therefore, because the world didn’t share her regard for the role, existed in a state of perpetual grievance.
Between him and Laura was the social ease of having long ago established that they didn’t like each other.
Good people, plenty Christian—there are many ways to skin a cat. I can’t say as I’ve tried any of them, but I’ve skinned a raccoon, and the adage has it right. There are different ways of doing it.”
It was strange that self-pity wasn’t on the list of deadly sins; none was deadlier.
It was very curious. How did an all-seeing Entity end up on a toilet seat without knowing how he’d gotten there?
