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He’ll also cut you some slack if you’re astonishingly stupid in an amusing fashion. Granny claimed that this explains why uncountable millions of breathtakingly stupid people get along just fine in life.
Although the dawn had just broken, it had already flash-fried into a hard yellow yolk on the eastern horizon.
She had gone to sleep next to the man whom she had loved for more than forty years—and awakened beside a cold cadaver. For Herman, death had come as gently as it ever does, in sleep, but for Rosalia, the shock of waking with the dead had been traumatic.
Herman, her sisters, her nieces, her nephews had been the center of her life. She lost them all while sleeping.
The gods of the Mojave don’t know the meaning of the word moderation.
sweet Bertie Orbic, round in name and fact—at
Across his skull spread short, sour-yellow hair furrier than a yeasty mold.
One reason Elvis mattered, she said, was that in his prime, pop music had still been politically innocent, therefore deeply life-affirming, therefore relevant. By the time he died, most pop songs had become, usually without the conscious intention of those who wrote and sang them, anthems endorsing the values of fascism, which remains the case to this day.
Say what?
The air flash-dried my lips and brought to me that summer scent of desert towns that is a melange of superheated silica, cactus pollen, mesquite resin, the salts of long-dead seas, and exhaust fumes suspended in the motionless dry air like faint nebulae of mineral particles spiraling through rock crystal.
Nice!
Hard luck seemed to seep out of the ground itself, as though the devil’s rooms in Hades were directly beneath these streets, his sleeping loft so near the surface that his fetid breath, expelled with every snore, percolated through the soil.
“Yes, but I’m not like other people.” “Not in the least,” she agreed.
“You’re as smart as anyone I’ve ever known…and yet so simple. It’s a lovely combination. Brains and innocence. Wisdom and naivete. Sharp wit and genuine sweetness.” “That’s your favorite thing about me?” “At the moment, yes.”
Stormy quashed that idea: “Like hell you will, Mulder.”
Chief Porter seemed tickled: “She calls you Mulder, like on The X-Files?” “Not often, sir. Only when she thinks I’m being paternalistic.”
😂
I would no doubt quickly seek escape in autism or suicide. Not yet either dead or autistic, however, I had to face the challenge of Green Moon Lanes.
Mmm, maybe not cool to imply that autism is a choice, or any kind of escape for that matter. Or to imply that it's a fate equal to death. Yikes.
Shadows and shrubs plaited their different darknesses,
Above the back entrance to the restaurant kitchen, a security lamp glowed. Yet the darkness seemed to press toward it rather than to shrink away.
Elvis is the door that she closes in the face of romance. The architecture of his life is her mountain retreat, her high redoubt, her nunnery.
“That’s when he died,” Terri said. “Elvis himself?” Stormy asked. “Yes. August 16, 1977.”
Hmm, the birthday of my dad and his mother. Weird.
I understood his thinking, but I resented being used as bait without first being asked politely if I minded having a hook in my ass.
Recognizing the structure of your psychology doesn’t mean that you can easily rebuild it. The Chamber of Unreasonable Guilt is part of my mental architecture, and I doubt that I will ever be able to renovate that particular room in this strange castle that is me.
Her eyes were clear; she hadn’t been crying. She was a cop’s wife first, a woman second;
Ouch.
We are not strangers to ourselves; we only try to be.
He says that his second mutation is his ability to write well and swiftly, turning out enthusiastically received books at a prodigious pace.
I wonder what Koontz's first mutation is. 👆
