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They wanted to prove something to themselves about how much they could take, to prove they were hard.
He understood that the ghost existed first and foremost within his own head. That maybe ghosts always haunted minds, not places.
Like pinchin’ yourself in a dream. You know. Pain has a way of wakin’ you up. Of remindin’ you who you are.”
Danny did not think coke and computers were anything alike. But Jude had seen the way people hunched over their screens, clicking the refresh button again and again, waiting for some crucial if meaningless hit of information, and he thought it was almost exactly the same.
With old ladies it’s all about the eyes. You want to be an old lady with lively eyes, so it looks like you’re always thinking of something funny. Like you’re looking for trouble.”
“So this is what your kid would find out: No matter what bad thing happens to me, I can talk to my mother, because she’s been through it all. No matter what shitty thing happens to me, I can survive it, because my mom was through worse, and she made it.”
A childish willingness to remain in the dark, to avoid distressing conversations, upsetting truths. He had feared her secrets—or, more specifically, the emotional entanglements that might come with knowing them.
The dead win when you quit singing and let them take you on down the road with them.”
“This is why guys like him get away with it. Because people like you go on protecting them, even when they ought to know better.”
Was that the worst thing he’d ever done, planted that Judas kiss on his father’s cheek while his mother bled, taken the worthless coin of his father’s affection?
Horror was rooted in sympathy, after all, in understanding what it would be like to suffer the worst.
