The House at the End of the World

by Dean Koontz

The sky is for the most part blue, though a filigree of white clouds decorates it randomly, like a long ribbon of lace unraveling. When the sun westers a little farther, those scrolls and arabesques will be transformed to gold in the oblique light.

Is westers a word?

She distrusts those who prefer power to money or who seek money not by working but by exercising their power.

Unloaded and propped in one corner are a pistol-grip pump-action 12-gauge shotgun and an AR-15 that is often called an assault rifle by people who don’t know anything about guns.

Gone to gold, the filigree of clouds graces the sky like ornamentation spun with jeweler’s wire.

any great artist—musician, painter, sculptor, a fine prose stylist—is on a subconscious level a mathematician and a carpenter and a mason and an engineer. A great artist intuitively understands how the world is built and how it works and how people best fit into it. That’s how they’re able to create beauty—because they know the truth of things.

No longer a filigree, they are like a dark smear of some unpleasant organic substance.

Maybe scientists there are engaged in gain-of-function research on exotic viruses. The CDC had often indirectly funded such legally prohibited work at foreign laboratories, eventually resulting in an accidental leak and a global pandemic.

Maybe the good die young, like they say, but who wants to die knowing she’s treated other people like shit?

Here is the fruit of arrogance, fallen from the tree of hubris, as rotten as the minds of those who believe they can learn all that exists to be known and can control anything they wish to control, who believe that it is their right, above the rights of all other men and women, to shape the destinies of their neighbors, cities, nations, and the Earth entire, according to their whims.

The internet is the greatest repository of knowledge in history. But when history is kept in electronic files, the internet is also an efficient memory hole, and truths can be erased as easily as untruths can be fact-checked and sold as the new history.”

there’s beauty and magic in every place if you know how to look.”

These days, virtue is constantly and loudly signaled but seldom practiced.