Lightning

by Dean Koontz

I think you’re scared to die, but I don’t know if you have the guts to go on living.”

One of the greatest sorrows of human existence is that some people aren’t happy merely to be alive but find their happiness only in the misery of others. ”

Her father had said she could be anything: a vet, a lawyer, a movie star, anything. “You can be a moose herder if you want, or a ballerina on a pogo stick. Nothing can stop you.” Laura smiled, remembering how her father had imitated a ballerina on a pogo stick. But she also remembered he was gone, and a dreadful emptiness opened in her.

Nothing lasts forever. Life is a candle in the wind.

If the world was hard and cruel and unpredictable, then it did not seem wise to show the slightest weakness.

Some things are meant to be, and no one can prevent them.

left. Understanding wasn’t always necessary, as long as you believed.

Within a few weeks Laura realized that there were two types of survivors in life: those, like her, who found the requisite strength in having once been loved with great intensity; and those who, having not been loved, learned to thrive on hatred, suspicion, and the meager rewards of revenge. They were at once scornful of the need for human feeling and envious of the capacity for it.

it was one of those rare times when remembering the dead was more important than tending to the needs of the living.

“Adversity breeds toughness, and the tough succeed. And survive.”

After all, hunches were just messages from the subconscious, which was thinking furiously all the time and processing information she had not consciously noted.

Terror was not like happiness or depression; it was an acute condition that by its very nature had to be of a short term. Terror wilted fast. Or it escalated until you passed out or until you died of it, frightened to death; you screamed until a blood vessel burst in your brain.

But did distance matter to men who measured their journeys strictly in days and years rather than miles?

“I know. But if we live through this ... well, there’s always time.”

This is creepy???

tbousand-dollar

Lol

He would rejoin her—and enter the Hght—in only two or three minutes.

The what

“They say politics makes strange bedfellows, but the alliances necessitated by war make stranger ones yet.”

The government could not make a postage stamp that could be trusted to stay on an envelope, could not build a battle tank that was capable of crossing a river on every attempt, could not protect the environment or eliminate poverty, but it sure as hell knew how to procure indestructible wire; this stuff must be some wonder material which they had developed for the space shuttle and for which they’d eventually found more mundane uses; it was the wire God would use to guy the tilting pillars that held up the world.

A red curb, for instance, did not mean EMERGENCY PARKING, as he had thought, but NO PARKING AT ANY TIME.

LOL

In tragedy and despair, when an endless night seems to have fallen, hope can be found in the realization that the companion of night is not another night, that the companion of night is day, that darkness always gives way to light, and that death rules only half of creation, life the other half.

If you start talking family stuff with strangers, pretty soon where do you go when you want to go home?”