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No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality;
a novel was a confession to everything by a man who had never done anything.’
If you like another man and you are honest, you speak freely, discuss women over beer, shoot the shit about politics. But no matter how deep the potential liking, it is impossible to open up completely to a man who is dangling your daughter’s potential defloration between his legs.
it’s relatively easy for people to accept something like telepathy or precognition or teleplasm because their willingness to believe doesn’t cost them anything. It doesn’t keep them awake nights. But the idea that the evil that men do lives after them is more unsettling.’
God grant me the SERENITY to accept what I cannot change, the TENACITY to change what I may, and the GOOD LUCK not to fuck up too often.
Genesis I:I – ‘In the beginning there was scotch, and Father Callahan said, Let there be Notes.’),
At moments like this he suspected that Hitler had been nothing but a harried bureaucrat and Satan himself a mental defective with a rudimentary sense of humor – the kind that finds feeding firecrackers wrapped in bread to seagulls unutterably funny.
‘Does the Pope wear a tall hat?’
Older man, very urbane, very charming, very courtly. You know looking at him that he could order from a French menu and know what wine would go with what, not just red or white but the year and even the vineyard.
Now who’s sitting in the chimney corner, believing the wind in the eaves is a banshee?
Question: If you put a psychologist in a room with a man who thinks he’s Napoleon and leave them there for a year (or ten or twenty), will you end up with two Skinner men or two guys with their hands in their shirts? Answer: Insufficient data.
Alone. Yes, that’s the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn’t hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym
If a fear cannot be articulated, it can’t be conquered. And the fears locked in small brains are much too large to pass through the orifice of the mouth. Sooner or later you found someone to walk past all the deserted meetinghouses you had to pass between grinning babyhood and grunting senility.
he was not particularly agile on his mental feet
There was a smell. It oozed out of the walls in an almost visible miasma.
That quarter inch of darkness was hideous, unspeakable in its possibilities.
His bald head glistened with a subdued elegance in the gathering gloom.
There was something medieval about it, something accursed – a ritual act of regurgitation.
‘Park, you feelin’ all right?’ Parkins Gillespie considered it. ‘Nope,’ he said. ‘Well, what in hell’s the matter?’ ‘I believe,’ Gillespie said, ‘that I’m scared shitless.’
In the east the stars are already out. They gleam steadily, like fierce diamonds. There is no mercy in them at this time of year, no comfort for lovers. They gleam in beautiful indifference.
all around them, the bestiality of the night rises on tenebrous wings. The vampire’s time has come.
his thirst for revenge must be overmastering, a thing to be trembled at, but perhaps also a thing to be used.’
He listened to the story told by his son and the village abbé, sipping a cup of coffee and prompting them with lucid questions at points where the thread of narration became tangled or unclear.
the word sounded like a dead haddock in his mouth.
much of his work will be undone.’ He sighed. ‘We have to assume that Father Callahan is lost to us. That’s bad. But you must press on, regardless. You’ll have to be careful, all of you. Be ready to lie. If you’re locked up, that will serve his purpose well. And if you haven’t considered it, you might do well to consider it now:There is every possibility that some of us or all of us may live and triumph only to stand trial for murder.’ He looked each of them in the face. What he saw there must have satisfied him, because he turned his attention wholly to Mark again. ‘You
His eyes were fixed on Reggie’s face with the dead and sparkling avidity of a stuffed moose.
cheap diners. ‘How are you, Constable?’ Ben asked. ‘Tolerable,’ Parkins allowed.
she left them, walking down the center aisle in her black dress, the solitary mourner at a funeral that hadn’t been held here.
the knife blades thrust through them glittering like dragon’s teeth.
The holy water ran out on the floor, beginning to glow immediately. He got another one, twisted the small cap off, and doused the blade of the ax. It began to glimmer with eldritch fairy-light.
