Joey B. > Recent Status Updates

"It's a cruel joke, those formative years, when your brain learns the rules of the universe. Your childhood is spent being nurtured, protected, loved unconditionally while your adulthood is spent searching in vain for substitutes. Mate, government, God..."

"Small world," said Coraline.
"It's big enough for her," said the cat. "Spiders' webs only have to be big enough to catch flies."

"People thought life was a miracle, but it wasn't. Life was everywhere. The miracle was knowing you were alive. Sentience. That was the rare precious gift."

"You ever seen a dead body before? I mean a REAL dead body. One that's been decomposing for two full days. What you see today is going to stay with you for a long, long time."

"The cowboy felt as if he were witnessing the awful from a great distance, over the shoulder of an uninterested God."

"But you're not worried about la migra?"
"Nah. You don't have to outrun la migra. You only have to be faster than your brother."

"So you're not worried about la migra?"

"No. You don't have to outrun la migra. You only have to be faster than your brother."

"Evil only truly scares us when it's likely that we can't win."

"And it was Jess's light that found the paintings. They were inside the cave. So horrid were the designs, yet fluent and so elegantly wrought upon the stone. Jess had never forgotten them. An ancient work. Hellishly beauteous."

"During the journey in a vehicle she'd never glimpsed while hooded, she'd pleaded, begged for mercy. But inside THAT PLACE, she soon stopped whimpering. Slumped beside the fire, she'd been rendered mute in horrified awe."

"Defleshing, nutritional cannibalism: Her vocabulary had acquired a new vernacular of brutality and bloodshed."

"At the funeral of Homo sapiens there will be few mourners."

"We're edging into Twilight Zone territory here."

"Sir, please call us back if you cannot deal with the situation on your own," said the man. He hung up. Jesus, 9-1-1 hung up on me. I never thought I'd see the day.

"But then the new girl's infection reached a critical point, her tattoo was never going to heal properly. Even if the infection didn't kill her, the wings would be hopelessly flawed, and that was something the Gardener couldn't accept. Not when beauty was why he chose us."

"It's about the eyes, really. If you've seen enough, you just look older, no matter what the rest of your face looks like."

"You could peel a banana easily with your fingers; an apple you couldn't. To peel as an apple of it's skin, you needed a knife. A person was more like a apple than a banana. You couldn't peel a person easily with your fingers. With a person, you needed a knife."

"Yes," she sighed. "I'm one of an odd family. We sleep days and fly nights like black kites on the wind."

"I pray every day that I'll die before him. That's the only happy ending us humans can have, isn't it? For the parent to die before the child."

Chapter 18: "Do the bodies in the cemetery make the water we drink taste bad?"

"...these were fascinating. Like gargoyles, only not as friendly. You got the impression that gargoyles were there to chase away evil spirits. These things looked like they were there to chase away gargoyles."

"A lie. A dream. Good stories are both."

"You can't be scared. You're not human...let's not pretend otherwise. You're a very cunning approximation, but you're simply a manifestation, a character. A book playing at human... But you're not."

"The last thing he thought about before his brains escaped its boney enclosure was the pile and assemblage of parts, human and animal and all kinds of ungodly.
He closed his eyes.
The blast delivered him darkness, pure and absolute."

"Alone. Some words never full encompass the true depth of their meaning. Some are so small, so insignificant, that what they represent dwarfs them into meaningless and trivial utterances. Death is one. Alone is another."

"It may be the lower gravity, but your jokes are less funny here, Doctor."

I call myself "swim," which stands for 'someone who isn't me.'

"He could not manage the simple trick of walking toward his sister's voice, which came from the right when he was walking left, and from the left when he was walking right. And no matter which direction he walked in, he seemed to move farther from the road."

I literally had September 10th circled on my calendar as the day, The Institute, came out. Nothing disappointing here. Although not a horror story, (no monsters or jump scares here) the uneasy imagery of violence illustrated throughout the novel are fairly straightforward and gripping. A strong 5 stars to an absolute must read for Stephen King fans.

"Winona? Please remove Mr. Avery's pants and apply your Taser to his testes. Full power."