"But there are weak men who can lift cars if their wives are pinned underneath. The brain, Garraty." McVries's voice had dropped to a hoarse whisper. "It isn't man or God. It's something...in the brain."

"Fifty yards ahead of us, a doe had come out of the woods. She stepped delicately over one rusty GS&WM track and onto the railbed, where the weeds and goldenrod were so high they brushed against her sides. She paused there, looking at us calmly, ears cocked forward. What I remember about that moment was the silence. No bird sang, no plane went droning overhead. If my mother had been with us, she'd have had her camera and would have been taking pictures like mad. Thinking of that made me miss her in a way I hadn't in years."

"Of course we're friends ... we are both civilized men, aren't we? We've shared bed and board and bottle. We'll always be friends, and the dog collar I have on you will always be ignored by mutual consent, and I'll take good and benevolent care of you. All I ask in return is your soul. Small item. We can even ignore the fact that you've handed it over, the way we ignore the dog collar."

"Do any of us, except in our dreams, truly expect to be reunited with our hearts' deepest loves, even when they leave us only for minutes, and on the most mundane of errands? No, not at all. Each time they go from our sight we in our secret hearts count them as dead. Having been given so much, we reason, how could we expect not to be brought as low as Lucifer for the staggering presumption of our love?"

"The silence wasn't uncomfortable or hostile but exhausted--the quiet of people who have a great deal to think about but not a hell of a lot to say."

"I think it was the first real pain I ever felt in my life, he would tell the others. It wasn't what I thought it would be at all. It didn't put an end to me as a person. I think... it gave me a basis for comparison, finding out you could still exist inside the pain, in spite of the pain."

"Rings and magazines; keychains and umbrellas; hats and glasses; rattles and radios. They looked like different things, but Ralph thought they were really all the same thing: the faint, sorrowing voices of people who had found themselves written out of the script in the middle of the second act while they were still learning their lines for the third, people who had been unceremoniously hauled off before their work was done or their obligations fulfilled, people whose only crime had been to be born in the Random... and to have caught the eye of the madman with the rusty scalpel."

"He was a poet who sometimes taught Free University classes or travelled in the western states of Utah, Nevada, and Arizona, speaking to high school English classes, stunning middle-class boys and girls (he hoped) with the news that poetry was alive-narcoleptic, to be sure, but still possessed of a certain hideous vitality."

"Adulthood is accretive by nature, a thing which arrives in ragged stages and uneven overlaps."

"Sometimes, the embers are better then the campfire. It's strange, but it's true."

"He had never been a social man. He had shunned causes with contempt and disgust. They were for pig-simple suckers and people with too much time and money on their hands."

"Hearts can break. Yes, hearts can break. Sometimes I think it would be better if we died when they did, but we don't."

"His mind is like that. On the inside, where he never smiles."

"You're like a man who loves nothing better than a thick steak but wouldn't last an hour in a slaughterhouse."

"A woman who would steal your love when your love was really all you had to give was not much of a woman."

"What charitable 1 percenters can't do is assume responsibility - America's national responsibilities: the care of its sick and its poor, the education of its young, the repair of its failing infrastructure, the repayment of its staggering war debts."

"The last good time always comes."

"I tend to scare myself."

"Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win."

"It's a hard life if you don't weaken."

"Being good is commendable, but only when it is combined with doing good is it useful."

"If you don't have the time to do something right, where are you going to find the time to fix it?"

"I wanted to say goodbye to someone, and have someone say goodbye to me. The goodbyes we speak and the goodbyes we hear are the goodbyes that tell us we re still alive."

"Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest."

"Allie sighed. It was an old yellow sound, like turning pages."

"I was in enough to get along with people. I was never socially inarticulate. Not a loner. And that saved my life, saved my sanity. That and the writing. But to this day I distrust anybody who thought school was a good time. Anybody."

"The devil's voice is sweet to hear."

"When the work is the best work, it's more like being a secretary than it is a creative person, you just sort of take the stuff down."

"For God's sake, Larry, grow up. Develop a little self-righteousness. A lot of that is an ugly thing, God knows, but a little applied over all your scruples is an absolute necessity! It is to the soul what a good sunblock is to the skin during the heat of the summer. You can only captain your own soul, and from time to time some smart-ass psychologist will question your ability to even do that."

"Several times we had been very close to "it," but "it" just never quite happened. She always drew back, and I never pressed her. God help me, I was being gallant. I have wondered often since what would have changed (for good or for ill) had I not been. What I know now is that gallant young men rarely get pussy. Put it on a sampler and hang it in your kitchen."

"If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write."

"The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as long swallows."

"I want to make sure I remember what real ugly is. I might want to tell my grandchildren someday."

"Roland of Gilead responded as he ever had and ever would when such useless, mystifying questions were raised: 'Ka."

"The person healed has an obligation to then ask why- to meditate on God's will, and the extraordinary lengths to which God has gone to realize His will."

"We see her go through dangerous mood-swings, but I tried never to come right out and say "Annie was depressed and possibly suicidal that day" or "Annie seemed particularly happy that day."If I have to tell you, I lose. If, on the other hand, I can show you a silent, dirty-haired woman who compulsively gobbles cake and candy, then have you draw the conclusion that Annie is in the depressive part of a manic-depressive cycle, I win."

"Christ.No, not Christ. These leavings were made in propitiation of a much older God than the Christian one. People have called Him different things at different times, but Rachel's sister gave Him a perfectly good name, I think: Oz the Gweat and Tewwible, God of dead things left in the ground, God of rotting flowers in drainage ditches, God of the Mystery."

"When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, "Why god? Why me?" and the thundering voice of God answered, "There's just something about you that pisses me off.""

"Home is where they want you to stay longer."

"Kill if you will, but command me nothing!' the gunslinger roared. 'You have forgotten the faces of those who made you!"

"Most politicians lie for the same reason a monkey swings by his tail, which is to say because he can."

"You said 'God is cruel' the way a person who's lived his whole life on Tahiti might say 'Snow is cold'. You knew, but you didn't understand." He stepped close to David and put his palms on the boy's cold cheeks. "Do you know how cruel your God can be, David. How fantastically cruel?"

"There were fourteen steps exactly fourteen. But the top one was smaller, out of proportion, as if it had been added to avoid the evil number."

"What sad, short lives humans live! Each life a short pamphlet written by an idiot! Tut-tut, and all that."

"So okay- there you are in your room with the shade down and the door shut and the plug pulled out of the base of the telephone. You've blown up your TV and committed yourself to a thousand words a day, come hell or high water. Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want."

"The things a man sees when he ain't got a gun.--Watson the Caretaker."

"And perhaps the greatest blessing was that we never knew how short the time was."

"Show me a man or a woman alone and I'll show you a saint. Give me two and they'll fall in love. Give me three and they'll invent the charming thing we call 'society'. Give me four and they'll build a pyramid. Give me five and they'll make one an outcast. Give me six and they'll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they'll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home."

"She saw clearly a boy and a man fighting for control of the same face."

"Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled on to the bestseller lists by the magic words AUTHOR OF on the covers of their books."