A Choir of Ill Children

The Crone tires quickly and reaches out for the velvet draperies, sits on the divan, breathing heavily. She's too ancient to have a name any longer. When she coughs you can hear the ages rattling inside her shrunken frame. No human names can cling to her any more- they slip from her dusty shriveled flesh like a young girl's whimsies.

Ghosts will forever put in appearances, as they should. Our illusions have muscle and meaning. The past returns at midnight, in the heart of our dreams, and the rains and the willows forever remind us of the sacrifices we’ve offered and those we have yet to make.

It will finish badly when she dries out, I suppose, and probably end with madness, but almost everything does.

He was a realist with too much fervor and not enough reverie. He always remained pragmatic in a place that had too much use for superstition. That’s enough to ruin any man.

It seems that the people who question me the most are the ones who’ve committed the most outlandish or atrocious acts.

He doesn’t hate you, Thomas, he admires you. And we’re often frightened and jealous of what we admire.

Evil, as considered in these cases, is a lack of choice.

why she did not trade Dodi to anyone but me, and why I didn’t dig screw worms out of anybody

The past can come back in a lot of different ways, chile. It don’t get old and wind up buried like people do. It can die and be reborn. Sins take on shape and peck at your face.

LOVE IS ONLY LUST DRESSED UP FOR CHURCH.

They walk the wire across the chasms of their own souls, looking down into the great depths as, step by step, they cross to the distant side. On occasion they’ve learned something by the time they get there, but not always, and usually not what they expect.