A Time of Torment

His grandfather used to say that there were angels whom devils would greet on the street. If that were true, thought Parker, then let the devils raise their hats to him. It would just make them easier to identify and destroy.

It was the kind of bar where everybody knew your name, as long as your name was ‘Motherfucker’.

He understood the half-life of hope: it is not despair that destroys us, but its opposite. Hope is the winding, despair the unwinding. Despair brings with it the possibility of an ending. Taken to the extreme, its logical conclusion is death. But hope sustains. It can be exploited. Ormsby

Every individual spends a lifetime trying to disprove Copernicus by placing him- or herself at the heart of existence, but a small core of diehards manages to turn it into an art.

Law and justice are not the same.

He had a vague longing for the student radicalism of the sixties and seventies, mainly because he had been too young to experience it himself. It seemed to him that the youth of that era had been looking for reasons to be angry, which was perfectly understandable because the young were supposed to be angry. Now the young were just looking for reasons to feel offended, and that wasn’t the same thing at all. The four ages of man, as far as Williamson was concerned, were confusion, anger, complacency, and grumpiness, but it was important to embrace them in the right order.

There’s always someplace to go, even if it’s only someplace else.

The four ages of man, as far as Williamson was concerned, were confusion, anger, complacency, and grumpiness, but it was important to embrace them in the right order. The

There’s a kind of evil that isn’t even in opposition to good, because good is an irrelevance to it. It’s a foulness that’s right at the heart of existence, born with the stuff of the universe. It’s in the decay to which all things tend. It is, and it always will be, but in dying we leave it behind.” “And while we’re alive?” “We set our souls against it, and our saints and angels, too.

The biggest life change any man would ever experience was the ending of it.

you had to be reasonably wealthy and privileged to choose not to own stuff. He

People who didn’t know any better sometimes put out food for them in winter, but deer were sensitive creatures, and could take weeks to adjust to a new food source. Corn was the worst: it caused acute acidosis, which could kill a deer agonizingly within days.

The trees were almost bare, making their branches appear as cracks in the cosmos.

And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place. —Deuteronomy 12:3

Tony Fulci reached out and took Dale’s phone from his hand. It was an old flip-top, and Tony stared at it curiously, the way a paleontologist might have examined a particularly obscure fossil. “I didn’t think they still made these,” said Tony. He handed the phone to Paulie, who amused himself by flipping it open and closed with a thumb that was roughly the size and shape of the top of a hammer. His fun came to an end when the phone snapped, leaving the screen dangling by a wire. Paulie shook it, like a cat trying to understand why a dead mouse wouldn’t play anymore. “That was the guy’s fuckin’ phone, man,” said Tony.

through life in his vibrant plumage, advertising his presence, hiding nothing, but when he closed his front door behind him the artificial light in his eyes was suffocated, and the face of the Gray Man was pendent like a dead moon in the blackness of his pupils.

discovered that silence made a lot of people uneasy, and they would often say something to break it, thus revealing themselves in the process.

I used to think this was all about good and evil,” said Rickett, “but it’s not.” “No?” “There’s a kind of evil that isn’t even in opposition to good, because good is an irrelevance to it. It’s a foulness that’s right at the heart of existence, born with the stuff of the universe. It’s in the decay to which all things tend. It is, and it always will be, but in dying we leave it behind.” “And while we’re alive?” “We set our souls against it, and our saints and angels, too.” He patted Parker on the shoulder. “Especially the destroying ones.

In the end, the truth doesn’t matter.

This was a fundamentally changed man, one who had come back strengthened, not weakened, by what he had endured, but who was also both less and more than he once had been. For