“...because once you've got one scar on your face or your heart, its only a matter of time before someone gives you another - and another - until a day doesn't go by when you aren't being bashed senseless, nor a town that you haven't been run out of, and you get to be such a goddamn mess that finally it doesn't feel right unless you're getting the Christ beaten out of you - amd within a year of that first damming fall, those first down borne fists, your first run out, you wind up with flies buzzing around your eyes, back at the same place, the same town, deader than when you left, bobbiong around in the swill - a dirty deadbeat whore in a roadside ditch. But a little part of you deosn't die. A little part of you lives on. And you make an orphan of that corrupt and contemtible part, dumping it right smack in the laps of the ones who first robbed you of your sweetness, for it is the wicked fruit of their crimes, it is their blood, their sin, it belongs there, this child of blood, this spawn of sin...”
“And Satan sighed and shook his head, played harp amongst the flames. ‘It’s Hell up there in Heaven too, for all that that is worth. Heaven is just a lie of mine to make it Hell on Earth.”
“Listen, ah don't wanna speak ill of the dead but have ah told you that mah mother was a great whopping whale of a cunt? Well she was precisely that - a great whopping whale of a hog's cunt with a dirty maggot for a brain.”
“And I know why our friendship must be kept a secret. Or they will kill You like they killed You in the Bible. And then we could not be together. If not for them we would live in this valley together. As best friends. But we must be careful, Jesus. I think I would die if anything happened to You...' - she cried ah think, for ah could hear her little sobs as she spoke - '...just close my eyes and die.' And she let fall a heavy tear, and it passed through the slats and exploded upon mah face, just below the right cheek. And as the droplet began to roll, ah caught it with mah tongue. And ah was shocked momentarily by that tear's sweetness, having known them only as bitter things - only bitter things - always bitter things.”
“Mummy was a swine: a scum-cunted, likkered-up, brain-sick swine. She was lazy and slothful and dirty and belligerent and altogether evil. Ma was a soak - a drunk - a piss-eyed hell-bag with a taste for the homebrew.”
“Found in a small stone cave bitten from the roadside, stitchless save for his great outsized boots and a plague of flies, fat on the human scrappage of dinners long past, Toad squatted in the slitted stomach of a warm child, eating loudly the face of her hapless, headless father, who sat a good foot off the ground impaled up the ass on a pointed post.”
“Humming softly with the child asleep in his arms, Sardus Swift looked to the winking stars and saw the moon - a smirk on the face of heaven - as he made his way home.”
“Comatose, Pa's wife, the slobstress, buried an armchair beneath her bulk.”
“Seth looked back at Lydia. “I have to stay … please.”
Lydia couldn’t believe that he was still willing to stay here for her safety. If she’d had any doubt before about how much he loved her, that cleared it. “All right, fine. If you stay. I stay.”
“Yes, I drank some of the ancient blood and it changed me. If I'm right...If the vellum is right, the world is dead. Everyone! But I was brought back to life by the blood.”
“A friend is someone who understands your past, believes in your future and accepts you for who you are today.”
“Dad had once said, Trust your mind, Rob. If it smells like shit but has writing across it that says Happy Birthday and a candle stuck down in it, what is it?
Is there icing on it? he'd said.
Dad had done that thing of squinting his eyes when an answer was not quite there yet.”
“What are you two doing in here?” Mike Iglehart wore an eye-blistering white lab coat and a surly expression. “This isn’t some teenage make-out room.”
My face flushed scarlet. “Excuse me?”
“We were using the computer!” Ben barked. “That’s it.”
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