“Some guys step on a rake in the dark, and get mad and go punch somebody. Others step on a rake in the dark and fall down laughing at themselves. I know which kind of guy I'd rather be. So do my friends.”
“Just as there are laws of Conservation of Matter and Energy, so there are in fact Laws of Conservation of Pain and Joy. Neither can ever be created or destroyed. But one can be converted into the other.”
“there's nothing in the human heart or mind, no place no matter how twisted or secret, that can't be endured - if you have someone to share it with.”
“Shared sorrow is lessened, shared joy is increased”
“And there's this place called college! I mean, they want you to care, dig it, care about this education trip, and they don't care enough themselves to make it as attractive as the crap game across the street!”
“Progress is something with no pity, and no purpose. It just happens. It chews up all you ever knew, and spits out things you can't understand, and the only value it seems to have is to make a few people a lot of money.”
“it's better than a stick in the eye”
“He smiled like a sun lamp.”
“Hey Jake. I got an idea.'
'Be gentle with it,' the Doc grinned. 'It's in a strange place.”
“A naked blade is reckoned to be less obscene than a naked woman.”
“It's a rare hurt that can stand under the advice, help, and sympathy generated by upwards of thirty people that care. Callahan loses a lot of his regulars. After they've been coming around long enough, they find they don't need to drink any more.”
“Callahan dried his big meaty hands on his apron and cleared his throat with a sound like a bulldozer in pain.”
“Doc Webster's eyes rolled briefly, like loaded dice, and came up snake eyes.”
“Certainly, all of us at Callahan's were heir to the tradition of the B-movie — and the A-movie for that matter — that any female who enters your life in a dramatic manner must be your fated love.”
“There's a price for absolution on this planet, and it's called penance.”
“She was black and a woman and scarred, and as the thought formed in our minds we realized that it was a redundancy. Her scar was visible externally, was all.”
“What shocked us the most was that we had no idea why we should be so shocked. Like opening a ginger ale and finding Jamesons' inside: nothing wrong with it, but it sort of takes you by surprise.”
“A surprising percentage of your own society, with all your heritage of murder, would like to believe that Life survives by going to the supermarket. So the ideal would be to train cattle to make butcher knives and take turns cutting each other up at a convenient location.”
“The expense of eating is, in great part, the resistance the second life offers to being eaten.”
“Corinne told us that revolution was brewing in the hills to the north, under the leadership of a man named Miranda, who with absurd inevitability had styled himself El Supremo.”
“The rain accompanied Faolan as he travelled inland to the crossroads where he must at last make a choice of ways. He tried to fix his mind on the decision ahead, but thoughts of Deord intruded: Deord strong and serene as guard to a solitary, gifted captive; Deord devoting all he had left, after Breakstone, to keeping that wrongly imprisoned man safe from his own brother and from himself. Deord, at the end, fighting one last, heroic battle and dying so Faolan and Ana and the remarkable Drustan could go free.”
“Unity succeeds division and division follows unity. One is bound to be replaced by the other after a long span of time. This is the way with things in the world.”
“You never had to fight for me to begin with. I am yours and have been from the moment I saw you”
“Nothing could be more absurd than moral lessons at such a moment! Oh, self-satisfied people: with what proud self-satisfaction such babblers are ready to utter their pronouncements! If they only knew to what degree I myself understand all the loathsomeness of my present condition, they wouldn't have the heart to teach me.”
“Perhaps now, though, he had hit bottom. One thing about the bottom, he told himself, you can't fall any further. He tried to take comfort from this thought. Yet there knocked in his heart the suspicion that the bottom did not really exist.”
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