False Memory

Petting, scratching, and cuddling a dog could be as soothing to the mind and heart as deep meditation and almost as good for the soul as prayer.

Funny, how one good cookie could calm the mind and even elevate a troubled soul.

The primitive in each of us climbs closer to the surface during the night, for the moon sings to it, and the cold void between the stars speaks its language. To that savage self, evil can look lovely in too little light.

The rain wasn't the usual glittering silver, but dark and dirty, as if nature were a scrubwoman wringing out a filthy mop.

Language can't describe reality. Literature has no stable reference, no real meaning. Each reader's interpretation is equally valid, more important than the author's intention. In fact, nothing in life has meaning. Reality is subjective. Values and truths are subjective. Life itself is a kind of illusion. Blah, blah, blah, let's have another scotch.

The retriever took each bit of meat from his master's hand with a delicacy almost equal to that of a hummingbird sipping sugar water from a garden feeder, and when it was all gone, he gazed up at Dusty with an adoration that could not have been much less than the love with which the angels regard God.

Life is a train ride, and at the many stations along the route, people important to us debark, never to get aboard again, until by the end of the journey, we sit in a passenger car where most of the seats are empty.

Grapes are juicy. Strawberries. Oranges. Good pork chops are succulent," said Dusty. "But the word isn't accurately descriptive of a person." Smiling with delight, Ahriman said, "Oh, really, not accurately descriptive? Be careful housepainter. Your genes are showing. What if I were a cannibal?

In the wind, the trees, like agitated lions preparing to roar, shook their great green manes.

Man, I like you. I wish you could like me.

There's more to me than you see, another me down inside somewhere, full of hate, ready to hurt, cut, smash, or if maybe there's no Other and there's just me alone, then I'm not the person I thought I was, I'm something twisted and terrible, terrible.

Martie came out of the office first, smiling prettily, and Dusty rose to greet her, smiling less prettily, and Dr. Ahriman entered the waiting room behind her, smiling paternally, and maybe Dusty smiled a little more prettily when he saw the psychiatrist, because the man virtually radiated competence and compassion and confidence and all sorts of good stuff.

Paper clip. Ping. Disaster. Colonel Bowie is down. Colonel Bowie is down! The Mexican Army is now leaderless. Capone gloats.

My rich Diana. Fly me to the moon with you. Dance among the stars. Treacle. Romantic hogwash. Derivative. Unworthy. My rich Diana. I hate you, hate you, hate you. Hate you, hate. "Do it," he said.

Sometimes he found it frustrating to be a sadist in an age when self-mutilation was all the rage

Life would be easy if common sense ruled; but sometimes the easy way doesn't feel like the right way.

She turned more heads than a coven of chiropractors.

Most people regarded Psychology as a science. Some called it a soft science, but those making such a distinction grew fewer by the year.

Terror and pleasure are linked in us. We are a baldly miswired species, Martie. Terror delights us, both the experience of terror and the dealing out of it to others. We are healthier if we admit to this miswiring and do not struggle to be better than our natures allow.

Regardless of what our Creator intended us to be, what we have become is what we are.

Although enlightened people know that an extreme phobia wasn't a form of madness, hey could not help but regard it as odd.

Action. Action, shaped by intelligence and a moral perspective, is the answer to most problems.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I tend to do that. Any life isn’t just one story; it’s thousands of them. So when I try to tell one of my own, I sometimes go down an alleyway when I should take the main street, or if the story is fourteen blocks long, I sometimes start on block four and have to backtrack to make sense.

if you were always guided by courage, honor, self-respect, honesty, and compassion, and if you kept your mind and your heart open to the lessons that this world teaches you, then you would eventually understand the meaning of your existence, perhaps even in this world, but certainly in the next. Such a philosophy virtually guaranteed a brighter life, less shadowed by fear than the lives of those who were convinced of meaninglessness.

I’m a bad case of arrested development, stuck in early adolescence, more screwed-up-twisted-up-tangled-up than a couple earthworms makin’ babies.

Eventually, the storm blew itself out, because it is in the character of these strange times that any outrage, regardless of its unprecedented dimensions and horror, is inevitably followed by another outrage more novel and more shocking still.