“I planned to reintroduce him to my friends lorazepam and oxycodone in a big, big way.”
“Welcome to the secret wing of County Hospital ....Where vampires get transfused, werewolves have silver allergies, and one nurse is way over her head !”
“Nurses are natural kleptos. You don't want to be in a roon without enough supplies, so every time you walk past the med-cart you pocket another saline flush. By the end of the shift you can look like a chipmunk if you're not careful. Some days it's hard to remember that the gum at the end of the grocery aisle isn't there just for you.”
“But if you believe in heaven then you have to believe someone's keeping score. And if someone's keeping score, if what we do really matters, then life ought to be fair. And I'm sorry it isn't. Shitty things happen to good people, and bad people never get what's coming to them. Don't tell me that there is a heaven as some sort of perverse reward for being good. That is bullshit of the highest caliber”
“My voice mail message says I work nights and sleep days. Everyone who knows me, knows this. And still, people who aren’t employed at the Nursing Office feel compelled to call me before three P.M. Certain people feel compelled to call me repeatedly, until I pick up—namely, dicks.”
“I nodded. Everyone at the hospital wanted to think that their case was special, and if you were a good nurse, you helped them keep that illusion alive. Knowing that someone down the hall had it worse than you never stopped your own paper cut from hurting, at least not until they came in and bludgeoned you senseless with their amputated leg.”
“We could crawl inside your head and make you but a shell of yourself, a puppet of meat, for which we keep the only strings.” It paused to let the impact of this settle in. “Please stop trying to be brave, and become the pathetic creature we both know you to be.”
My short nails bit against my arms. “Fuck you.”
“Nurses are natural kleptos. You don’t want to be in a room without enough supplies, so every time you walk past the med-cart you pocket another saline flush. By the end of the shift you can look like a chipmunk if you’re not careful.”
“Compulsion, guilt, pick your poison.' Meaty shrugged. 'You make a better nurse than a patient.”
“No matter how much I fought him or gave in to him in turns, I couldn’t fuck away my fears.”
“I sank into the chair and checked to see if the charge nurse could see me—not if I didn’t lean out too far. The night was looking up! Two patients who ought to sleep all night long, and an Internet connection. How lucky was I? Pretty damn lucky, at least until someone needed a diaper change.”
“The Shadows this, the Shadows that—I’d asked Charles about them once, when our breaks had overlapped....But Charles said “they” (complete with scare quotes) lurked in the corners by our entrance door, screening visitors, unseen. Since that made them sound like omnipotent dust bunnies, I preferred the version of them in my own imagination.”
“almost never free.” “We will hear what he has to say before we agree to pay”
“Richards and Maureen Sherbondy, also contributed their ideas at various points in the story, as did my sister, Joann Scanlon, and my assistant,”
“Allen was perhaps a similar case, and may have persuaded the youth into accepting him as an avatar of the long-dead Curwen.”
“If you've never done anything wrong it's probably because you have never tried anything new.”
“As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear that my jealousy will wound the other, because I allow myself to be subject to a banality: I suffer from being excluded, from being aggressive, from being crazy, and from being common.”
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