“He wanted the word "Daddy" added to his list of names. He wanted to teach his son to skate, just as he'd been taught by Ernie. Like every other father in the world, he wanted to stay up late on Christmas Eve and put together tricycles, bicycles, and race-car sets. He wanted to dress up his son as a vampire, or a pirate, and take him trick-or-treating.”
“I only know that you are the breath in my lungs, the beat of my heart, the ache in my soul, and without you, I am empty.”
“As a kid, he would have given just about anything to touch a naked Barbie, but he'd never been lucky enough to get within ogling distance. Now that he was afforded a good look at her, he discovered she had a scrawny ass and her knees made weird crunching sounds.”
“He can trade me to a team below five hundred if he wants to, or worse, I could find myself wearing a duck on my sweater.”
“John, you don’t like me.”
“I’ve never said I didn’t like you.”
“You don’t have to say it. You just look at me and I know it’s true.”
His brows drew together. “How do I look at you?”
She sat back. “You scowl and frown at me as if I’d done something tacky, like scratch myself in public.”
He smiled. “That bad, huh?”
“Yes.”
“What if I promise not to scowl at you?”
“I don’t think that’s a promise you can keep. You are a very moody person.”
He removed one hand from his pocket and placed it over the even pleats of his shirt. “I’m very easygoing.”
Georgeanne rolled her eyes. “And Elvis is alive and raising minks somewhere in Nebraska.”
“Often, half in a bay of the mountains and half on a headland, a small and nearly amphibian Schloss mouldered in the failing light among the geese and the elder-bushes and the apple trees. Dank walls rose between towers that were topped with cones of moulting shingle. Weeds throve in every cranny. Moss mottled the walls. Fissures branched like forked lightning across damp masonry which the rusting iron clamps tried to hold together, and buttresses of brick shored up the perilously leaning walls. The mountains, delaying sunrise and hastening dusk, must have halved again the short winter days. Those buildings looked too forlorn for habitation. But, in tiny, creeper-smothered windows, a faint light would show at dusk. Who lived in those stone-flagged rooms where the sun never came? Immured in those six-foot-thick walls, overgrown outside with the conquering ivy and within by genealogical trees all moulting with mildew? My thoughts flew at once to solitary figures…a windowed descendant of a lady-in-waiting at the court of Charlemagne, alone with the Sacred Heart and her beads, or a family of wax-pale barons, recklessly inbred; bachelors with walrus moustaches, bent double with rheumatism, shuddering from room to room and coughing among their lurchers, while their cleft palates called to each other down corridors that were all but pitch dark.”
“By the time the doctor came, we had lifted my father’s body to the couch and covered it with a blanket. The doctor was a thin, sturdy man, bald, with thick glasses. He lifted the blanket and looked. He dropped the blanket. “He’s dead, all right.” I”
“I’m willing to make sense as soon as the rest of the world does.”
“Worry may not change the outcome, but it definately affects the outlook.”
“Then his lids closed slowly over his slightly bloodshot eyes, and Mort Rainey, who had yet to discover what true horror was all about, fell asleep.”
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