The Burning Soul

Drowning men will drag you down if you let them. Sometimes, to survive, you have to let them sink.

Here is a truth, a truth by which to live: there is hope. There is always hope. If we choose to abandon it, our souls will turn to ash and blow away. But the soul can burn and not be damned.

When one encounters enough strangeness, then what is strange ultimately becomes familiar. The mind can accommodate itself to almost anything, given time: pain, grief, loss, even the possibility that the dead talk to the living.

It was human nature. You didn't give everything away; if you did, you would have nothing left. There were those who took the view that there was a liberation in the act of confession, but mostly they tended to be the ones who were listening, and not the ones confessing. The only full confessions occur on deathbeds; all others are partial, modified.

Regret, he now knew, was a useless emotion, the poor cousin of guilt.

because a man who is everybody’s friend really has no friends at all.

Most criminals were dumb, and he took the view that the whole science of criminology was essentially flawed, since much of its theory was based on the study of criminals who had been caught, and were therefore either stupid or unlucky, as opposed to the study of those who had not been caught, and were therefore smart and had a little luck on their side, but just a little. Luck ran out, but smart was for life.

There are some truths so terrible that they should not be spoken aloud, so appalling that even to acknowledge them is to risk sacrificing a crucial part of one's humanity, to exist in a colder, crueler world than before.

They were called “rooms,” but it was still a cell. A room you could leave when you chose to do so; a cell you could not.

All cynics were once romantics. Most of them still are.

She had not given me the cross to keep the bad men away, as a child might have been expected to do. No, in her mind the bad men could not be kept away. They were coming, and they would have to be faced.

Harlan was not a particularly religious man, and had always poured scorn on those whom he termed “God-botherers”—Christian, Jew, or Muslim, he had no time for any of them—but he was, in his way, a deeply spiritual being, worshipping a god whose name was whispered by leaves and praised in birdsong. He had been a warden with the Maine Forest Service for forty years,

aside. “How long will it take?” He was scared, and he wasn’t pretending. “Not long,” I said. “Not long at all.” You

my God was like a parent always trying to watch out for His children, but you couldn’t always be there for your children, no matter how hard you tried. I had not been there for Jennifer when she most needed

cynics were once romantics. Most of them still are.

I disliked the attitude of those who came up from the cities to hunt—their braggadocio, their faux machismo, the unpleasant transformative effect of guns and camouflage on otherwise unremarkable men, for in my experience it was generally men who hunted in this way.

But the soul can burn and not be damned. The soul can burn with a bright fire, and never turn to ash.

carried the smell of the streets with him.

Don't ask us what it's like in that moment when the body skitters away from that stupid sheepy shape of breath. Down here, no one asks. We all died boot to throat. We all went out shrieking some bloody name. ~Danielle Pafunda, "The Dead Girls Speak in Unison

And I told him that I believed in God because I had seen His opposite. I had seen all that He was not, and been touched by it, and so I could no more deny the possibility of an ultimate goodness to set against such depravity than I could deny that daylight followed darkness, and night the day.

ABOVE PASTOR’S BAY SIX ravens flew low, barely rising over the skeletal trees. High in the clear blue sky the last geese were heading south, but the ravens moved north toward forests and mountains, toward ice and snow. They flew fast and sure into the coming dark, that they might tell the waiting wolf of all they had seen.

paunch lapping at his belt like a pale tongue, peeping out from beneath the fabric of his golf shirt, hairy and somehow obscene. He was