The Face

... and she had worn bitterness as though it were a crown.

Lots of people are unable to see all kinds of truths right in front of their eyes." "The world is what we make it, and our future is ours to shape.

The world is hat we make it, and our future is ours to shape.

Regardless of how rough we may appear on the exterior, each of us had a human heart.

Now, an hour later, Ethan stood at a window, gazing at the rain, like threads of seed pearls, accessorizing the hills of Bel Air. Watching weather clarified his thinking. Sometimes only nature felt real, while all human monuments and actions seemed to be the settings and the plots of dreams.

He is like a man living through the night before doomsday, with full knowledge that the sun will go nova in the morning, yet unable to enjoy the precious pleasures of this world because all his energy is devoted to wishing desperately that the foreseen end will not, after all, come to pass.

Every palace and every work of art is only dust as yet unrealized, and time is the patient wind that will whither it all away.

When steel sagged, when clothes grew moth-eaten on haberdashery racks, when cars rusted on showroom floors for want of customers, the film industry nevertheless flourished. In bad times as in good, the only two absolute necessities were food and illusions.

Lying won't get you anything but misery.

.......She said you need to eat well, say prayers without fail each morning and night, and avoid drinking strong spirits." "One problem. Drinking strong spirits is how I pray.

People existed, however, who believed that closet racists were everywhere around them. They needed to believe this in order to have purpose and meaning in their lives, and to have someone to hate.

he was serenaded by an orchestrated version of an old Sheryl Crow tune with all the sex squeezed out of it and with a perkiness squeezed in, retaining only the skin of the melody to wrap a different and less tasty variety of sausage. In this fallen world, even the most insignificant things, like pop tunes, were inevitably corrupted.

We are what we are, no matter what we might wish to be, or pretend to be.

You could make yourself a little crazy, even certifiable, if you insisted that life always proceed according to some this-because-that system of logic. Occasionally you had to accept the inexplicable.

industrious people, regardless of the quality of what their labor produced, rarely committed violent crimes. Only in movies did successful businessmen routinely indulge in murder and mayhem in addition to corporate responsibilities.

taught them that whether a piece of writing is a novel or a law, each person is the sole arbiter of what that writing says and what it means, that all truth is relative, that all moral principles are fraudulent

If Fric reported what had happened in the attic, Mr. Truman would think that he’d been smoking weed. He would lose whatever

Britney Spears tunes out of its butt, that would have been proof.

He’d read a shitload of stupid things, in fact, and most of them were probably just made up by stupid novelists trying to make a buck while they peddled their stupid screenplays to stupid producers.

WHEN A FIERCE-LOOKING GUY COMES OUT of a mirror as though it’s a doorway, and when he grabs for you and snags your shirt with his fingertips, you could be excused for wetting your pants or for losing total control of your sphincter, so

her butt could drive a man crazy.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” he said to the assembled cadavers.

faithless priests molesting children, politicians riding to reelection by the agitation of class envy: All these and numerous

every human enterprise, due to the nature of the beast, was imperfect