The Tommyknockers

Late last night and the night before, tommyknockers, tommyknockers knocking on my door. I wanna go out, don't know if I can 'cuz I'm so afraid of the tommyknocker man.

He remembered waking up once, listening to the wind, thinking of all the dark and rushing cold outside and all the warmth of this bed, filled with their peaceful heat under two quilts, and wishing it could be like this forever.

And I believe happiness is the exact opposite of sadness, bitterness, and hatred: happiness should remain unexamined as long as possible.

So what he supposed to do? Grab Bobbie's ax and make like Jack Nicholson in The Shinning? He could see it. Smash, crash, bash: Heeeeeeere's GARDENER!

Overhead was a sky blacker than jewlers' velvet, and a billion stars screamed down...

We always assumed the aliens would have to at least be alive to invade. Not even H.G. Wells expected an invasion of ghosts.

You cant be too careful on a skateboard.

There's a big difference between being good at what you DO and being smart about what you KNOW

I don't mean that creative people are somehow finer, or more sensitive, and thus have finer, more sensitive nervous breakdowns - you can save that horseshit for the Sylvia Plath worshipers. It's just that creative people have creative breakdowns.

thoes prepared to shed copious floods of crocodile tears . . .

The feel of the sticky wetness down there when she moved made her grimace. God, she wanted to get cleaned up. In a hurry.

His failure hurt too badly for that. It was a bad equation. Best erase it and try a new one. If adults could put aside their obsessions with such firmness, the world would undoubtedly be a better place. Robertson Davies does not say that in his Deptford Trilogy ... but he strongly hints at it.

The trouble with living alone, she had discovered-and the reason why most people she knew didn't like to be alone even for a little while-was that the longer you lived alone, the louder the voices on the right side of your brain got.

Mr. Robertson Davies has also suggested in his Deptford Trilogy that the same great truism which applies to writing, painting, picking horses at the track, and telling lies in a sincerely believable way, also applies to magic: some people got the knack, and some people don’t. Hilly didn’t.

Getting help from a guy like you is like hiring a pyromaniac to fix the oil-burner.

Then they were all standing and applauding, yeah, they were giving him a fucking standing O, and in their faces he saw what every poet or would-be poet hopes to see when he or she finished reading: the faces of people suddenly awakened from a dream brighter than any reality.

She had been amazed-and a little relieved-to discover that she was not concealing some private neurosis; almost all imaginative people heard voices. Not just thoughts but actual voices inside their heads, different personae, each as clearly defined as the voices on an old-time radio show. They came from the right side of the brain, the teacher explained-the side which is most commonly associated with visions of telepathy and that striking human ability to create images by drawing comparisons and making metaphors. There are no such things as flying saucers.

Late last night and the night before, Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door. I want to go out, don’t know if I can, ’cause I’m so afraid of the Tommyknocker man.

He was having a seizure of projectile vomiting. This was not considered a sign of good health in medical circles.

A person sometimes believes she's seen all the way to the bottom of the well of human stupidity, and a reminder that that well apparently has no bottom is sometimes useful.

Boring and unpleasant did not mean a task was 'unfruitful,' a fact a lot of people seemed not to know, or to willfully ignore.