Mischief nodded. 'It's true,' he conceded. 'You're in the company of eight world-class thieves,' he said, not without a little touch of pride. 'Saints we are not.' But then,' said Deaux-Deaux, 'who is?' he thought on this. 'Besides saints.

I know that I want to bring sex and horror together as I have been able to in my books.

Nothing ever begins. There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any story springs. The threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and the tales that preceded that; though as the narrator's voice recedes the connections will seem to grow more tenuous, for each age will want the tale told as if it were of its own making.

A soul of water a soul of stone. A soul by name a soul unknown. The hours unmake our flesh our bone. The Soul is all and all alone!

It was as though in these last minutes together - when they had so much to say - they could say nothing of the least significance, for fear it open the floodgates.

Why'd you want to sing about sad things?" Candy had asked him. "Because any fool can be happy," he'd said to her. "It takes a man with real heart" —he'd made a fist and laid it against his chest— "to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.

After all, where can the glorious, the goofy, and the god-like stand shoulder to shoulder?