Like children, dogs want discipline and are most secure when they have rules to live by. The happiest dogs are those with gentle masters who quietly but firmly demand respect.

Sometimes waiting is the hardest thing.

In this uncertain space between birth and death, especially here at the end of the world in Moonlight Bay, we need hope as surely as we need food and water, love and friendship. The trick, however, is to remember that hope is a perilous thing, that it's not a steel and concrete bridge across the void between this moment and a brighter future. Hope is no stronger than tremulous beads of dew strung on a filament of spider web, and it alone can't long support the terrible weight of an anguished mind and a tortured heart.

...at it's best fiction is medicine.

Some argued that the youth of today were poorly educated and insufficiently industrious, but one of them had sought to validate his generation by spending considerable time and effort chiseling an obscene word in the concrete picnic table, and he had spelled it correctly.

Given my heritage and the ordeal of my childhood, I sometimes wonder why I myself am not insane. Maybe I am.

Tommy told Sal about the strange white-cloth figure with black stitches that he had found on the front porch. "Sounds like Pillsbury Doughboy gone punk," Sal said.