If life teaches anything at all it teaches that there are so many happy endings that the man who believes that there is no God needs his rationality called into serious question.

It's exciting and it's thrilling and it's not particularly threatening, because they're not overtly sexual. A lot of the physical side of it is conveyed in things like the vampire will touch her forearm or run a hand over skin, and she just flushes all hot and cold. And for girls, that's a shorthand for all the feelings that they're not ready to deal with yet.

A short story is a different thing all together - a short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger.

One only wishes Wayne LaPierre and his NRA board of directors could be drafted to some of these scenes, where they would be required to put on booties and rubber gloves and help clean up the blood, the brains, and the chunks of intestine still containing the poor wads of half-digested food that were some innocent bystander's last meal.

God doesn't bribe, child. He just makes a sign and lets people take it as they will.

Twas something else. I had come to hate her, you see. I had come to wish her dead, and that was what held me back.

Any thoughts of guilt, any feelings of regret, had faded. The desert had baked them out.