Sometimes the embers are better than the campfire.

You have to go where the book leads you.

Sometimes when you're young, you have moments of such happiness, you think you're living on someplace magical, like Atlantis must have been. Then we grow up and our hearts break into two.

Terrible thing to live in fear. Brooks Hatlen knew it. Knew it all too well. All I want is to be back where things make sense. Where I won't have to be afraid all the time.

The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.

I just didn't want her to get hurt. I thought she was going to be. But everyone gets their share, don't they? Sure. Pow, in the nose. Pow, in the eye. Pow, below the belt, down you go, and the ref just went out for a hot dog.

His mother called such people ignorant and superstitious, but his father only shook his head slowly and puffed his pipe and said that sometimes old stories had a grain or two of truth in them and it was best not to take chances. It was why, he said, he crossed himself whenever a black cat crossed his path.