Steve Totten

“For example, then,” continued Holgrave: “a dead man, if he happens to have made a will, disposes of wealth no longer his own; or, if he die intestate, it is distributed in accordance with the notions of men much longer dead than he. A dead man sits on all our judgment-seats; and living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions. We read in dead men’s books! We laugh at dead men’s jokes, and cry at dead men’s pathos! We are sick of dead men’s diseases, physical and moral, and die of the same remedies with which dead doctors killed their patients! We worship the living Deity according to dead men’s forms and creeds. Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a dead man’s icy hand obstructs us! Turn our eyes to what point we may, a dead man’s white, immitigable face encounters them, and freezes our very heart! And we must be dead ourselves before we can begin to have our proper influence on our own world, which will then be no longer our world, but the world of another generation, with which we shall have no shadow of a right to interfere. I ought to have said, too, that we live in dead men’s houses; as, for instance, in this of the Seven Gables!”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gambles

“Tell-tale-tit, are you? Two can play at that game. If you tell on me, I'll tell my friend the Ghost of Christmas Future where your house is, and do you know what he'll do to you?"

The wide-eyed shitletto shook his head, shaken and stirred.

"When your family is all tucked up asleep in your snug little beds, he'll slide into your house through the crack under the door and eat – your – 150
puppy!" The venom in my bile duct pumped fast. "He'll leave its curly tail under your pillow and you'll get blamed. Your little friends will all scream, 'Puppy slayer!' whenever they see you coming. You'll grow old and friend-less and die, alone, miserably, on Christmas morning half a century from now. So if I were you, I wouldn't breathe a word to anyone about seeing me."

I pushed myself through the hedge before he could take it all in. As I was heading back to the station along the pavement, the wind carried his sob: "But I don't even have a puppy …”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“But he did not sleep well, in his big black-walnut bed. He startled to the night noises of an old frame house--the easing walls, the steps of bodiless assassins creeping across the wooden floors all night long.”
― Sinclair Lewis, It Can't Happen Here

“Grigoire has exquisite fingers, long and pliant. Robert Schumann maimed his hands by tying weights to ’em. He thought it’d increase his range at the keyboard. Majestic string quartets but what a bloody fool! Grigoire on the other hand possesses perfect hands by birth but probably doesn’t know a crotchet from crochet.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas