“Tukhachevsky told me that.” “Your commander?” “Twice. Outside Moscow in the revolution, then in Poland in ’21.” “And, for his trouble, shot.” “Yes. You were with the Whites?” “Damn my soul. Under Yudenich.” “Not the worst.” “Pretty close. I was sixty-two years old when they dragged me back into it, believed in order, in Christ our Lord, in life being as life had always been. I feared the rabble. I feared that, once the yoke came off, they would burn and murder. And then, in 1917, the yoke came off, and they burned and murdered. I was wrong on the scale of the thing, much grander than I ever imagined, but that’s an old man’s error.”
― Blood of Victory
― Blood of Victory
“he would have done it as simply and easily as he had once slipped down the snow-covered hills in McCarron Park on his Flexible Flyer. You ran with the sled, threw yourself onto it, and down you went—seemingly at the speed of sound. You couldn’t do that as a grownup; it racked the hell out of your balls.”
― It
― It
“A drunken whore walks in a dark street at night, shedding snatches of song like petals. Was”
― Justine
― Justine
“They just disappeared. All of them. All three hundred and forty of them. Without a trace. So far as I know, the only case remotely like it in American history is the disappearance of the colonists on Roanoke Island, Virginia. Every school-child in the country knows about that one, but who knows about the Derry disappearance?”
― It
― It
“After that, he walked and walked. Writing sometimes, staring at faces, adrift in unknown streets, far away on his own private planet. The world gnawed at you, he thought, better to be, now and then, elsewhere—it would all still be there when you got back.”
― Blood of Victory
― Blood of Victory
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