Graeme

“But one of the worst results of being a slave and being forced to do things is that when there is no one to force you any more you find you have almost lost the power of forcing yourself.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy

“Harold—please—" She was sick, crying. The irrevocable fact of murder was in her heart forever.

"Get used to it," Harold said brutally. He flung the tent on the back of his cycle and began to tie it down. "It's over for them down there, and it's over for us, and it's over for everybody that died in the plague. God went off on a celestial fishing trip and He's going to be gone a long time. It's totally dark. The dark man's in the driver's seat now. Him. So get used to it."

She made a squeaking, moaning noise in her throat.

"Help me get this shit packed up. I want to do a hundred miles before sunup.”
― Stephen King, The Stand

“Away deep in the aim to study himself in the school of the land his ancestors' gravestones flowered, Rip planned to burn his oil on the journey for growth by the hike, the thumb, the hitch, the rod, the freight, the rail, and he x'd New York on a map and pencilled his way to and into and through and under and up and between and over and across states and capitals and counties and cities and towns and villages and valleys and plains and plateaus and prairies and mountains and hills and rivers and roadways and railways and waterways and deserts and islands and reservations and titanic parks and shores and, ocean across to ocean and great lakes down to gulfs, Rip beheld the west and the east and the north and the south of the Brobdingnagian and, God and Christ and Man, it was a pretty damn good grand big fat rash crass cold hot pure mighty lovely ugly hushed dark lonely loud lusty bitchy tender crazy cruel gentle raw sore dear deep history-proud precious place to see, and he sure would, he thought, make the try to see it and smell it and walk and ride and stop and talk and listen in it and go on in it and try to find and feel and hold and know the beliefs in it and the temper and the talents in it and the omens and joys and hopes and frights and lies and laughs and truths and griefs and glows and gifts and glories and glooms and wastes and profits and the pulse and pitch and the music and the magic and the dreams and facts and the action and the score and the scope and span of the mind and the heart and spine and logic and ego and spirit in the soul and the goal of it.”
― Alan Kapelner, All the Naked Heroes: A Novel of the Thirties

“A stucco of agony clothed her mind when she thought of having to go home to see her mother, a frail compound of maudlin substance. Someone shut the warm faucet in her body and she quaked in the wind. A man on his motorcycle tooted his horn and she heard a boy call his father a jerk.”
― Alan Kapelner, Lonely Boy Blues