Ɗẳɳ 2.☊ > Recent Status Updates

“Being alone at your age isn’t healthy. I’d hate to think of what would happen if you were to blow your brains out. It’d hurt the resale value of the whole neighborhood.”
“I’m not depressed!”
She looked him up and down. “You aren’t? Why on earth not?”

“She was falling, but now, there was a pair of arms that would catch her at the end, a warm pair of arms she’d always imagined but could never feel.
‘Oh,’ Pepper choked. ‘Oh, stars—’
The vox switched on. The face on the scrib was overjoyed. ‘Jane,’ Owl said. ‘Oh, oh, sweetheart, don’t cry. It’s all right. I’m here. I’m here now.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNWTs...

Suddenly he’s hollering, furious, stalking across the diner toward me. “You’re like a little kid, you know that?”
He leans over me in the booth. I shrink back.
“In your tidy little universe, with your notebooks, and the good guys and the bad guys. That shit is moot, man. That shit is over.”

Tell me you’re not really hurt, walking around so tough and macho when you need to be in the goddamn hospital.” She reaches for his windpipe with the fingers of both hands, ready, as ever, to choke the life from Landsman to show how much she cares. “Are you hurt badly, you idiot?”
“Only in my soul, sweetness,” Meyer says.

They were all haunted in this cave, both by whatever ghosts they’d brought with them and by the fear they’d found when they arrived.

The lesson of the biblical tale of Noah’s ark was a simple one, a refrain that echoed throughout the Old Testament: behave, or God will fuck you up.

With the smell of Pinky on his collar and the cool dry ghost of Goldy’s hand in his, he plays goalkeeper as a squad of unprofitable regrets mounts a steady attack on his ability to get through a day without feeling anything.

They had no idea what sort of man he was, that he was only waiting for the right moment to dissect them. For him, politeness was a surgical mask, something he slipped on before he took out his scalpel.

Whatever she fled, or sought, it was beyond that door, nameless and writhing.
She turned the knob and pushed. Shadows scrabbled around the doorjamb, long and slender and hooked like spider’s legs. The howling, clawed things neared behind her. She steeled herself and leapt through.

Heart pounding, she reached the street, hand in the air and a gargoyle’s face in her shoulder bag. It had been an odd couple of hours, and she had a feeling that, before the week was out, her life would grow stranger still.
But she could deal with strange. She was starting to like the big city.
“Taxi!”

"I don't like playing games."
Ransom snickers. "That's what they do here, college boy. You ain't been gone so long you forgot that yet. Right now they playing their favorite game of all."
"What's that?"
"The quiet game."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8mYL...

He smiled. “Nowhere to run, bitch.”
Before she could slip past him, he had his hands around her throat again. Black spots filled her vision. North was shouting, gesturing wildly, powerless to help. No, not powerless. That wasn’t right. Let me in, Alex.
No one knew who she was. Not North. Not this monster in front of her. Not Dawes or Mercy or Sandow or any of them.
Only Darlington had guessed.

Something’s fixing to happen, sure as I’m standing here breathing, he thought then, feeling the creeps overtake him all over again. He was an old man and possessed an intuition about certain things, much as infants know when they’re hungry and mothers know how to provide the milk. Something bad.
Like an electrical current, it radiated through the marrow of his bones.

The smells of the land—the farms with their pig shit and chicken coops and tractor fumes, mingled with the brackish stink of the Narrows—practically clawing at his lungs. Remember me, remember me! Stillwater cried, as if to forget where he came from was to lose some important part of himself. Remember me, remember me! Indeed, how could he forget?

Again, Matthew thought of the creepy wink the old janitor had given him that day he saw him cleaning up puke in the cafeteria. Might taste a bit different but it still looks the same.

This was the end, he realized. The tangle of his life had been unpicked and set out before him, and he saw and understood it clearly now, all of it so obvious in hindsight.

Jake swallowed. He didn’t want to say it, but he forced himself to, speaking as quietly as the little girl just had.
“If you’re lonely, sad, and blue, the Whisper Man will come for you.”

There were many times, like now, when she'd almost stood up and told strangers what she'd done, but she wouldn't leave the legacy she desired simply through prideful public displays, like some men did. There were advantages to a low profile. It was like a man to scratch his name on the banister of history, but Helen had come to believer it was better to be the stairs.

"Let me sleep on it," she said, but instead, she was wide awake until midnight, listening to the crickets outside. She did a trick she learned from her grandpa, where she counted the number of chirps she heard in fifteen seconds--twenty-five--and added thirty-seven. Sixty-two. It was 62 degrees outside.

Wait, what? How did I not know that trick?

Anything is surmountable. Anything. Anything but death, but if death is not foreign, if death is not exotic, if death isn’t—but death is. Death always is. It’s the unknown country. It’s the tenant of tall shadows. It’s the dark . . . It’s the boogeyman.

Oh man, I'm struggling with this one, Carmen. The writing style is so choppy and minimalist, and the narrative jumps are so jarring and abrasive. I'll try to hang in there, but I think this would definitely play better on the big screen.

He was working to save them; he had plans and schemes and plots, but they all had the same flaw, the same weakness lurking within them―they all involved a degree of hope.

They scrambled to the hole, peered into it, but there was nothing for them to see.
Darkness. Silence.
"Pablo?" Eric called, his voice echoing down the shaft.
And then, sounding impossibly far away, but somehow close, too--suffocatingly close--as if it were coming from inside Amy's own body, the Greek began to scream.

I've been trying to track down a copy of this book all year, so I'm happy to see my library finally purchased one. But a signed, limited edition, really?

Carl’s hand shot out and seized Amy’s wrist. Amy let out a yelp of surprise. His eyes rolled down and fixed on her. His mouth twisted itself into a cold grin. When he spoke, his voice seemed to creep out of the wound in his throat:
“The doors are open.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeqGu...

Trinity was one of those happy, super-popular, high-energy girls who reminded Amy of the creatures from Gremlins: she was fun for about half and hour, then you wanted to stuff her in a blender.

“Li Kao shrugged and reached out and pressed a finger to my forehead, and quoted Lao-Tzu.
“Blessed are the idiots, for they are the happiest people on earth.”

His feet were kicked out from under him. His neck lay on the block, and the bonze mumbled a prayer, and the sergeant at arms asked if he had any last words. The ironic eyes lifted.
“Eat pickled turnips with yellow beans,” he said politely. “It gives the taste of walnut.”

“The newlyweds happened to be praying mantises,” said Master Li. “The groom was happily engrossed in copulation, and right on cue his blushing bride craned her pretty neck and casually decapitated him. The groom’s hindquarters continued to pump away while the bride devoured his head, which says something about the location of his brains, and for a moment the emperor had second thoughts about wedding bells.”