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There is nothing more poisonous to the imagination than sameness and repetition, and it is imagination, above all else, that we seek to nurture here.

I must confess that, since there was no one of my own age in his writings, I did not much care for Trollope. Most of his fossilized clergymen, for instance, quite frankly made me want to spew my sausages. The character I most identified with was Mrs. Proudie, the tyrant wife of the rabbity bishop, who knew what she wanted and, for the most part, knew how to get it.

He lay awake for some time, watching light ripple across the segments of glass in the empty rear windows of the Robie House each time a car went by. Inviting, that's what the house was. Tommy tried to imagine what the kids who lived on the third floor, so many years before, might have seen when they looked out through those patterns. A world of triangles and parallelograms?

When an impossible experience happens to you and you know you're not nuts, he thought, it changes how you see things.

I stood there holding the two books and looking at the piles around us--they were like literary landmines just waiting to explode minds.

Small comforts, but I always felt better with my hat on.

It was always like this when you were the messenger of death; the reaper himself didn't deign to deliver his own majestic messages but left that chore to us lesser beings, and the resonance of it stayed with you.

If you think I'm a bigot that's going to be offended you went to bed with a man, you can forget it. Half this town's gayer that Paris in Spring.

If it felt that bad dying, no one would go.

I want to be one of those crazy people who believes in ghosts or the Loch Ness Monster. They have more fun than sane people.

Her chilly voice held veiled threats. It was within her to end his life if she pleased. After all, she was the law of the land--outside of the magic itself.

In the history of bad ideas, however, this had to be the thesis statement. The first indication that you're in the midst of a bad idea is that people stop making eye contact with you and you with them.

That is the nature of servitude, Kaye. It is literal-minded and not at all clever. Be careful with your epithets.

Col wasn't satisfied; he wanted to hear Riff condemn the murderous treachery of her former friend. Riff's oddly respectful mood didn't make sense to him. But he could see it was no use arguing the point.

Sometimes it seemed like everything could be explained away. Even the burning water had been dismissed as simply being from a contaminated well.

A lone tear coursed down the dust on my face. Something in my heart cracked wide with the sound of the door on a birdcage opening, showing blue sky and freedom beyond.

The light of day had the power to undo all his work! Adults dismissed their encounters with him as never happened; they were just "bad dreams." And they convinced their children of the same.

She soared higher than she had even imagined; below her Santoff Claussen looked rather small, and the outside world very large and inviting. She trusted the djinni to catch her--after all, North had made it.

I looked at the dynamic people surrounding the table, a people who had been cheated, frozen, starved, and hunted almost into extinction, a people who, with the combined nations of the Brules, Sansarcs, Minneconjous, Hunkpapas, Ogllalas, and Blackfeet, fought the United States of America to a standstill. My money was still on them.

I felt as though the Old Cheyenne were challenging me for my friend, were attempting to take him with them to the Camp of the Dead. It was a good, spirited challenge, one that pulled at my heartstrings, but one that I would not allow. I looked at their shadows as they walked along with me.

The dispatcher's log was transcribed and documented under police reports in a rather surrealistic style. This resulted in profound statements, such as "A pig was reported on Crow Street, officer dispatched. No pig was found." I considered them my moment of Zen on a daily basis.

A little bit of goodness can be very powerful against evil.

When people are unhappy about their lives, tell them that a group that's a little different is the cause of their problems, and they'll follow a tyrant into hatred. The history of war is all about *us* against *them*.