Men, she thought, were one of the world’s few sure comforts, like a fire on a cold October night, like cocoa, like broken-in-slippers. Their clumsy affections, their bristly faces, and their willingness to do what...

I want you to remember what was good in me, not what was most awful. The people you love should be allowed to keep their worst to themselves.

Carroll was eleven years old when he saw The Haunting in The Oregon Theater. He had gone with his cousins, but when the lights went down, his companions were swallowed by the dark and Carroll...

It bewildered Ig, the idea that a person could not be interested in music. It was like not being interested in happiness.

He’d possessed all the key elements of a school shooter: hormones, misery, ammunition. People wondered how something like Columbine could happen. Jude wondered why it didn’t happen more often.

If you don’t, you’re probably thinking too much. That’s the worst mistake you can make.

Sillman looked at his interrogator with hopeless eyes. ‘I think while I was passed out, I dreamed about my mom’s gingerbread cookies. Maybe the guy who knocked on the glass was eatin’ one.’ ‘Mm,’ said...

God saves – but not now, and not here. His salvation is on layaway. Like all grifters, He asks you to pay now and take it on faith that you will receive later. Whereas women...

I wanted to explore this idea that the bogey man in the closet is scary, but being a mother is scarier.

Fantasy was always only a reality waiting to be switched on.

If you didn’t have me to rake you over the coals now and then, there wouldn’t be any fire in your life at all.

I wouldn’t underrate the power of regret. It doesn’t feel good… But it’s hard to learn anything important without it.

Gold don’t come off. What’s good stays good no matter how much of a beating it takes.

He paused, twisting his goatee, considering the law in Deuteronomy that forbade clothes with mixed fibers. A problematic bit of Scripture. A matter that required thought. “Only the devil wants man to have a wide...

She had felt good for a few moments, racing across the face of the hill on her old bike, but the happy feeling had burned itself out and left behind a thin, cold rage. She...

Eighteen and stupid happens to everyone, I guess. If you survive it, it’s probably half luck, and half having the right people in your life to watch out for you.

I think you must make a few [mistakes]. Of you don’t, you’re probably thinking too much. That’s the worst mistake you can make.

The Fly” may delight and appall in equal measure, but they also gently prepare us, helping us to think about how we would respond if faced with a terrifying seduction, or a corrupted and infected...

I see God now as an unimaginative writer of popular fictions, someone who builds stories around sadistic and graceless plots, narratives that exist only to express His terror of a woman’s power to choose who...

…but God fears woman even more than He fears the devil -and is right to. She, with her power to bring life into the world, was truly made in the image of the Creator, not...

It’s like in the Bible.You can’t always get what you want, but if you really need something, you usually find it.””What part of the Bible is that from?” Ig asked her. “The Gospel of Keith...

In this world, family is the final, most elemental unit of power. A small group, helplessly bound together by blood with a shared set of skills and tools for consolidating power and subjugating others.

You loved me as hard as you knew how. I’d give anything to go back and love you better…

… people made the imaginary real all the time: taking the music they heard in their head and recording it, seeing a house in their imagination and building it. Fantasy was always only a reality...

To be honest, I think cell phones were invented by the devil.

I am; I was. I want to be.

Does your license plate mean something?” Bing asked. “En-o-ess-four-a-two?””Nosferatu,” the man Charlie Manx said.”Nosfer-what-who?”Manx said, “It is one of my little jokes. My first wife once accused me of being a Nosferatu. She did not...

They had been Vince’s brothers in a way, and Race was his son, and you couldn’t drive a man’s family to the earth and expect to live.

Death isn’t the end of you life, you know. Your body is a lock. Death is the key. The key turns… and you’re free. To be anywhere. Everywhere. Two places at once. Nowhere. Part of...

For a time he read his Neil Diamond bible by the firelight. He paused, twisting nervously at his goatee, considering the law in Deuteronomy that forbade clothes with mixed fibers. A problematic bit of Scripture....

If books were girls and reading was s-ss-ssss-fucking, this would be the biggest whorehouse in the county and I’d be the most ruthless pimp you ever met. Whap the girls on the butts and send...

There’s the real world, with all its annoying facts and rules. In the real world, there are things that are true and things that aren’t. Mostly the real world s-s-s-suh-sucks. But everyone also lives in...

Max raised the mallet. He stared into her face and wished he could say he was sorry, that he didn’t want to do it. When he slammed the mallet down, with an echoing bang, he...

He had been a demon for just two days, but the time when he knew what it was like to be loved seemed to exist in a hazily recalled past, to have been left behind...

Jude did not flip them off and then drove for a few blocks feeling good about himself, proud of his restraint. His will, it was like iron.

Why is there evil in the world? Because sometimes you just wanna fuckin have it, and you don’t care who gets hurt.

Social media is teaching us that everyone fucks up, everyone is stupid sometimes, and that this is probably part of being a thinking human. The one exception are those who participate in the self-righteousness Olympics...

Terry was cool, cooler then Ig would ever be, but he was afraid. His fear narrowed his vision so that he couldn’t see anything except what he stood to lose.

Pick a sin we can both live with, is what I ask.

Innocence ain’t all it’s cracked up to be, you know. Innocent little kids rip the wings off flies, because they don’t know any better. That’s innocence.

He had tried to explain the way he felt to Danny once, about compulsive behavior and time rushing too fast and the Internet and drugs. Danny had only lifted one of his slender, mobile eyebrows...

Horror was rooted in sympathy . . . in understanding what it would be like to suffer the worst.

You think you know someone. But mostly you just know what you want to know.

The difference between childhood and adulthood, Vic had come to believe, was the difference between imagination and resignation. You traded one for the other and lost your way.

Don’t ever have children, Tyler, unless you’re ready to be afraid everyday for the rest of your life.

In a friendship, especially in a friendship between two young boys, you are allowed to inflict a certain amount of pain. This is even expected. But you must cause no serious injury; you must never,...

Terror is the desire to save your own ass, but horror is rooted in sympathy.

Eddie Carroll had just come in from outside, and read Noonan’s letter standing in the mudroom. He flipped to the beginning of the story. He stood reading for almost five minutes before noticing he was...

Already, though, she understood the difference between being a child and being an adult. The difference is when someone says he can keep the bad things away, a child believes him.

I mean, when the world comes for your children, with the knives out, it’s your job to stand in the way.