The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.
It's amazing that the heart makes no noise when it cracks.
He hated to think of his own life stretching ahead of him that way, a long succession of days and nights that were fine - not good, not bad, not great, not lousy, not exciting, not anything.
The possibility that hope comes out of hopelessness and that the opposite of things carry the seeds of birth - love out of hate, good out of evil. Didn't flowers grow out of dirt?
Cities fell. Earth opened. Planets tilted. Stars plummeted. And the awful silence.
Everybody sins, Francis. The terrible thing is that we love our sins. We love the thing that makes us evil.
They don't actually want you to do your own thing, not unless it's their thing too.
Don't miss the bus, boy. You're missing a lot of things in the world, better not miss that bus.
People throw the word love around like confetti when they actually mean affection.
He was swept with a sadness, a sadness deep and penetrating, leaving him desolate like someone washed up on a beach, a lone survivor in a world full of strangers.
It doesn't matter how big the body, it's what you do with it.
They tell you to do your own thing but they don't mean it. They don't want you to do your thing, not unless it happens to be their thing, too.
And he did see--that life was rotten, that there were no heroes, really, and that you couldn't trust anybody, not even yourself.
There was nothing more beautiful in the world than the sight of a teacher getting upset.
It came to me that hell would not be fire and smoke after all but arctic, everything white and frigid. Hell would be not anger but indifference.
They murdered him.
A terrific sadness swept over Jerry. As if somebody had died. The way he felt standing in the cemetry that day they buried his mother. And nothing you could do about it.
It would be nice to avoid the world, to leave it and all its threats and unhappiness. Not to die or anything like that, but to find a place of solitude and solace.
Why did the wise guys always accuse other people of being wise guys?
You bring up your children to be self-reliant and independent and they double-cross you and become self-reliant and independent.
...pain reaches a certain point and does not get worse but remains in all its intensity and you can survive it.
Mr. Sinclair once asked the class to make a list of the ten most beautiful words in the English language, and the only word that really seemed beautiful to me was tenderness.
That's what Archie did - built a house nobody could anticipate a need for, except himself, a house that was invisible to everyone else.
Pluck my heart From my flesh And eat it.....
Eat my heart Chew it hard Swallow my soul, too
Eric Poole began with cats. Or, to be more exact, kittens.
Go get your bus, square boy.
Happiness is a way of traveling and not a destination
I wonder if it's a special sin to lie to a nun
He closed the locker quickly so no one would see the damage. For some reason, he felt ashamed.
