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 offer a different sort of salvation, more immediate and fulfilling. They don't put off their love for a distant, ill-defined eternity but make a gift of it in the here and now, frequently to those who deserve it least. So it was in my case. So it is for many. The devil and woman have been allies against God from the beginning...

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 range of lightweight and comfortable styles to choose from," he murmured at last, trying out a new proverb. "Although there may be no forgiveness for polyester. On this one matter, Satan and the Lord are in agreement.

The Incas were right to worship the sun, Father. God is fire. Combustion is the one inarguable blessing. A tree, oil, coal, a man, a civilization, a soul. They've all got to burn sometime. The warmth made by their passing may be the salvation of others. The ultimate value of the Bible, the Constitution, or any work of literature, really, is that they all burn very well, and for a while they keep back the cold.

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

She breathed deeply of the scent of decaying fiction, disintegrating history, and forgotten verse, and she observed for the first time that a room full of books smelled like dessert: a sweet snack made of figs, vanilla, glue, and cleverness.

Fear does not incline people to be moderate in their use of extreme tactics.

Everyone lives in two worlds,” Maggie said, speaking in an absentminded sort of way while she studied her letters. “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 the world inside their own head. An inscape, a world of thought. In a world made of thought—in an inscape—every idea is a fact. Emotions are as real as gravity. Dreams are as powerful as history. Creative people, like writers, and Henry Rollins, spend a lot of their time hanging out in their thoughtworld. S-s-strong creatives, though, can use a knife to cut the stitches between the two worlds, can bring them together. Your bike. My tiles. Those are our knives.

[Lou]: “I’m not talking about the angioplasty. I mean the stuff you’re pumping into me. What is it? Something serious?”[Nurse]: “Oh. This is nothing. You’re not going under the knife today, so you don’t get the good shit. This is a blood-thinning agent. Also, it’ll mellow you out. Got to keep the mellows going.”[Lou]: “It’ll put me to sleep?”[Nurse]: “Faster than a marathon of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.

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 and how to love, to redefine love as she sees fit, not as God thinks it ought to be. The author is unworthy of His own characters.

You sure you're all right? You aren't out here pondering dark female thoughts are you?

The soul is an irrational, indivisible equation that perfectly expresses one thing: you. The soul would be no good to the devil if it could be destroyed. And it is not lost when placed in Satan's care, as is so often said. He always know exactly how to put his finger on it.

Whatever your sexual orientation, whatever your ethnicity, whatever your age or personal experience, it is my hope you will find a hero somewhere here you can relate to, that speaks to the world as you see it. Even better: there is a good chance you will find some heroes who are deeply, fundamentally different from yourself. I don't have much patience with readers who yearn to explore incredible worlds and mind-bending situations but grow cold at the idea of imagining their way into different political ideas, different faiths, a different gender, a different skin, a different life.

There's something horribly unfair about dying in the middle of a good story, before you have a chance to see how it all comes out. Of course, I suppose everyone ALWAYS dies in the middle of a good story, in a sense. Your own story. Or the story of your grandchildren. Death is a raw deal for narrative junkies.

Humanity is worse than flies.

I liked AC/DC," Lee said. "If you were going to shoot someone, you'd really want to do it while you were listening to them.""What about the Beatles? Did you feel like shooting anyone listening to them?"Lee considered seriously for a moment, then said, "Myself."At the same time he was laughing, Ig was distressed. Not liking the Beatles was almost as bad as not knowing about them at all.

All the world is made of music. We are all strings on a lyre. We resonate. We sing together.

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

He had no doubt that Merrin had called out to God here in this place while she was been raped and killed, in her heart if not with her voice. God's reply had been that due to the high volume of calls she could expect to be on hold until she was dead.

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

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.

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.

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.

The people in charge can always justify doing terrible things in the name of the greater good. A slaughter here, a little torture there. It becomes moral to do things that would be immoral if an ordinary individual did ’em.

But it turned out life was more like the kind of song the Stones wrote: you didn't get any satisfaction, you took one hit to the body after another, if you were a woman you were a bitch who belonged under someone's thumb, and if you wanted mother's little helper from your dear doctor you better have the silver, take it or leave it, and don't come crying for sympathy, that was just for the devil.

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

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

Vic didn't have a car and probably spent a hundred and sixty hours a week at home. The house smelled of piss-soaked diapers and engine parts, and the sink was always full.In retrospect Vic was only surprised she didn't go crazy sooner. She was surprised that more young mothers didn't lose it. When your tits had become canteens and the soundtrack to your life was hysterical tears and mad laughter, how could anyone expect you to remain sane?

In any random slaughter, the difference between living and dying rarely has anything to do with willpower, or wisdom, or pluck. It's just a matter of where you're standing. Two inches to the right, and the bus hits you. If your office is on the ninety-second floor instead of the ninetieth, you don't make it out in time.

It’d be a mistake,” Lee said. “I think maybe you have to make a few,” Merrin said. “If you don’t, you’re probably thinking too much. That’s the worst mistake you can make.

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

The imagination is our final advantage as a species, a place to safely (and happily) explore experiences that are far from safe and far from happy. “Dracula” and “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 body.

... 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 waiting to be switched on.

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 needed to be done - cook an omelette, change lightbulbs, make with hugging - sometimes almost made being a woman fun.

The sound of an English accent distracted her and lifted her spirits. She associated English accents with singing teapots, schools for witchcraft, and the science of deduction. This wasn't, she knew, terribly sophisticated of her, but she had no real guilt about it. She felt the English were themselves to blame for her feelings. They had spent a century relentlessly marketing their detectives and wizards and nannies, and they had to live with the results.

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. A matter that required thought."Only the devil wants man to have a wide range of lightweight and comfortable styles to choose from," he murmured at last, trying out a new proverb. "Although there may be no forgiveness for polyester. On this matter, Satan and the Lord are in agreement.

Writers were as parasitic, she supposed, as the spore itself.

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

Everything that is good in the day is even better in the night.

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

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

The dead pull the living down.

He believed in his own decency with all his heart. So it was with every true monster, Vic supposed.

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

He got up and ran on, pitching himself down the hill, flying through the branches of the firs, leaping roots and rocks without seeing them. As he went, the hill got steeper and steeper, until it was really like falling. He was going too fast and he knew when he came to a stop, it would involve crashing into something, and shattering pain.Only as he went on, picking up speed all the time, until with each leap he seemed to sail through yards of darkness, he felt a giddy surge of emotion, a sensation that might have been panic but felt strangely like exhilaration. He felt as if at any moment his feet might leave the ground and never come back down. He knew this forest, this darkness, this night. He knew his chances: not good. He knew what was after him. It had been after him all his life. He knew where he was - in a story about to unfold an ending. He knew better than anyone how these stories went, and if anyone could find their way out of these woods, it was him.("Best New Horror")

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 found himself essentially alone, shut tight into his own suffocating cabinet of shadows. At times, it required all his will not to hide his eyes, yet his insides churned with a nervous-sick frisson of pleasure. When the lights finally came up, his nerve endings were ringing, as if he had for a moment grabbed a copper wire with live current in it. It was a sensation for which he had developed a compulsion.Later, when he was a professional and it was his business, his feelings were more muted - not gone, but experienced distantly, more like the memory of an emotion than the thing itself. More recently, even the memory had fled, and in its place was a deadening amnesia, a numb disinterest when he looked at the piles of magazines on his coffee table. Or no - he was overcome with dread, but the wrong kind of dread.("Best New Horror")

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 was no longer entirely sure who she was angry with though. Her anger didn't have a fixed point. It was a soft whir of emotion to match the soft whir of the spokes.

Sometimes it seemed that one of the stars came loose from the firmament and sailed off with dizzying speed to a far corner of the night. In the dark hours before sunrise, constellations came apart and reformed and fell in burning streaks.

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 long ago.

Why am I not good at anything?""You're a good dad.""It ain't rocket science."No, Vic thought. It was harder.

A thousand prayers every minute everywhere and what does God ever say back? Nothing! Because silence never lies. Silence is God's final advantage. Silence is the purest form of harmony. Everyone ought to try it.

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 Richards?

Death and ruin is man's preferred ecosystem.

...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 man...

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

Kids always think they're coming into a story at the beginning, when usually they're coming in at the end.

I'm sorry to bother you," she whispered. "When I get excited about a movie I want to talk. I can't help it.

Because, of course, it wouldn't do to just talk to her. She had spoken to him in flashes of daylight, and he felt he ought to reply in kind.

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 use that exact word, but close enough.

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.

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.

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.

The night had a nearly liquid quality, was like sliding into a warm swimming pool, a pool filled with buoyant darkenss instead of water.

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.

Someone probably a lot smarter than me said hell is other people. I say you're in hell when you don't give to someone who needs, because you can't bear to have less.

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

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 heard a high, piercing scream and almost screamed himself, believing for an instant it was her, still somehow alive; then realized it was Rudy. Max was powerfully built, with his, deep water-buffalo chest and Dutch farmer's shoulders. With the first blow he had driven the stake over two-thirds of the way in. He only needed to bring the mallet down once more. The blood that squelched up around the wood was cold and had a sticky, viscous consistency.Max swayed, his head light. His father took his arm.'Goot,' Abraham whispered into his ear, his arms around him, squeezing him so tightly his ribs creaked. Max felt a little thrill of pleasure - an automatic reaction to the intense, unmistakable affection of his father's embrace - and was sickened by it. 'To do offense to the house of the human spirit, even after its tenant depart, is no easy thing, I know.'("Abraham's Boys")

I think if you cheat in a ethics class then there's really no hope for you.

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 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.

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 Peace-not-War. 'Well. That's helpful. We'll put an APB out on the Gingerbread Man. I'm not hopeful it'll do us much good, though. Word on the street is you can't catch him.

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

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 and stared at him in smirking confusion. Danny did not think coke and computers were anything alike. But Jude had seen the way people hunched over their screens, clicking the refresh button again and again, waiting for some crucial if meaningless hit of information, and he thought it was almost exactly the same.

There's only room for one hero in this story-and everyone knows the devil doesn't get to be the good guy.

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

One thing I realize now is that you only advertise your beliefs with a t-shirt if you're seriously insecure.

Taking a thing apart is always faster than putting something together. This is true of everything except marriage.

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 and they often turn people who agree with them against 'em.

Carol says we speak with one voice. What she doesn't say is that voice belongs to HER. There's only one song to sing these days--Carol's song--and if you aren't in harmony, you can stick a stone in your mouth and shut the hell up.

It's because she doesn't love being lonely. When a girl loses her virginity, though, it may hurt, but it's real. It might be the realest, most private thing you could ever see in another person. You wonder who she'll be in that moment, when you finally get past all the pretend.

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 them off to their tricks as fast and often as I can.

Wouldn’t be very fair to the rest of them, would it?” Harper asked. “They’re not bad people, most of them. All they want is to be safe.”“Isn’t that always a permission slip for ugliness and cruelty? All they want is to be safe, and they don’t care who they have to destroy to stay that way. And the people who want to kill us, the Cremation Crews, all they want is safety, too!

Death isn't the end of your 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 the background hum of the universe.