LOWER YOUR PRICE

Not Quite Human II (1989)

White Palace (1990)

Found my other half

dollar, under the cushions,

fresh from the couch mint.

Paris, Texas (1984)

Vigil (1984)

"... and suddenly he began to laugh. 'That's what I'm supposed to do, isn't? If there are certain preconditions for the use of magic, those preconditions will inevitably arrange themselves. Right?'"

It, Stephen King

Paris, Texas (1984)

"He hadn't been very good at first; he was too excited to be good. But he had understood his potential not to be just good at the job but great at it, and just that knowledge had been enough to put him over the moon on a cloud of euphoria. At the same time he had begun to understand the great principle that moved the universe, at least that part of the universe which had to do with careers and success: you found the crazy guy who was running around inside of you, fucking up your life. You chased him into a corner and grabbed him. But you didn't kill him. Oh no. You put a harness over his head and then started plowing. The crazy guy worked like a demon once you had him in the traces. And he supplied you with a few chucks from time to time. That was really all there was. And that was enough."

It, Stephen King

"Offended, yes. It was the only word he could think of, and if he used it they would laugh--they liked him, he knew that, and they had accepted him as one of them, but they would still laugh. All the same, there were things that were not supposed to be. They offended any sane person's sense of order, they offended the central idea that God had given the earth a final tilt on its axis so that twilight would only last about twelve minutes at the equator and linger for an hour or more up where the Eskimos built their ice-cube houses, that He had done that and He then had said, in effect: 'Okay, if you can figure out the tilt, you can figure out any damn thing you choose. Because even light has weight, and when the note of a train whistle suddenly drop it's the Doppler effect and when an airplane breaks the sound barrier that bang isn't the applause of the angels or the flatulence of demons but only air collapsing back into place. I gave you the tilt and then I sat back about halfway up the auditorium to watch the show. I got nothing else to say, except that two and two makes four, the lights in the sky are stars, if there's blood grownups can see it as well as kids, and dead boys stay dead.' You can live with fear, I think, Stan would have said if he could. Maybe not forever, but for a long, long time. It's offense you maybe can't live with, because it opens up a crack inside your thinking, and if you look there, and they have little yellow eyes that don't blink, and there's a stink down in that dark, and after awhile you think maybe there's a whole other universe down there, a universe where a square moon rises in the sky and the stars laugh in cold voices, and some of the triangles have four sides, and some have five, and some of them have five raised to the fifth power of sides. In this universe there might grow roses which sing. Everything leads to everything, he would have told them if he could. Go to your church and listen to your stories about Jesus walking on water, but if I saw a guy doing that I'd scream and scream and scream. Because it wouldn't look like a miracle to me. It would look like an offense."

It, Stephen King

silly ways to die

"at every turn, playing their own part, unwitting vise grips driving the seven of them together--tight, tighter, tightest."

It, Stephen King

Damned If You Don't (1987)

Hester Street (1975)

a gravitationally completely collapsed object (the return to innocence)

"Well, after you've used the phrase 'a gravitationally completely collapsed object' ten times you conclude you've got to get a better name. So that's when I switched to the word 'black hole'."

John Archibald Wheeler, A Brief History of Time (1991)

"No... no, I don't think that. But... 

But what? that rational side of his mind demanded, and Mike thought it was talking just a little too loud, a little too fast. Even if there was still something to find, it would have decayed long ago. So... what?"

It, Stephen King

STEPHEN HAWK-KING

A Brief History of Time (1991)

"The fog changed everything, made the most ordinary things like fire hydrants and stop-signs into objects of mystery--things both strange and a trifle sinister. You could hear cars but not see them, and because of the fog's odd acoustic quality, you could not tell if they were far or near until you actually saw them come rolling out of the fog with ghost-halos of moisture ringing their headlamps."

It, Stephen King

"And yet some rationality remained, even until the end: as the Creature hooked its claws into the soft meat of his neck, as his carotid artery let go in a warm and painless gout that splashed the thing's reptilian plating, Eddie's hands groped at the Creature's back, feeling for a zipper. They fell away only when the Creature tore his head from his shoulders with a low satisfied grunt. 

And as Eddie's picture of what It was began to fade, It began promptly to change into something else."

It, Stephen King

New York Stories (1989) 

" 'cause what do you give a girl that has nothing, you know, that doesn't need anything, right? you give her comfort, right?"

"The Cadillac Hotel," Snap Judgement, 07.27.2017.

"Yet there was something in the concept of haiku that fired his imagination. The idea made him feel happy... Haiku was good poetry, Ben felt, because it was structured poetry. There were no secret rules. Seventeen syllables, one image linked to one emotion, and you were out. Bingo. It was clean, it was utilitarian, it was entirely contained within and dependent upon its own rules. He even liked the word itself, a slide of air broken as if along a dotted line by the 'k'-sound at the very back of your mouth: haiku."

It, Stephen King

Some nights I just play black-jack.

Rain Man (1988) 

"(for some reason this last caused another wave of feeling to sweep him so powerfully he had to grope for the railing again; the feeling was huge, inarticulate, mercifully brief; perhaps a sexual pre-signal, meaningless to his body, where the endocrine glands still slept almost without dreaming, yet as bright as summer heat-lightning) a bright golden anklet-bracelet she wore..."

It, Stephen King

"Team Homer," The Simpsons (1995)

"My mother was not a person but the climate I grew up in."

1982 Janine, Alasdair Gray

An Angel at My Table (1990)

the sun can't be seen
behind our backs while we sleep,
radiating heat

Under the surface
of an extinguishing core,
from remnants are mined

the membrane, stripped off
like vinyl from a billboard
when the bond pays out.

Takes one year no more
to become expert at this
manual labor.

Protein-rich membranes
are dried, powdered, and processed.
Sold as supplements

to heal busted joints,
lasting muscle contracture,
palmar fascia.

"There was very little in the place, mostly it was furnished with light and quiet. It was on the top floor and looked out over rooftops. There was a Chinese teapot in the kitchen, there was a copy of Lilly's The Mind of the Dolphin on the table by the bed. In the sitting room were R. H. Blyth's four volumes on haiku and some natural history. 'I don't buy books much anymore,' he said. There was a radio but no gramophone."

Turtle Diary, Russell Hoban

"I stretched out my hands, thought of holding the grey air cool and wet in my hands."

Turtle Diary, Russell Hoban

chased a lost dog back to its home

Just One of the Guys (1985)

"I don't want to be naked with anybody now, especially with myself."

Turtle Diary, Russell Hoban

"Is it possible that they made wishes here when they threw in their coins?"

Trust (1991)

Turtle Diary, Russell Hoban

"The model houses and shops, thick and awry, had an air of stolid outrage. It was as if the anima of each place, private and indwelling, had been nagged into standing naked in the little streets before the deformed buildings. As if someone had said, 'We need the money, you must help.' the very boats in the model harbour, oafish and out of scale in the still water, cursed almost aloud, denied any connection whatever with real boats, fishing and the sea, tried by disassociating themselves to make amends to the poor household gods of the port."

Turtle Diary, Russell Hoban

"They were playing a tournament, twelve players, twelve matches a day, twelve days running. When that was over and the victor had been crowned, they'd play another one."

Drop City, T. C. Boyle

"And then he was there, by the tree with its black skirts of tightly woven needles and the bark that smelled of pitch, of air freshener and Pine-Sol, and saw that there was no moose, wounded or otherwise, lying heaped in the snow. He heard a sudden sharp heartrending cry then, the cry of a human baby spitted by some fiend on the point of a bayonet, and looked down at his feet. There was something there, a black weakly thrashing living form, a thing he'd shot while it clung to the bark of the tree eight feet from the ground, impersonating the head of a moose. And what was it? weak and bristling, the life sucking out of the hole he'd put in it--a porcupine, that's what it was, the humped and hobbling old man of the woods, fit only to feed to the dogs. 

For a long moment he stood there, watching the thing thrash its spiked head against the ground, back and forth, back and forth, a metronome keeping time with its agony and its unbelief-or was that its tail? All the while, the dark thumping kept time to the beat of his own unavailing blood. He felt foolish, felt lost and hopeless and incompetent, felt ashamed, felt guilty. ..."

Drop City, T. C. Boyle

 

Wolves: A Legend Returns to Yellowstone (2007)