The most serious drawback to the telling-nothing approach is that it made that much more of a mystery of what had happened, and the nature of gossip abhors a vacuum of the unexplained.

The train is roaring toward you and the villain is twirling his moustache and you're fussing that he's tied you to the tracks with the wrong kind of rope.

I wondered what you'd have on the side with a plate of Deep Fried Anxiety. Pickles? Coleslaw? Potato-strychnine mash?

The Lone Ranger of vampires. Did that make me Tonto?

Charlie is one of the big good guys in my universe.

I'd always had a guilty preference for fiction. Since I seemed now to be living fiction, this proved to have been an entirely reasonable choice.

Can you trust me, he said. Not will you. Can you.Can I trust him?What do I have to lose?

What this world doesn't have is the three-wishes, go-to-the-ball-and-meet-your-prince, happily-ever-after kind of magic. We have all the mangling and malevolent kinds. Who *invented* this system?

You can be a really nasty, selfish little jerk when you're scared enough. I was scared enough.

When you're feeding the second coachload of tourists that day you aren't thinking about the birthday party for fifty next week.

There are always cats around Charlie's, but they are usually refugees seeking asylum from the local rat population, and rather desperately friendly.

First, let me finish. Then interrupt.

If you are not envied, you are not enviable.

An armed man will kill an unarmed man with monotonous regularity.

It frightened people when you were honest; it shocked them.

I don't cover my face because I want to show my identity.

The Great Morning which is for all, rises in the East.

Knowing that conscious decisions and personal memory are much too small a place to live, every human being streams at night into the loving nowhere, or during the day, in some absorbing work.

Water is the grand epic of creation; and there is not a human soul but feels the influence of its majesty, its power, or its beauty.

You don't hate history, you hate the way it was taught to you in high school.

There's husbandry in heaven; Their candles are all out.