Great Throughts Treasury

"Absence may or may not make the heart grow fonder, but it certainly freshens the eye."

"Acknowledge your good fortune by sharing it."

"Adults are the real monsters."

"Advertising tends to be most effective in jogging finally into action those people who are well-enough disposed towards a product, but have not yet got around to buying it."

"Alice had managed to get herself back under some sort of control, but it was thin. Thin enough to read a newspaper through, his bingo-playing mother might have said. Although a kid herself, Alice had managed to keep herself shiny-side up mostly for the other kid's sake, so he wouldn't give way entirely."

"All I ask is that you do as well as you can, and remember that, while to write adverbs is human, to write he said or she said is divine."

"Afterward Larry felt as if he had been through a long pillow-fight in which all the pillows had been treated with a low-grade poison gas."

"After the 9/11 apocalypse happened in New York City, people, particularly New Yorkers, who breathed in the ash, or saw the results of that, have a tendency to keep seeing echoes and having flashbacks to it."

"All is forgotten in the stone halls of the dead. These are the rooms of ruin where the spiders spin and the great circuits fall quiet, one by one..."

"All right I think we've been down here in the dark long enough. There's a whole other world upstairs. Take my hand Constant Reader and I'll be happy to lead you back into the sunshine. I'm happy to go there because I believe most people are essentially good. I know that I am. It's you I'm not entirely sure of."

"All I can say is what you already know: some days are treasure. Not many, but I think in almost every life there are a few. That was one of mine, and when I'm blue -- when life comes down on me and everything looks tawdry and cheap, the way Joyland Avenue did on a rainy day -- I go back to it, if only to remind myself that life isn't always a butcher's game. Sometimes the prizes are real. Sometimes they are precious."

"All you imagined, no matter how wild it might seem, was no more than a disguised version of what you already knew."

"All you need to do is hold on tight... and believe."

"Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym."

"Although emotionally delicate and eminently bruisable, teenagers are short on empathy. That comes later in life, if it comes at all."

"Am I weird?" "Yeah. But so what? Everybody's weird."

"America?s two great specialties are demagogues and rock and roll, and we?ve all heard plenty of both in our time."

"Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work."

"American grammar doesn't have the sturdiness of British grammar, but it has its own scruffy charm."

"Americans are apocalyptic by nature. The reason why is that we've always had so much, so we live in deadly fear that people are going to take it away from us."

"And all that weirdness isn't just going on outside. It's in you too, right now, growing in the dark like magic mushrooms. Call it the Thing in the Cellar. Call it the Blow Lunch Factor. Call it the Loony Tunes File. I think of it as my private dinosaur, huge, slimy, and mindless, stumbling around in the stinking swamp of my subconscious, never finding a tar pit big enough to hold it."

"America's two great specialties are demagogues and rock and roll, and we've all heard plenty of both in our time."

"An idea is like a cold germ: sooner or later someone always catches it."

"And as a writer, one of the things that I've always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that's what we're supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react."

"And didn't they say that, although curiosity killed the cat, satisfaction brought the beast back?"

"And I believe happiness is the exact opposite of sadness, bitterness, and hatred: happiness should remain unexamined as long as possible."

"And almost idly, in a kind of side-thought, Eddie discovered one of his childhood's great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought."

"And if there are no cars or planes, and if no one?s Uncle John is out in the wood lot west of town banging away at a quail or pheasant; if the only sound is the slow beat of your own heart, you can hear another sound, and that is the sound of life winding down to its cyclic close, waiting for the first winter snow to perform last rites."

"And I guess you judge how well you're doing by how well you sleep at night... and what your dreams are like."

"And I wonder if there is really any point to what I'm doing, or what I'm supposed to make of a world where a man can get rich playing "let's pretend"

"And if you are honest about the words coming out of your characters' mouths, you'll find that you've let yourself in for a fair amount of criticism."

"And in real life endings aren't always neat, whether they're happy endings, or whether they're sad endings."

"And in the gunslinger's mind, those words echoed: You dare not."

"and now, all these years later, it seem to him that the most horrible fact of human existence was that broken hearts mended"

"And people who don?t dream, who don?t have any kind of imaginative life, they must? they must go nuts. I can?t imagine that."

"And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God's language - it's better, it's finer, it's language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives."

"And she sees that the moonlight is losing its orange glow. It has become buttery, and will soon turn to silver."

"And the most terrifying question of all may be just how much horror the human mind can stand and still maintain a wakeful, staring, unrelenting sanity."

"And that almost killed you?" "It wasn't deep but it got infected. Infection means that the bad germs got into it. Infection's the most dangerous thing there is, Tom. Infection was what made the super-flu germ kill all the people. And infection is what made people want to make the germ in the first place. An infection of the mind."

"and so will the world end, I think, a victim of love rather than hate. For love's ever been the more destructive weapon, sure."

"And suddenly it didn't seem to matter anymore, nothing would matter if she could turn over, turn over and see the stars, turn over and look once and die."

"And this wasn't lying, not really. It was leaving out."

"And the rain went rollin? down the windowpanes, and the shadows wiggled n' squiggled on her check and forehead like black veins."

"And then a funny thing happened to me...except when I think about it, it wasn't very funny at all. There must be a line in all of us, a very clear one, just like the line that divides the light side of a planet from the dark. I think they call that line the terminator. That's a very good word for it. Because at that moment I was freaking out, and at the next I was as cool as a cucumber."

"And will I tell you that these three lived happily ever after? I will not, for no one ever does. But there was happiness. And they did live."

"And then the world exploded."

"And when there are enough outsiders together in one place, a mystic osmosis takes place and you're inside."

"Anger is the most useless emotion," Henchick intoned, "destructive to the mind and hurtful to the heart."

"Andy Dufresne: 'That's the beauty of music. They can't get that from you...haven't you ever felt that way about music?' Red: 'I played a mean harmonica as a younger man. Lost interest in it though. Didn't make much sense in here.' Andy: 'Here's where it makes the most sense. You need it so you don't forget.' Red: 'Forget?' Andy: 'Forget that...there are places in this world that aren't made out of stone. That there's something inside...that they can't get to, that they can't touch. That's yours.' Red: 'What're you talking about?' Andy: 'Hope."

"And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it."