Nos4a2 Quotes

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.

Was there any human urge more pitiful-or more intense- than wanting another chance at something?

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

I felt like it needed some color down there, so I painted the walls with the motherfucker.

The blood of a redheaded woman is three degrees cooler than the blood of a normal woman. This has been established by medical studies.

She'd thought love had something to do with happiness, but it turned out they were not even vaguely related. Love was closer to a need, no different from the need to eat, to breathe.

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

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.

What a blessed if painful thing, this business of being alive.

No one looks too closely at a librarian. People are afraid of going blind from the glare of ssss-ssso much compressed wisdom.

Innocence ain't all it's cracked up to be, you know. Innocent little kids rip the wings off flies, because they don't know any better. That's innocence.

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.

I don't know, maybe you'd be more interested in me if I were a book.

... 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.

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

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

Sooner or later a black car came for everyone.

You can't let facts get in the way of the truth.

And he paddled away in his douche canoe.

You had to know when it made sense to try to untangle something and when to just cut the motherfucker loose.

Everyone you lost was still there with you, and so maybe no one was ever lost at all.

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.

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.

Aren't you going to tell me I'm not so bad? she asked. Mmm-no. I was thinking how every man loves a hot girl with a history of making mistakes. Because it's always possible she'll make one with you.

If you’re going to be mad, she heard her father say, then use it, and don’t be used by it.

She just knew that even when you had nothing, you still had love.

Vic’s father was badass. Other dads built things. Hers blew shit up and rode away on a Harley, smoking the cigarette he used to light the fuse. Top that.

She thought of mothering, which was really another word for being present and caring what happened to someone.

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.

Christmas was almost four months in the rearview mirror, and there was something awful about Christmas music when it was nearly summer. It was like a clown in the rain, with his makeup running.

It seemed to her sometimes that this was the only fight that mattered: the struggle to take the world's chaos and make it mean something, to put it to words.

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

I remember an era when you could get your nose sliced off for sticking it too far into another man's business. Now you can find out anything about anyone with the click of a button. There is no privacy and no consideration, and everyone is prying into things that aren't their affair. You can probably check on the intertube and find out what color underwear I have on today.

So many of man's inventions - the syringe, the sword, the pen, the gun - were metaphorical cocks, but the internal combustion engine had to have been dreamt up by a man who had looked upon the human heart.

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.

When you feel helpless, you'll do just about any old thing to shut off your head.

By the time I knew it was a mistake, it was too late to come back. That's usually how it is.

Her sanity was a fragile thing, a butterfly cupped in her hands, that she carried with her everywhere, afraid of what would happen if she let it go - or got careless and crushed it.

If Wayne needed a punching bag, Vic was ready to take the hits. It would be a way of making amends. How she loved that word. She liked that it almost sounded like "amen".

a room full of books smelled like dessert: a sweet snack made of figs, vanilla, glue, and cleverness.

He was as tall as Lincoln and just as dead.

The fires of hell are not hot enough for a man—or woman!—who would hurt his children.

Heroism was exhausting business.

The sky was the color of a migraine.

Bing," Manx said, "I thought I told you to put Mr. and Mrs. de Zoet in the spare room!" "Well," Bing said, "they aren't hurting anyone." "No. Of course they're not hurting anyone. They're dead! But that's no reason to have them underfoot either!

My first wife was like the rash you get from poison ivy. I couldn't stand her, but I couldn't keep my hands off her. She was an itch I scratched until I bled--and then I scratched it some more!

There’s the physical world . . . but there’s also our own private inner worlds, the world of our thoughts. A world made of ideas instead of stuff. It’s just as real as our world, but it’s inside.

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.

There was no such thing as arguing with delight. Like seeing a pretty girl with the sunlight in her hair, like pancakes and hot chocolate in front of a crackling fire. Delight was one of the fundamental forces of being, like gravity.

It sounded like delusion until you remembered that 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.

Her anger didn't have a fixed point.

.down it slow can you ,reverse in think you If .Wayne ,truth the from away you driving He's ...behind soul your leave He'll .snap you until ,band rubber a like out you stretch He'll .soul own your from away you drive He'll

He had long accepted that everyone had his own world inside, each as real as the communal world shared by all but impossible for others to access.

He looked cold in his little loincloth, so Bing flicked a match and dressed him in a robe of flame

She seemed almost to have a perverse impulse to make anyone who cared about her regret it, to find the thing that would most appall those people and then do that until they had to run away as a matter of self-preservation.

Hey! I get to sleep in a library and read books all night! Without pity, where would I be? I'm a total pity s-s-ssslut.

It took a clever man to figure out a way to make a profit off his bad habits.

Everything that is good in the day is even better in the night. A merry-go-round, a ferris wheel, a kiss from a girl.

every man loves a hot girl with a history of making mistakes. Because it’s always possible she’ll make one with you.

You could look at birds all your life without ever knowing what was a sparrow and what was a blackbird, but we all know a swan when we see it.

You can’t let facts get in the way of the truth.

Outlaws like to sleep in. I’ve been FBI for eight years, and I’ve never once had cause to shoot anyone before eleven in the morning. Not as long as I get my coffee anyway.

Most recently she’s been helping Bing redecorate his basement. I felt like it needed some color down there, so I painted the walls with the motherfucker

She was trying to pull it up to stick it through his throat, but he had her wrist, kept the blade down and his face turned away from its questing edge

The man-nurse was his age and had sleepy eyes with dark circles under them, and a jutting Cro-Magnon forehead. His name tag said, improbably, BIBLO. He had a spaceship tattooed on one hairy forearm: Serenity from the TV show Firefly. "'I am a leaf on the wind,'" Lou said, and the man-nurse said, "Dude, don't say that. I don't want to start crying on the job.

The night was aromatic with the smell of autumn and the steely fragrance of freshly dampened blacktop. How she loved the smell of road: asphalt baking and soft in July, dirt roads with their dust-and-pollen perfume in June, country lanes spicy with the odor of crushed leaves in sober October, the sand-and-salt smell of the highway, so like an estuary, in February.

Christmas was almost three months in the rearview mirror, and there was something awful about Christmas music when it was nearly summer. It was like a clown in the rain, with his makeup running.

The last man she'd dated said something to her, shortly before they broke up: 'I don't know, maybe I'm boring, but I never really feel like you're there when we're out to dinner. You live in your head. I can't. No room for me in there. I don't know, maybe you'd be more interested in me if I were a book.' She had hated him at the time, and hated herself a little, but later, looking back, Hutter had decided that even if that particular boyfriend had been a book, he would've been one from the Business & Finance aisle and she would've passed him by and looked for something in SF & Fantasy.

Maggie said, “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.

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.

She breathed deeply and smelled water-logged books, the perfume of rotting cardboard and paper that had dried beneath the furnace of the July sun. If a single breath could summarize an entire life, she supposed that would do.

As a world of shared ideas, Twitter is a kind of Inscape in and of itself, and a good one.

If I die in a plane crash remember to always bag and board your comics.

HIC LOCUS EST UBI MORS GAUDET SUCCURRERE VITAE.

What’s good stays good no matter how much of a beating it takes.

Let me tell you something. The blood of a redheaded woman is three degrees cooler than the blood of a normal woman. This has been established by medical studies.

was once a young lady from Yale,’” said the Gasmask Man. “‘Who had verses tattooed on her tail. And on her behind, for the sake of the blind, a duplicate version in braille.

Some part of her felt that the existence of the bridge depended utterly on forward motion and not thinking too much.

Above it all drifted a silvery scythe blade of moon. Wayne looked up at it, and away, and then looked again. The moon had a hooked nose, a thoughtfully frowning mouth, and a single eye closed in sleep. When it exhaled, a wind rippled across the plains and silvery beds of cloud raced through the night. Wayne almost clapped his hands in delight to look upon it.

Boy, this is your lucky day!" She clapped her hands. "You found yourself a librarian! I can help wit the figuring-out thing and point you toward some good poetry while I'm at it. It's what I do.

What frightened him was not the thought that he was a prisoner of Charlie Manx but that for a moment he had forgotten he was a prisoner. For a moment he had been admiring the light and feeling almost happy.

She bought tennis rackets, didn't know if Wayne knew how to play. It had been so long for herself that she couldn't even remember how to score. She just knew that even when you had nothing, you still had love.

The snowmen stood in bunches, in families, and the breeze generated by the car snatched at their striped scarves. Snowmen fathers and snowgirl mothers with their snowchildren and snowpuppies. Top hats were in abundance, as were corncob pipes and carrot noses. They waved the crooked sticks of their arms, saluting Mr. Manx, Wayne, and NOS4A2 as they went by. The black coals of their eyes gleamed, darker than the night, brighter than the stars.

She wanted to believe that information brought clarity. Not for the first time in her life, however, she had the disconcerting notion that it was often the opposite. Information was a jar of flies, and when you unscrewed the lid, they went everywhere and good luck to you trying to round them all up again.

Sam Cleary reached the two old men fighting on the ground and used the fire extinguisher for the first time, bringing it down two-handed to hit Charlie Manx in the face. He would use it for the second time on Tom Priest, not thirty seconds later, by which time Tom was well dead. Not to mention well done.

She was sitting on the floor, beneath the phone, with her arms wrapped around her, when Lou found her. “You been, like, sitting out here for a while,” he said. “Do you want me to bring you a blanket or a dead tauntaun or something?

I know all about bridges like that one. I know all about roads that can only be found with the mind. One of them is how I find my way to Christmasland. There is the Night Road, and the train tracks to Orphanhenge, and the doors to Mid-World, and the old trail to the Tree House of the Mind, and then there is Victoria’s wonderful covered bridge.

After six hours in the car, he felt no panic, only a kind of numb wonder. On some level he had come to view his situation as almost natural. Sooner or later a black car came for everyone. It came and took you away from your loved ones, and you never got to go back.

When he smiled, she saw that his mouth was full of little hooks, rows of them, each as small and delicate as a sewing needle.

He had long accepted that everyone had his own world inside, each as real as the communal world shared by all but impossible for others to access. She had said she could bring her bridge into this world but that in some way it also existed only in her mind. It sounded like delusion until you remembered that 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.

She’d thought love had something to do with happiness, but it turned out they were not even vaguely related. Love was closer to a need, no different from the need to eat, to breathe. When Wayne fell asleep, his hot cheek against her naked breast, his lips smelling sweetly of the milk from her own body, she felt as if she was the one who had been fed.

I’m not supposed to suh-ss-sleep in the library, but Ms. Howard lets me get away with it if it’s only now and then. She pities me, because I’m an orphan and kind of weird. That’s okay. I don’t mind. People make out like it’s a terrible thing to be pitied, but I say, Hey! I get to sleep in a library and read books all night! Without pity, where would I be? I’m a total pity s-s-ssslut.

They were in a trench sliding through a forest of corn. Machine stood over the rows, black girders that arced in the sky like the proscenium above a stage. The thought occurred to Wayne that those machines were sprayers, full of poison. They would drench the corn in a lethal rain to keep it from being eaten by invasive species. Those exact words - "invasive species" - rang through his brain. Later the corn would be lightly washed and people would eat it.

Vic smelled the vast vault filled with books before she saw it, because her eyes required time to adjust to the cavernous dark. 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.

She was working on the eighth step of her program and was here in Haverhill to make amends. For years she had not wanted Linda to know Wayne, to be a part of his life. She took pleasure in limiting her mother’s contact with the boy, felt it was her job to protect Wayne from Linda. She wished now there had been someone to protect Wayne from herself. She had amends to make to him, too.

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.” She

Are u at the airport yet? Yep. They pushed my flight back to 3 so I’m going to be sitting here awhile. That sux. What r u gonna do? Gonna hit the food court. Gonna hit it so hard it CRIES. Mom got the bike going. She’s out riding around. She wearing her helmet? Yes. I made her. Coat too. Good for you. That coat adds +5 to all armor rolls. LOL. I love u. Have a safe flight. If I die in a plane crash remember to always bag and board your comics. Love you too.

Vic just laughed at that, didn’t bother to tell him she had pulled his cell phone apart and shoved it in the garbage the day before. He took her in his arms, held her in his bearish embrace. He was a big man, glum about being overweight, but he smelled better than any guy she had ever met. His chest smelled of cedar and motor oil and the outdoors. He smelled like responsibility. For a moment, being held by him, she remembered what it had been like to be happy.

THEY WOULDN’T LET LOU WALK ANYWHERE, DIDN’T WANT TO TAKE A chance that the fat man might get dizzy and fall onto his face, so after his examination he sat in a wheelchair and a man-nurse wheeled him to recovery. The man-nurse was his age and had sleepy eyes with dark circles under them, and a jutting Cro-Magnon forehead. His name tag said, improbably, BILBO. He had a spaceship tattooed on one hairy forearm: Serenity from the TV show Firefly. “‘I am a leaf on the wind,’” Lou said, and the man-nurse said, “Dude, don’t say that. I don’t want to start crying on the job.

Bruce Wayne Carmody had been unhappy for so long that it had stopped being a state he paid attention to. Sometimes Wayne felt that the world had been sliding apart beneath his feet for years. He was still waiting for it to pull him down, to bury him at last. His mother had been crazy for a while, had believed that the phone was ringing when it wasn’t, had conversations with dead children who weren’t there. Sometimes he felt she had talked more with dead children than she ever had with him. She had burned down their house. She spent a month in a psychiatric hospital, skipped out on a court appearance, and dropped out of Wayne’s life for almost two years. She spent a while on book tour, visiting bookstores in the morning and local bars at night. She hung out in L.A. for six months, working on a cartoon version of Search Engine that never got off the ground and a cocaine habit that did. She spent a while drawing covered bridges for a gallery show that no one went to. Wayne’s father got sick of Vic’s drinking, Vic’s wandering, and Vic’s crazy, and he took up with the lady who had done most of his tattoos, a girl named Carol who had big hair and dressed like it was still the eighties. Only Carol had another boyfriend, and they stole Lou’s identity and ran off to California, where they racked up a ten-thousand-dollar debt in Lou’s name. Lou was still dealing with creditors. Bruce Wayne Carmody wanted to love and enjoy his parents, and occasionally he did. But they made it hard. Which was why the papers in his back pocket felt like nitroglycerin, a bomb that hadn’t exploded yet.