Pynch Quotes

Making Ronan Lynch smile felt as charged as making a bargain with Cabeswater. These were not forces to play with.

Adam lived in an apartment located above the office of St. Agnes Catholic Church, a fortuitous combination that focused most of the objects of Ronan's worship into one downtown block.

The choice was death or hurting Adam, which wasn’t much of a choice at all.

Inside, they pretended they would dream, but they did not. They sprawled on the living room sofa and Adam studied the tattoo that covered Ronan's back: all the sharp edges that hooked wondrously and fearfully into each other. 'Unguibus et rostro,' Adam said. Ronan put Adam's fingers to his mouth. He was never sleeping again.

It should have been impossible. No one should have been able to dream any of these thing, much less all of them. But Adam had seen what Ronan could do. He'd read the dreamt will and ridden in the dreamt Camaro and been terrified by the dreamt night terror. It was possible that there were two gods in this church.

Adam finally sat down on one of the pews. Laying his cheek against the smooth back of it, he looked at Ronan. Strangely enough, Ronan belonged here, too, just as he had at the Barns. This noisy, lush religion had created him just as much as his father's world of dreams; it seemed impossible for all of Ronan to exist in one person. Adam was beginning to realize that he hadn't known Ronan at all. Or rather, he had known part of him and assumed it was all of him. The scent of Cabeswater, all trees after rain, drifted past Adam, and he realized that while he'd been looking at Ronan, Ronan had been looking at him.

What an impossible and miraculous and hideous thing this was. An ugly plan hatched by an ugly boy now dreamt into ugly life. From dream to reality. How appropiate it was that Ronan, left to his own devices, manifested beautiful cars and beautiful birds and tenderhearted brothers, while Adam, when given the power, manifested a filthy string of perverse murders.

Adam retreated to sit beside Mary as Ronan stretched out on the pew, rubbing out the dingy plan with the legs of his jeans. Something about his stillness on the pew and the funereal quality of the light reminded Adam of the effigy of Glendower they'd seen at the tomb. A king, sleeping. Adam couldn't imagine, though, the strange, wild kingdom that Ronan might rule. "Stop watching me," Ronan said, though his eyes were closed.

Tamquam,’ said Adam. 'Wait,’ said Ronan. 'Tamquam,’ he said again, gently. 'Alter idem,’ Ronan said, and found himself alone.

Ronan hadn't known anything about who Adam was then and, if possible, he'd known even less about who he himself was, but as they drove away from the boy with the bicycle, this was how it had begun: Ronan leaning back against his seat and closing his eyes and sending up a simple, inexplicable, desperate prayer to God: Please.

Light, or something like light, reflected off it onto Ronan's chin and cheeks, rendering him stark and handsome and terrifying and someone else. Then he blew on it. His breath passed through the word, the mirror, the unwritten line. Adam heard a whisper in his ear. Something moved and stirred inside him. Ronan's eyelashes fluttered darkly. What are we doing -

I want it too much," Adam said. That sentence, Ronan thought, was enough to undo all bad feeling he might have had meeting Adam's Harvard friends, all bad feeling about looking like a loser, all bad feeling about feeling stuck, all bad feeling, ever. Adam Parrish wanted him, and he wanted Adam Parrish.

As they scuffled in the grass, Adam closed his eyes and leaned his head back. He could nearly scry just like this. The quiet and the cold breeze on his throat would take him away and the dampness of his toes in his shoes and the scent of living creatures would keep him here. Within and without. He couldn’t tell if he was letting himself idolize this place or Ronan, and he wasn’t sure there was a difference. When he opened his eyes, he saw that Ronan was looking at him, as he had been looking at him for months. Adam looked back, as he had been looking back for months.

It gave him the same vibe he used to get back at the Barns some nights, when he got trapped in one particular train of thought, where he imagined he and Adam had been together for a very long time and then Ronan died of old age or bad choices and Adam found someone else and later they all three were reunited in the afterlife, and rather than getting to spend the rest of eternity together, Adam had to split his time between Ronan and this stupid usurper he'd fallen in love with as a widower, which completely ruined the point of Heaven. And that was before Ronan even got to worrying if Adam made it to the afterlife at all, with his agnostic tendencies.