Robert Mccammon Quotes

After years of having a dog, you know him. You know the meaning of his snuffs and grunts and barks. Every twitch of the ears is a question or statement, every wag of the tail is an exclamation.

Maybe crazy is what they call anybody who's got magic in them after they're no longer a child.

They say that somewhere in Africa the elephants have a secret grave where they go to lie down, unburden their wrinkled gray bodies, and soar away, light spirits at the end.

Once upon a time, man had a love affair with fire.

See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand.

Even the most worthless thing in the world can be beautiful, it just takes the right touch

I understood then what courage is all about. It is loving someone else more than you love yourself.

The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them good, some of them not so good. Things happen to us. Loved ones die. People get in wrecks and get crippled. People lose their way, for one reason or another. It's not hard to do, in this world of crazy mazes. Life itself does its best to take that memory of magic away from us. You don't know its happening until one day you feel you've lost something but you're not sure what it is. It's like smiling at a pretty girl and she calls you 'sir'. It just happens.

No one ever grows up. They may look grown-up, but it's just the clay of time. Men and women are still children deep in their hearts." Mrs. Neville

If you were my girlfriend I would give you a hundred lightning bugs in a green glass jar, so you could always see your way. I would give you a meadow full of wildflowers, where no two blooms would ever be alike. I would give you my bicycle, with its golden eye to protect you. I would write a story for you, and make you a princess who lived in a white marble castle. If you would only like me, I would give you magic. If you would only like me.

You know, I do believe in magic. I was born and raised in a magic time, in a magic town, among magicians. Oh, most everybody else didn’t realize we lived in that web of magic, connected by silver filaments of chance and circumstance. But I knew it all along. When I was twelve years old, the world was my magic lantern, and by its green spirit glow I saw the past, the present and into the future. You probably did too; you just don’t recall it. See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God’s sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they’d allowed to wither in themselves. After you go so far away from it, though, you can’t really get it back. You can have seconds of it. Just seconds of knowing and remembering. When people get weepy at movies, it’s because in that dark theater the golden pool of magic is touched, just briefly. Then they come out into the hard sun of logic and reason again and it dries up, and they’re left feeling a little heartsad and not knowing why. When a song stirs a memory, when motes of dust turning in a shaft of light takes your attention from the world, when you listen to a train passing on a track at night in the distance and wonder where it might be going, you step beyond who you are and where you are. For the briefest of instants, you have stepped into the magic realm. That’s what I believe. The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them good, some of them not so good. Things happen to us. Loved ones die. People get in wrecks and get crippled. People lose their way, for one reason or another. It’s not hard to do, in this world of crazy mazes. Life itself does its best to take that memory of magic away from us. You don’t know it’s happening until one day you feel you’ve lost something but you’re not sure what it is. It’s like smiling at a pretty girl and she calls you “sir.” It just happens. These memories of who I was and where I lived are important to me. They make up a large part of who I’m going to be when my journey winds down. I need the memory of magic if I am ever going to conjure magic again. I need to know and remember, and I want to tell you.

I had always wondered what Reverend Lovoy meant when he talked about "grace." I understood it now. It was being able to give up something that it broke your heart to lose, and be happy about it.

See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God's sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they'd allowed to wither in themselves.

I'd like to be everybody in the world' I said. 'I'd like to live a million times.' 'Well'--and here my father gave one of his sagely nods--'that would be a fine piece of magic, wouldn't it?

Put one foot forward and the other will get you to where you are going~!" Bag Lady, Swan Song

Many times you will fail. That is the nature of the world, and the truth of life. But when you find your horse again, will go back or will you go forward?

It was a feeling in the crisp twilight air; it was a hush across the hills. The ghosts were gathering themselves, building up their strength to wander the fields of October and speak to those who would listen.

One Step...and then the next gets you where you're going." - Sister Creep

...the magic place of soul-soothing dreams, where the silken sheen of polished glass under soft lights made her think of how lovely Heaven was going to be.

... some wounds refuse the remedy of time.

My father could throw up a fistful of dice to make a decision, but my mother had an agony for every hour. I guess they balanced, as two people who love each other should.

Rain fell on the roofs of the just and the unjust, the saints and the sinners, those who knew peace and those in torment, and tomorrow began at a dark hour.

Don’t be in a hurry to grow up. Hold on to being a boy as long as you can, because once you lose that magic, you’re always begging to find it again.

Twas said better to light a candle than curse the dark...

Right." He smiled bitterly. "Well, look around. Just look. Have you ever considered the possibility that God might be insane?

When you look at something, don’t just look. See it. Really, really see it. See it so when you write it down, somebody else can see it, too.

The same river can never be crossed twice. The flowing water has no memory of footprints.

Death cannot be known. It cannot be befriended. If Death were a boy, he would be a lonely figure, standing at the playground’s edge while the air rippled with other children’s laughter. If Death were a boy, he would walk alone. He would speak in a whisper and his eyes would be haunted by knowledge no human can bear.

This was a dank, sinister chill: the chill of shadows where poison toadstools grown, their ruddy colors beckoning a child to come, come take a taste of candy.

...just shattered structures rising up like rotten teeth from a diseased jaw.

It’s not right,” he said, “to hate somethin’ just for bein’ alive.

Friends. They really know how to knock you off your pedestal, don’t they?

Seems to me a writer gets to hold a lot of keys,” she said. “Gets to visit a lot of worlds and live in a lot of skins. Seems to me a writer has a chance to live forever, if he’s good and if he’s lucky.

...he was a scream wrapped up in straw, a little, weak, vicious thing gnashing inside a monstrous facade...

But life is just as much pain and mess as it is joy and order. Probably a lot more mess than order, too.

I guess you never know what a person can do until that person has to do it.

It’s funny, sometimes, when you look at the people who brought you into this world and you see yourself so clearly in them.

take it one step at a time. One step and then the next gets you where you’re going.

The thing about pain is, it teaches you humility

It is a contradiction this creek- a hundred thousand years old but renewed with each rainfall.

I couldn't picture heaven. How could a place be any good at all if it didn't have the things there you enjoyed doing? If there were no comic books, no monster movies, no bikes, and no country roads to ride them on? No swimming pools, no ice cream, no summer, or barbecue on the Fourth of July? No thunderstorms, and front porches on which to sit and watch them coming? Heaven sounded to me like a library that only held books about one certain subject, yet you had to spend eternity and eternity and eternity reading them. What was heaven without typewriter paper and a magic box?

as she’d watched him stagger away Swan had realized that forgiveness crippled evil, drew the poison from it like lancing a boil.

...hot shouts of neon...

God has a sense of humor that gets my goat sometimes.

Hold onto the magic of being a boy(...) once you lose it you are always begging to find it again.

A ninety-two-year-old man has to open a lot of locks to recall a day when he was nine years old.

It seemed to me at an early age that all human communication — whether it’s TV, movies, or books — begins with somebody wanting to tell a story. That need to tell, to plug into a universal socket, is probably one of our grandest desires. And the need to hear stories, to live lives other than our own for even the briefest moment, is the key to the magic that was born in our bones. The

If you make friends with pain, you have a friend for life.

Maybe crazy is what they call anybody who’s got magic in them after they’re no longer a child.

...and his bones were a cage of ice.

Seems to me if a person loses the past, he can’t find the future either.

All life isn't hearts and flowers. But life is just as much pain and mess as it is joy and order, too. I guess when you make yourself realize that you.. .start growing up - Boy's Life

Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, The lady of situations. Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel, And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card, Which is blank, is something he carries on his back, Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.

The thing about adults is, when you want them to pay attention to you and intervene, their minds are worlds away; when you want them to be worlds away, they’re sitting on the back of your neck.

Trouble is, at my age, most all my dreams are reruns.

No doubt about it, summer was on the wane. The mornings seemed a shade cooler. The nights were hungry, and ate more daylight.

Sometimes thinking gets in the way of doing.

And the need to hear stories, to live lives other than our own for even the briefest moment, is the key to the magic that was born in our bones.

I believe music is the language of youth, and the more you can accept as being valid, the younger your attitude gets.

But who ever said everybody gets a happy ending?

All hate does is breed more hate.

I realized all prisons were not buildings of gray rock bordered by guard towers and barbed wire. Some prisons were houses whose closed blinds let no sunlight enter. Some prisons were cages of fragile bones, and some prisons had bars of red polka dots. In fact, you could never tell what might be a prison until you’d had a glimpse of what was seized and bound inside.

There are things much worse than monster movies. There are horrors that burst the bounds of screen and page, and come home all twisted up and grinning behind the face of somebody you love.

You know, no mistake in the world can’t be fixed. All it takes is wantin’ to fix it. Sometimes it’s hard, though. Sometimes it hurts to fix a mistake, but you have to do it no matter what.

I couldn’t understand how one human bein’ could do that to another. I couldn’t understand that kind of hate. I mean … what road do you take to get there? What is it that has to get inside you and twist your soul so much you can take a human life as easily as flickin’ a fly?

We ran like young wild furies, where angels feared to tread. The woods were dark and deep. Before us demons fled. We checked Coke bottle bottoms to see how far was far. Our worlds of magic wonder were never reached by car. We loved our dogs like brothers, our bikes like rocket ships. We were going to the stars, to Mars we'd make round trips. We swung on vines like Tarzan, and flashed Zorro's keen blade. We were James Bond in his Aston, we were Hercules unchained. We looked upon the future and we saw a distant land, where our folks were always ageless, and time was shifting sand. We filled up life with living, with grins, scabbed knees, and noise. In glass I see an older man, but this book's for the boys.

God A’mighty, what’s the point of livin’ if you don’t fight for what you hold dear?

I had a dog named Jesus once. I crucified him, but he didn't come back to life. Before he died, he told me what to do to the people in the brick house. Off went their heads.

Johnny James was sitting on the front porch, sipping from a glass of gasoline in the December heat, when the doom-screamer came.

But I think parents aren't teachers anymore. Parents -- or a whole lot of us, at least -- lead by mouth instead of by example. It seems to me that if a child's hero is their mother or father -- or even better, both of them in tandem -- then the rough road of learning and experience is going to be smoothed some. And every little bit of smoothing helps, in this rough old world that wants children to be miniature adults, devoid of charm and magic and the beauty of innocence.

There was lightning behind Mr. Sayre's eyes, and it was looking for a place to strike.

That’s one problem about relating events in first person. The reader knows the narrator didn’t get killed.

I don’t — ” “Understand,” the Lady finished for her. “I know you don’t. Sometimes I don’t either. But I know the language of pain, Miz Mackenson. I grew up speakin’ it.

THERE IS NOTHING MORE frightening or exciting than a blank piece of paper.

She looked like the daughter of a marriage between ice and fire.

It was hell's season, and the air smelled of burning children

Writer? Author? Storyteller, that’s what I decided to be.

I wanted no souvenirs of tragedy.

Who on this earth can know where they’re going, unless they have a map of where they’ve been?

Bein’ used to somethin’,” Davy Ray answered, “is not the same as likin’ it.

Something inside her brain cracked like a funhouse mirror that existed only to reflect a distorted world,

So before long we had a sensible fire going, the firepit rimmed with stones as my dad had told me to do, and by its ruddy light we three frontiersmen ate the sandwiches our mothers had made.

But my parents had taught me that everybody deserved respect, no matter if they were pansies or not, and to tell the truth, I was nothing to write home about in the physical looks department.

They may look grown-up,” she continued, “but it’s a disguise. It’s just the clay of time. Men and women are still children deep in their hearts. They still would like to jump and play, but that heavy clay won’t let them. They’d like to shake off every chain the world’s put on them, take off their watches and neckties and Sunday shoes and return naked to the swimming hole, if just for one day. They’d like to feel free, and know that there’s a momma and daddy at home who’ll take care of things and love them no matter what. Even behind the face of the meanest man in the world is a scared little boy trying to wedge himself into a corner where he can’t be hurt.

Boys want to hurry up and be men, and then comes a day they wish they could be boys again. But I’ll tell you a secret, Cory. Want to hear it?” I nodded. “No one,” Mrs. Neville whispered, “ever grows up.

...that in this town prostitutes may give sewing lessons to ladies of the church, pirates my be consulted for their opinions on seaworth by shipbuilders, Christians and Jews may stroll together on a Sunday, and Indians my play dice games with leatherstockings, but let one silver piece fall in a crack between two members of the same profession and it's bloody war.

In later years I would think that no woman’s lips had ever been as red as that bike. No low-slung foreign sports car with wire wheels and purring engine would ever look as powerful or as capable as that bike. No chrome would ever gleam with such purity, like the silver moon on a summer’s night.

It seemed to Billy that no matter how far you walked, you never really got to the end of things.

The sharp white steeple of the Hawthorne First Baptist Church stuck up through the leafless trees like an admonishing finger.

Where you live ain’t important,” he said. “It’s what … lives in you.

To my mother, the world was a vast quilt whose stitches were always coming undone. Her worrying somehow worked like a needle, tightening those dangerous seams. If she could imagine events through to their worst tragedy, then she seemed to have some kind of control over them.

There is something about nature out of control that touches a primal terror. We are used to believing that we’re the masters of our domain, and that God has given us this earth to rule over. We need this illusion like a good night-light. The truth is more fearsome: we are as frail as young trees in tornadoes, and our beloved homes are one flood away from driftwood. We plant our roots in trembling earth, we live where mountains rose and fell and prehistoric seas burned away in mist. We and the towns we have built are not permanent; the earth itself is a passing train. When you stand in muddy water that is rising toward your waist and you hear people shouting against the darkness and see their figures struggling to hold back the currents that will not be denied, you realize the truth of it: we will not win, but we cannot give up.

Here is my room, in the yellow lamplight and the space heater rumbling: Indian rug red as Cochise's blood, a desk with seven mystic drawers, a chair covered in material as velvety blue-black as Batman's cape, an aquarium holding tiny fish so pale you could see their hearts beat, the aforementioned dresser covered with decals from Revell model airplane kits, a bed with a quilt sewn by a relative of Jefferson Davis's, a closet, and the shelves, oh, yes, the shelves. The troves of treasure. On those shelves are stacks of me: hundreds of comic books- Justice League, Flash, Green Lantern, Batman, the Spirit, Blackhawk, Sgt. Rock and Easy Company, Aquaman, and the Fantastic Four... The shelves go on for miles and miles. My collection of marbles gleams in a mason jar. My dried cicada waits to sing again in the summer. My Duncan yo-yo that whistles except the string is broken and Dad's got to fix it.

What would describe it? What word in the English language would speak of youth and hope and freedom and desire, of sweet wanderlust and burning blood? What word describes the brotherhood of buddies, and the feeling that as long as the music plays, you are part of that tough, rambling breed who will inherit the earth?

Remember everything and anything. Don't you go through a day without remembering something of it, and tucking that memory away like a treasure. Because it is. and memories are sweet doors, Cory. They're teachers and friends and disciplinarians. When you look at something don't just look. See it. Really, really see it. See it so when you write it down, somebody else can see it too.

Jesus Christ was as perfect as a human bein’ can be, yet he got mad and fought and wept and had days of feelin’ like he couldn’t go on another step. Like when the lepers and the sick folks almost trampled him down, all of ’em beggin’ for miracles and doggin’ him till he was about miracled out. What I’m sayin’, Mr. Mackenson, is that even Jesus Christ needed help sometimes, and he wasn’t too proud to ask for it.

His hair was think and curly and reddish-brown, his eyes a clear ice blue; Ramona had told him many times that she could see the sky in them, clouds when he was angry and rain when he was sad. Now, if she had looked into his eyes closely enough, she might've seen the approaching storm.

I was never afraid of my monsters. I controlled them. I slept with them in the dark, and they never stepped beyond their boundaries. My monsters had never asked to be bora with bolts in their necks, scaly wings, blood hunger in their veins, or deformed faces from which beautiful girls shrank back in horror. My monsters were not evil; they were simply trying to survive in a tough old world. They reminded me of myself and my friends: ungainly, unlovely, beaten but not conquered. They were the outsiders searching for a place to belong in a cataclysm of villagers’ torches, amulets, crucifixes, silver bullets, radiation bombs, air force jets, and flamethrowers. They were imperfect, and heroic in their suffering.

Grigsby had looked at him askance. “Why is it,” he said, “that I have the distinct impression you’re not surprised by this news?” ‘Surprised by the fact that the reverend is first and foremost a human being? Surprised by the fact that every human being, reverend or ribald, can be undone by capricious circumstances? Or should I be surprised by the fact that a man who teaches love and forgiveness can love and forgive? Tell me, Marmy, exactly what it is I should be surprised at?

It’s 1991. Can you believe it? We’re poised on the edge of a new century, for better or worse. I guess we’ll all make up our own minds which. The year 1964 seems like ancient history now. The Polaroids taken in that year have turned yellow. No one wears their hair like that anymore, and the clothes have changed. People have changed, too, I think. Not just in the South, but everywhere. For better or worse? You can decide for yourself. And what we and the world have been through since 1964! Think of it! It’s been a faster, more brain-busting ride than ever could be devised by the Brandywine Carnival. We’ve lived through Vietnam — if we’ve been fortunate — and the era of Flower Power, Watergate and the fall of Nixon, the Ayatollah, Ronnie and Nancy, the cracking of the Wall and the beginning of the end of Communist Russia. We truly are living in the time of whirlwinds and comets. And like rivers that flow to the sea, time must flow into the future. It boggles the mind to think what might be ahead. But, as the Lady once said, you can’t know where you’re going until you figure out where you’ve been. Sometimes I think we have a lot of figuring out to do.