the Coffee & a Book Chick

“I know where I stand now,” he said, looking with friendly eyes from one of the police-detectives to the other. “I’m sorry I got up on my hind legs, but you birds coming in and trying to put the work on me made me nervous. Having Miles knocked off bothered me, and then you birds cracking foxy. That’s all right now, though, now that I know what you’re up to.”

Sam Spade (P.21)

Lisey opens her arms and lets it fall. The sound it makes is only the softest sigh (like the arguments against insanity falling into some ultimate basement), but the long boy hears it. She feels a shift in the rowing direction of its unknowable thoughts; feels the hideous pressure of its insane regard. One of the trees snaps with an explosive rending noise as the thing over there begins to turn, and she closes her eyes again and sees the guest room as clearly as she has ever seen anything in her life, sees it with desperate intensity, and through a perfect magnifyng lens of terror.

The last word might be Canada, probably is, but there’s no way to tell for sure because by then she’s lost in the land of sleep and he is too, and when they go there they never go together, and she is afraid that is also a preview of death, a place where there may be dreams but never love, never home, never a hand to hold yours when squadrons of birds flock across the burnt-orange sun at the close of the day.

(p. 264)

She hadn’t planned what she was going to say. This was in accordance with another of Landon’s Rules: you only planned out what you were going to say for disagreements. When you were really angry - when you wanted to tear someone a new asshole, as the saying was - it was usually best to just rare back and let it rip.

There is one thing at least that she can’t find out on the Internet, and that is the nature of my own undetected crime. That is not to say that my secret is safe. Far from it. There are things that could happen, potential emergencies that could force the facts blinking and unwilling into the light. Time does not lessen the odds in my favor. If anything, it becomes more likely every day as she grows up. What will happen if I am found out? I don’t even know what law I have broken, but I must have, it must be illegal. And how would they punish me? What punishment could be worse than the knowledge I live with every single day?

(pg.167)

But my sins are my strength, he thinks; the sins I have done, that others have not even found the opportunity of committing. I hug them close; they’re mine. Besides, when I come to judgment I mean to come with a memorandum in my hand: I shall say to my Maker, I have fifty items here, possibly more.

(pg. 568)

The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase, a woman’s sigh as she passes and leaves on the air a trail of orange flower or rose water; her hand pulling close the bed curtain, the discreet sigh of flesh against flesh.

(pg. 566)