Home > Work > 77 Shadow Street (Pendleton, #1)
1 " I am the One, and I see all.But the blind man in Apartment 1-A is blind in many ways, as are all human beings, even those with functioning eyes. They are blind to their folly, to their ignorance, to their history, to the future that they will make for themselves. A future born of self-loathing. "
― , 77 Shadow Street (Pendleton, #1)
2 " Either the gates of hell had opened, or Tom had lost his mind; for there could be nothing like this entity outside the precincts of the damned, except in the fevered fantasies of a raving paranoid psychopath "
3 " Being a bad guy was easy, being a hero was hard. "
4 " Winny had learned from books... you had to be tested in life to discover who you were and what you were capable of doing. Hopeless sissy, noble warrior, maniac - he could be anything, and he wouldn't know until he was tested. One thing he could never be was Santa Claus. Nobody could be Santa Claus. Santa Claus wasn't real like the FedEx guy. "
5 " And the funny thing was if you made the best of it, if you smiled through every storm, the bad things were never as terrible as you expected them to be, and the good things were better than anything you could have wished for yourself. "
6 " Maybe the one dangerous thing about reading a library's worth of books was the way your imagination got pumped up like a bodybuilder on steroids. "
7 " Falling in love could be like falling off a cliff, no water below but plenty of rocks. "
8 " Winny didn't know what he would do without his books, except probably go berserk and start killing people and making ashtrays out of their skulls even though he didn't smoke and never would. "
9 " Imminent death didn't terrify her as much as did the prospect of having lived a life in perpetual retreat, a life that would amount now to so much less than she'd ever hoped,... "
10 " Simplify, simplify. That was the secret to a happy life. "
11 " The singing wasn't the hopscotch-jumprope-happy kind. This was the kind of singing that, if you tracked it to its source, you might find a little girl in a moldy old burial dress, her skin pitted & green, with lots of coffin splinters & dirt between her teeth......like a mermaid luring idiot sailors...Winny wasn't a sailor, & he wasn't old enough to get all sexed up by some hot siren. "
12 " The way Winny saw it, the best thing and the worst thing were the same thing: nothing lasted ... what to say and felt you didn't belong anywhere, books were a way to lead another life, a way to be someone else entirely, to be anyone at all. "
13 " Fear is the engine that drives the human animal. Humanity sees the world as a place of uncountable threats, and so the world becomes what humanity imagines it to be. They not only live in fear but use fear to control one another. Fearmongering is their true religion. "
14 " To you of great faith, I am the product of your wisdom and the guarantor of your immortality. "
15 " Death was everywhere, he was legion, and you couldn't escape his attention, but in some places he manifested in greater numbers than in others. "
16 " I don’t know whether to call a medical doctor or psychiatrist,” she said to Bailey, “but I refuse to call an exorcist. "
17 " He needed some aromatherapy to clear his mind. He needed some time in the sauna. He felt stupid. He had never before felt stupid. His mother said stupidity should be a capital offense, except with so many stupid people everywhere you looked, there wouldn’t be enough steel in the world to build all the necessary guillotine blades or enough executioners to operate them. "
18 " I am the One, the all and the only. I live in the Pendleton as surely as I live everywhere. I am the Pendleton’s history and its destiny. The building is my place of conception, my monument, my killing ground. "
19 " Variety is not the spice of life. It is the mother of disorder. Individuality is not the hallmark of freedom. It is the essence of decadence. Freedom is slavery to chaos. Unity is peace, all thinking and acting as one. "
20 " Sometimes truth was elusive... "
