Quotes from Robert Masello

pavement of the street as the boy draped the strip of gleaming tinfoil around his neck and

taking the samples, we'd be better off. The drill could get snagged." Slater knew she was right, but it was

How long, he wondered, could such a thread endure in a world filled with scissors? CHAPTER NINE Wally was the superstitious sort, and although he was always glad to have a little extra money for overtime, he wasn't

What do you teach?" "Art history." From Taylor's expression, this made little sense.

Rebecca West would not be a passing fancy; she would assume a leading role in his life—he could feel it in his bones—and was he ready for that?

If you had never seen war up close, it was an easy thing to be brave and bellicose about it. But if you had, it was hard not to despair.

If you have it within your powers to summon the devil, why not summon angels instead?' Though

Gutzon Borglum, the man most famous for sculpting Mount Rushmore.

I do not know how the Third World War will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth—rocks." —Albert Einstein, in an interview with Alfred Werner for Liberal Judaism (1949)

the knife out and searching for the old woman in the

nor any special purpose, for a Divinity. Mankind had made it all up out of whole cloth because, at bottom, everyone was afraid of the dark, afraid of ultimate extinction, afraid to face the fact that individual lives meant nothing in the grand scheme

What none of these faiths—even the Hindu—did was doubt for one moment the existence of dark spirits, or their ability to jump from one living presence to another. Demons were considered parasites, infinitely malleable and indefatigable, hitchhikers of the soul, and as she read, Simone could see that her father had been trying to unify all this material in some way, with many arrows and notes and cross-references.

No, the reason he didn't fear death was because he had accepted his place—minuscule as an atom, insignificant as a mayfly—in a mystery and a miracle beyond full comprehension.

Einstein appealed to humanity's higher instincts, asking the world to ignore its petty differences and quarrels in quest of wisdom and happiness instead. "If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise," he predicted. "If you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.

rising from the desert, like a pillar of fire, burning the eyes of those who behold it and laying waste to all that lives upon the earth and to all that ever will, unto the tenth generation." Again, there was a missing phrase or two, followed by, "And even the clouds shall burn.

On many a night, as he hung his coat and hat on the rack in the vestibule, he felt that rather than coming home, he was checking into a small, elegant, but cold hotel.

What none of these faiths—even the Hindu—did was doubt for one moment the existence of dark spirits, or their ability to jump from one living presence to another. Demons were considered parasites, infinitely malleable and indefatigable, hitchhikers of the soul, and as she read,

Although Dr. Levinson had spoken with a touch of hyperbole, Slater soon discovered that she'd meant what she said. He was instructed to draw up a game plan and risk assessment, a preliminary budget (though Dr. Levinson had made it clear on his way out that cost was to be no object), put together a team of whatever specialists he would require, and have it all on her desk in seventy-two hours.

Nor could I forget my role in the terrible changes that had overtaken him. We shook hands in a manly fashion, and then under Fanny's approving eye, embraced. In my heart, I have always felt a powerful urge towards forgiveness, coupled with the conviction that time can alter anyone, for good or ill. I was prepared to believe that the Lloyd I knew, serial impostor and unwanted suitor, was a new and different man.

a corpse was merely an empty vessel for the spirit it had housed. "The soul," he'd said one night by a campfire in the Valley of the Kings, "is like a falcon. Despite its loyalty to the falconer, it longs to fly free. When my time comes, let my soul soar into the wind and the sky. Wherever its natural home is meant to be, that's where it will go.

Berlin in particular had once been a thinking man's paradise, though now, to Einstein's horror—indeed, to the horror of the entire civilized world—all of Germany had become a bastion of willful ignorance and unequalled brutality. The

As part of a clandestine advance guard, their route was perilously unprotected. Lucas was glad to have Toussaint watching his back. Soldiering was in the private's blood, but it wasn't in Lucas's. He'd been diverted from the infantry into the CRC, the Cultural Recovery Commission, a minuscule cadre of experts in art and architecture, recruited and dispatched to find, preserve, and protect the treasures that the Nazis had looted so far in their conquest of Europe. In

become a bastion of willful ignorance

If you had never seen war up close, it was an easy thing to be brave and bellicose about it. But if you had, it was hard not to despair. What men could wantonly do to each other, in the name of nation