Quotes from Jack Ketchum

You could grow up every which way, a tree standing tall and straight in an open field or blasted and twisted on the side of a mountain.

Good ol' boys could be pushed. Wolves could be made to snap. It was time he started pushing.

You don't carry it around with you like a sackful of cinders.

He was the product of what his father had taught him to be, who in turn was the product of what his father had taught him to be and she wondered how far back in sheer misogyny and greed the Cleeks actually went.  She had married blind into this, impressed by his self-possession as a teenager, even more impressed by him in bed — or in fact for the first year or so, in the back seat of his father's Caddy.  Her first and only lover.

The anesthetic was amazing. His eyes flickered down and he could see his own organs beneath the film of welling blood, his lungs, his heart, and below them his diaphragm, stomach, liver. Yet there was no pain. He felt only an itch around his collarbone and a strange cold feeling, like drinking crushed ice in a tall summer drink-so cold you could feel it all the way down inside you.

She had never met an actor who wasn't utterly dim

Pain can work from the outside in.

How do the angels get to sleep When the devil leaves the porch light on? —Tom Waits

What you had in Florida was just heat. Heat that was fine and pleasant about a third of the time, a little uncomfortable about a third of the time, and a third of the time like walking through steam. Like walking through clouds of your own sweat.

She knew it happened, but now that it had happened and to people near her, she couldn't even absorb it enough to fear it thoroughly.

It was strange how, when there was nothing else in your life, sex was everything.

Up here, if they found them, they were helpless. People don't look up, she thought. Melissa was sleeping now, but what if she woke and cried?

The soul under the burden of sin cannot flee." —Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn