John Shirley on God

"God can't help most of the time. God can only put a little spin on the ball, offer a little help here and there, where conditions allow. A lot of wise men have said it's up to us to do God's work in the world ourselves. But now and then, when conditions allow, that divine influence -- I mean, I hesitate to use that word God, with all the old associations it has -- now and then that influence nudges us along, brings us together so we can help ourselves. We have to be alert to those possibilities."

John Shirley, Crawlers (2003)

It Stands to Reason

All of the following quotations taken from the World Book Night U.S. free edition of The Stand by Stephen King


"...people who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad."  -- Judge Farris, p. 1008

"You stare at your face in the mirror.  You stare at it for a long time. Five minutes, ten, fifteen. No fair blinking.  You watch with an intellectual sort of horror as your face changes, like the face of Lon Chaney, Jr., in a werewolf epic. You become a stranger to yourself, an olive-skinned Doppelganger, a psychotic Vampira with pale skin and fish-lit eyes."  --  One of Nadine's metaphors that almost describes the presence of the dark man, p. 1088

"They talk like people, [Glen Bateman] thought, who have kept the huddled-up secrets of their guilts and inadequacies to themselves for a long time, only to discover that these things, when verbalized, were only life-sized after all.  When the inner terror sowed in sleep was finally harvested in this marathon public discussion, the terror became more manageable...perhaps even conquerable." -- p. 1134

"You are to go west," Mother Abigail whispered.  "You are to take no food, no water.  You are to go this very day, and in the clothes you stand up in.  You are to go on foot.  I am in the way of knowing that one of you will not reach your destination, but I don't know which will be the one to fall.  I am in the way of knowing that the rest will be taken before this man Flagg, who is not a man at all but a supernatural being. I don't know if it's God's will for you to defeat him.  I don't know if it's God's will for you to ever see Boulder again.  Those things are not for me to see.  But he is in Las Vegas, and you must go there, and it is there that you will make your stand.  You will go, and you will not falter, because you will have the Everlasting Arm of the Lord God of Hosts to lean on. Yes. With God's help you will stand."  -- p. 1144

"Watching the words grow, letter by letter.  Watching the sentences grow, word by word. Watching the paragraphs grow, each one a brick in the great walled bulwark that was language.... The bricks of language. A stone, a leaf, an unfound door.  Words. Worlds. Magic. Life and immortality. Power....  Watching the letters improve as time passed.  Watching them connect with each other, printing left behind, writing now. Assembling thoughts and plots. That was the whole world, after all, nothing but thoughts and plots.  [Harold Lauder] had gotten a typewriter finally....  The typewriter unlocked the rest of it for him.  At first it was slow, so slow, and the constant typos were frustrating beyond belief.  It was as if the machine was actively -- but slyly -- opposing his will. But when he got better at it, he began to understand what the machine really was -- a kind of magic conduit between his brain and the blank page he strove to conquer." -- p. 1211

     "[Tom Cullen] stepped out into the courtyard of building without a backward glance.  The moon was so bright that he cast a shadow on the cracked cement where the would-be high rollers had once parked their cars with the out-of-state plates.
     "He looked up at the ghostly coin that floated in the sky.
     "M-O-O-N, that spells moon," he whispered.  "Laws, yes.  Tom Cullen knows what that means."
                                                                                                            -- p. 1244

What We All Share

"There comes a time when we realize that our parents cannot save themselves or save us, that everyone who wades through time eventually gets dragged out to sea by the undertow -- that, in short, we are all going."

--John Green, Looking for Alaska (2005)

Stephen King on Saying What Matters

"The most important things are the hardest to say because words diminish them.  It's hard to make strangers care about the good things in your life."

--from the novella "The Body" in the collection Different Seasons (1982)

Time in School

"I spent the next three hours in classrooms, trying not to look at the clocks above various blackboards, and then looking at the clocks, and then being amazed that only a few minutes had passed since I last looked at the clock. I'd had nearly four years of experience looking at these clocks, but their sluggishness never ceased to surprise. If I am ever told that I have one day to live, I will head straight for the hallowed halls of Winter Park High School, where a day has been known to last a thousand years."

--John Green, from Paper Towns (2008)

Two Thoughts on Memory

The way we get to live forever is through the memories stored in the hearts and souls of those whose lives we touch. That's our soul print. It's our comfort, our emotional nourishment at the end of the day and the end of a life. How wonderful that they are called up at will and savored randomly. It seems to me we should spend our lives in a conscious state of creating these meaningful moments that live on. Memories matter.

--Leeza Gibbons, TV personality
(From the side of a Starbucks cup: The Way I See It #292)


"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between a man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn cutter might just as well not been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime..."

"...Grandfather's been dead for all these years, but if you lifted my skull, by God, in the convolutions of my brain you'd find the big ridges of his thumbprint..."

--Granger, from Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

Harlan Ellison on 'The Mass'

[Substitute current politicians, current technologies, and current TV characters, and this 40-year-old article still perfectly applies to America in 2008.]

Walking the streets these days and nights are members of the Television Generation. Kids who were born with TV, were babysat by TV, were weaned on TV, dug TV and finally rejected TV. These kids are also, oddly enough, members of the first Peace Generation in history, members of the Revolution Generation that refuses to accept the possibility that if you don't use Nair on your legs you'll never get laid.

But their parents, the older folks, the ones who brought the world down whatever road it is that's put us in this place at this time -- they sit and watch situation comedies. Does this tell us something? Particularly in a week where prime-time was pre-empted for major political addresses by the gag-and-vomit boys, Humphrey and Nixon? It tells us that even in a year when the situation facing us is so politically bleak that optimists are readying their passports for Lichtenstein and pessimists are contemplating opening their veins, that the mass is still denying the facts of life. The mass is still living in a fairyland where occasionally a gripe or discouraging word is heard. The mass has packed its head with cotton. The mass has allowed its brains to be turned to lime jello. The mass sits and sucks its thumb and watches Lucy and Doris and Granny Clampett and the world burns around them.

It goes to something stronger than merely one's personal taste in television shows. It goes straight to the heart of an inescapable truth: if the world is going to be changed, gang, if we're going to find out where the eternal verities have gone, if we're going to rescue ourselves before the swine mass sends us unfeelingly and uncaringly down the trough to be slaughtered, we have to face it: they will not help us. They will applaud now that LBJ has stopped the bombing, but they see no inconsistency in having beaten and arrested all the clear-sighted protesters who said it three years ago, before how many thousands of innocent cats got their brains spilled? And now that what those protesters protested has come to pass, will they rise up and say free them, reinstate them, honor them?

We know the answer to that.

The answer is: they're too busy watching Gomer Pyle cavort around in a Marine Corps that never gets anywhere near jellied gasoline and burning babies.

Dear God, we must face the truth: for the mass in America today, the most powerful medium of education and information has become a surrogate of Linus's blue blanket.

A ghastly glass teat!


--Originally published in the Los Angeles Free Press, November 8, 1968, and later collected in the Ace edition (not the first, but the one I was still able to get a copy of) entitled The Glass Teat (1983)

Stephen King on The Difference Between Men and Boys

"Before drifting away entirely, he [Mark Petrie] found himself reflecting--not for the first time--on the peculiarity of adults. They took laxatives, liquor, or sleeping pills to drive away their terrors so that sleep would come, and their terrors were so tame and domestic: the job, the money, what the teacher will think if I can't get Jennie nicer clothes, does my wife still love me, who are my friends. They were pallid compared to the fears every child lies cheek and jowl with in his dark bed, with no one to confess to in hope of perfect understanding but another child. There is no group therapy or psychiatry or community social services for the child who must cope with the thing under the bed or in the cellar every night, the thing which leers and capers and threatens just beyond the point where vision will reach. The same lonely battle must be fought night after night and the only cure is the eventual ossification of the imaginary faculties, and this is called adulthood.

"In some shorter, simpler mental shorthand, these thoughts passed through his brain. The night before, Matt Burke had faced such a dark thing and had been stricken by a heart seizure brought on by fright; tonight Mark Petrie had faced one, and ten minutes later lay in the lap of sleep, the plastic cross still grasped loosely in his right hand like a child's rattle. Such is the difference between men and boys."

--From 'Salem's Lot (1975)

Ray Bradbury's Great 'Medicine'

"The great 'medicine' was finding that we were alive and loving it. We have celebrated every day of our lives. The celebration, the exhilaration, of worshipping the gift, has kept us young. Does that sound impossible? By simply knowing you're alive and looking at the sun and enjoying the weather and speaking it every moment of your existence, this ensures our longevity. We live every moment of our existence to the fullest, and that is superb medicine. In that way we refuse the darkness. Now think of what I've said and tell me about your future."

--From the novella Somewhere a Band is Playing, as contained in the book entitled Now and Forever (2007)

Why Sweeping Educational Reform That Involves More Testing Will Never Work

It’s relationships, not programs, that change children. A great program simply creates the environment for healthy relationships to form between adults and children. Young people thrive when adults care about them on a one-to-one level, and when they also have a sense of belonging to a caring community.

-- Bill Milliken
Founder and vice chairman of Communities in Schools, author of Tough Love and The Last Dropout.

(Discovered on the side of a coffee cup at Starbucks)