"There isn't any division of time to express the marrow of our lives, the time between the explosion of lead from the muzzle and the meat impact, between the impact and the darkness. There's only barren instant replay that shows nothing new. I shot her; she fell; and there was an indescribable moment of silence, an infinite duration of time, and we all stepped back, watching the ball go around and around, ticking, bouncing, lighting for an instant, going on, heads and tails, red and black, odd and even...I think that moment ended. I really do. But sometimes, in the dark, I think that hideous random moment is still going on, that the wheel is even yet in spin, and I dreamed all the rest. What must it be like for a suicide coming down from a high ledge? I'm sure it must be a very sane feeling. That's probably why they scream all the way down."

“French is the language that turns dirt into romance.”

“There was a perfunctory knock at the door, and then Rosalind stuck her head in, looking apologetic. "I'm sorry to disturb you, ma'am, but it's Fred Clark, asking to see you. He seems-" "Refresh me. Who is Fred Clark?" Mrs. Sigsby took off her reading glasses and rubbed the sides of her nose. "One of the janitors." "Find out what he wants and tell me later. If we've got mice chewing the wiring again, it can wait. I'm busy." "He says it's important, and he seems extremely upset." Mrs. Sigsby sighed, closed the folder, and put it in a drawer. "All right, send him in. But this had better be good." It wasn't. It was bad. Very.”

“In these silences, something may rise”

“Ninety-five percent of people who walk the earth are simply inert. One percent are saints, and one percent are assholes. The other three percent are people who do what they say they can do.”

“She stood and turned around and of course there was nothing there. But she could see him standing there, his hands jammed deep into his pockets, that easy, crooked grin on his pleasant-rather-than-handsome face, leaning lanky and at ease against a monument or one of the stone gateposts or maybe just a tree gone red with fall's dying fire.”

“The Tommyknockers is an awful book. That was the last one I wrote before I cleaned up my act. And I've thought about it a lot lately and said to myself, "There's really a good book in here, underneath all the sort of spurious energy that cocaine provides, and I ought to go back." The book is about 700 pages long, and I'm thinking, "There's probably a good 350-page novel in there.”