There are always cats around Charlie's, but they are usually refugees seeking asylum from the local rat population, and rather desperately friendly.

The train is roaring toward you and the villain is twirling his moustache and you're fussing that he's tied you to the tracks with the wrong kind of rope.

I wondered what you'd have on the side with a plate of Deep Fried Anxiety. Pickles? Coleslaw? Potato-strychnine mash?

The Lone Ranger of vampires. Did that make me Tonto?

Charlie is one of the big good guys in my universe.

I'd always had a guilty preference for fiction. Since I seemed now to be living fiction, this proved to have been an entirely reasonable choice.

Can you trust me, he said. Not will you. Can you.Can I trust him?What do I have to lose?

What this world doesn't have is the three-wishes, go-to-the-ball-and-meet-your-prince, happily-ever-after kind of magic. We have all the mangling and malevolent kinds. Who *invented* this system?

You can be a really nasty, selfish little jerk when you're scared enough. I was scared enough.

The most serious drawback to the telling-nothing approach is that it made that much more of a mystery of what had happened, and the nature of gossip abhors a vacuum of the unexplained.

When you're feeding the second coachload of tourists that day you aren't thinking about the birthday party for fifty next week.

Bloodthirsty little beasts. Never trust a duck.

My greatness shall never be measured by my actions or accomplishments, but rather by those of my son's guided by my teachings.

Don't listen to criticism, positive or negative. You just keep going forward.

Long-term meditators can have a biological age 5 to 12 years younger than their chronological age.

It takes close attention to see what is happening in front of you. It takes work, pious effort, to see what you are looking at.

I am, Sir, a brother of the angle.

As in the rankest soil the most beautiful flowers are grown, so in the dark soil of poverty the choicest flowers of humanity have developed and bloomed.

I'm terrified of growing up. Once you become an adult, how to you step back from that? It's something that wakes me up at night.

Men of quality are in the wrong to undervalue, as they often do, the practise of a fair and quick hand in writing; for it is no immaterial accomplishment.

When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse.