Donald Trumbo
- Johnny Got His Gun
You can always hear the people who are willing to sacrifice somebody else's life. They're plenty loud and they talk all the time. You can find them in churches and schools and newspapers and legislatures and congresses. That's their business. They sound wonderful. Death before dishonor. This ground sanctified by blood. These men who died so gloriously. They shall not have died in vain. Our noble dead.
Paulina Simons
- The Bronze Horseman
Dear Pasha, she thought, we lost you and we didn't even know it. That's the saddest loss of all, to go on for a few weeks, a few days, a night, a minute, and think everything is still all right when the structure you've built your life on has crumbled. We should have been mourning you, but instead we made plans, went to work, dreamed, loved, not knowing you were already behind us.
Matt Ruff
- Lovecraft Country
An experienced natural philosopher might hope to survive exposure to the unfiltered light of creation, but Atticus would be annihilated by it. Stripped of identity, of everything that made him Atticus: not just unmanned, but unnamed.
Stephen King
- The Gunslinger
She stared at him, the anger dying. It was replaced with speculation, then with a high, wet gleam that he had seen before. The rickety building ticked thoughtfully to itself. A dog barked brayingly, far away. The gunslinger waited. She saw his knowledge and the gleam was replaced by hopelessness, by a dumb need that had no mouth.
Stephen King
- Revival
"It's wicked to wish time away," my mother used to lecture us as kids - usually when we were pining for summer vacation in the depths of February, or waiting for Halloween to hurry up and come - and probably she was right, but I can't help thinking that such temporal jumps might be a good thing for people living bad lives, and between the advent of the Reagan administration in 1980 and the Tulsa State Fair in 1992, I was living a very bad life.
