Robert McCammon Quotes

Even the most worthless thing in the world can be beautiful, it just takes the right touch

Trouble is, at my age, most all my dreams are reruns.

Rain fell on the roofs of the just and the unjust, the saints and the sinners, those who knew peace and those in torment, and tomorrow began at a dark hour.

Here is my room, in the yellow lamplight and the space heater rumbling: Indian rug red as Cochise's blood, a desk with seven mystic drawers, a chair covered in material as velvety blue-black as Batman's cape, an aquarium holding tiny fish so pale you could see their hearts beat, the aforementioned dresser covered with decals from Revell model airplane kits, a bed with a quilt sewn by a relative of Jefferson Davis's, a closet, and the shelves, oh, yes, the shelves. The troves of treasure. On those shelves are stacks of me: hundreds of comic books- Justice League, Flash, Green Lantern, Batman, the Spirit, Blackhawk, Sgt. Rock and Easy Company, Aquaman, and the Fantastic Four ... The shelves go on for miles and miles. My collection of marbles gleams in a mason jar. My dried cicada waits to sing again in the summer. My Duncan yo-yo that whistles except the string is broken and Dad's got to fix it.

Remember everything and anything. Don't you go through a day without remembering something of it, and tucking that memory away like a treasure. Because it is. and memories are sweet doors, Cory. They're teachers and friends and disciplinarians. When you look at something don't just look. See it. Really, really see it. See it so when you write it down, somebody else can see it too.

You never know how things are gonna turn out, though, and that's the truth. You aim for one place, sure as an arrow, but before you hit the mark, the wind gets you. I don't believe I ever met one person who became what they wanted to be when they were your age." "I'd like to be everybody in the world," I said. "I'd like to live a million times.

Don't blow up the world till Sunday," Josh said through a mouthful of doughnut. "I've got to collect my paycheck first." Every

I tell you, shoes are important! Where would people be without shoes? Now,

Don't be in a hurry to grow up. Hold on to being a boy as long as you can, because once you lose that magic, you're always begging to find it again.

I'd like to be everybody in the world' I said. 'I'd like to live a million times.'
'Well'
and here my father gave one of his sagely nods
'that would be a fine piece of magic, wouldn't it?

I wanted no souvenirs of tragedy.

But life is just as much pain and mess as it is joy and order. Probably a lot more mess than order, too.

I understood then what courage is all about. It is loving someone else more than you love yourself.

My lip healed. So did my head. My pride stayed bruised, though, and my confidence was fractured. Those injuries, the ones that didn't show, I would have to live with.

They may look grown-up," she continued, "but it's a disguise. It's just the clay of time. Men and women are still children deep in their hearts. They still would like to jump and play, but that heavy clay won't let them. They'd like to shake off every chain the world's put on them, take off their watches and neckties and Sunday shoes and return naked to the swimming hole, if just for one day. They'd like to feel free, and know that there's a momma and daddy at home who'll take care of things and love them no matter what. Even behind the face of the meanest man in the world is a scared little boy trying to wedge himself into a corner where he can't be hurt.

The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them good, some of them not so good. Things happen to us. Loved ones die. People get in wrecks and get crippled. People lose their way, for one reason or another. It's not hard to do, in this world of crazy mazes. Life itself does its best to take that memory of magic away from us. You don't know its happening until one day you feel you've lost something but you're not sure what it is. It's like smiling at a pretty girl and she calls you 'sir'. It just happens.

It was a feeling in the crisp twilight air; it was a hush across the hills. The ghosts were gathering themselves, building up their strength to wander the fields of October and speak to those who would listen.

Josh Hutchins's battered old Pontiac gave a wheeze like an old man with phlegm in his lungs.

Just seconds of knowing and remembering. When people get weepy at movies, it's because in that dark theater the golden pool of magic is touched, just briefly.

We all three were struck with the kind of horror that makes you want to dig a hole, jump in, and pull the hole in after you.

Just shattered structures rising up like rotten teeth from a diseased jaw.

That in this town prostitutes may give sewing lessons to ladies of the church, pirates my be consulted for their opinions on seaworth by shipbuilders, Christians and Jews may stroll together on a Sunday, and Indians my play dice games with leatherstockings, but let one silver piece fall in a crack between two members of the same profession and it's bloody war.

Writer? Author? Storyteller, that's what I decided to be.

Hold onto the magic of being a boy( ... ) once you lose it you are always begging to find it again.

This was not Mr. Sears talking, not really; this was the voice of what the flask flayed raw and bloody inside his soul, what it stomped and kicked and tortured until the voice had to scream for release.

There was lightning behind Mr. Sayre's eyes, and it was looking for a place to strike.

Love strong and true can get you through a lot of dookey. And I'm here to tell you, honey, you got to walk through many fields of dookey to get to be my age.

That's where they make the books by the hundreds of thousands, and each one is a child different and special and some walk tall and some are crippled, but they all go out into the world from there.

Better not to walk upon a garden made of quicksand.

No doubt about it, summer was on the wane. The mornings seemed a shade cooler. The nights were hungry, and ate more daylight.

The demons almost got me! But glory be to Jesus, and when he arrives on his flying saucer from the planet Jupiter I'll be there on the golden shore to kiss his hand!

Right." He smiled bitterly. "Well, look around. Just look. Have you ever considered the possibility that God might be insane?

But who ever said everybody gets a happy ending?

But I think parents aren't teachers anymore. Parents
or a whole lot of us, at least
lead by mouth instead of by example. It seems to me that if a child's hero is their mother or father
or even better, both of them in tandem
then the rough road of learning and experience is going to be smoothed some. And every little bit of smoothing helps, in this rough old world that wants children to be miniature adults, devoid of charm and magic and the beauty of innocence.

I had a dog named Jesus once. I crucified him, but he didn't come back to life. Before he died, he told me what to do to the people in the brick house. Off went their heads.

It seemed to Billy that no matter how far you walked, you never really got to the end of things.

Those who babble the Lord's Prayer day and night would be the first to grin when I'm set afire.

The time for witticisms is over and the time for wits beginning. If

The sharp white steeple of the Hawthorne First Baptist Church stuck up through the leafless trees like an admonishing finger.

There is something about nature out of control that touches a primal terror. We are used to believing that we're the masters of our domain, and that God has given us this earth to rule over. We need this illusion like a good night-light. The truth is more fearsome: we are as frail as young trees in tornadoes, and our beloved homes are one flood away from driftwood. We plant our roots in trembling earth, we live where mountains rose and fell and prehistoric seas burned away in mist. We and the towns we have built are not permanent; the earth itself is a passing train. When you stand in muddy water that is rising toward your waist and you hear people shouting against the darkness and see their figures struggling to hold back the currents that will not be denied, you realize the truth of it: we will not win, but we cannot give up.

Seems to me a writer gets to hold a lot of keys," she said. "Gets to visit a lot of worlds and live in a lot of skins. Seems to me a writer has a chance to live forever, if he's good and if he's lucky.

There is nothing more cruel in this world than a young savage with a chip on his shoulder and anger in his soul.

Many times you will fail. That is the nature of the world, and the truth of life. But when you find your horse again, will go back or will you go forward?

SPIIIIIDERS!" The world ceased its turning. The owl went dumb. The Milky Way flickered on the verge of extinction. Ben hollered it again: "Spiders!" He started thrashing wildly amid the pine needles. "They're all over me!

After years of having a dog, you know him. You know the meaning of his snuffs and grunts and barks. Every twitch of the ears is a question or statement, every wag of the tail is an exclamation.

Where you live ain't important," he said. "It's what ... lives in you.

The thing about pain is, it teaches you humility

All us kids had found out by now that all teachers had a sore spot; some went crazy over gum chewing, others insane over behind-the-back giggles, still others nuts over the repeated squeaking and scuffing of shoes on the linoleum. Machine-gun coughs, donkeylike snorts, a fusillade of throat clearing, spitballs stuck to the blackboard: all these were arsenals in the battle against Hitlerian teachers.

The devil is my strawberry!

It was like carrying a rabbit's foot or throwing salt over your shoulder if you happened to spill any; these things were part of the grain and texture of life, and better to do them than not, just in case God's ways were more mysterious than we Christians could grasp.

My father could throw up a fistful of dice to make a decision, but my mother had an agony for every hour. I guess they balanced, as two people who love each other should.

All life isn't hearts and flowers. But life is just as much pain and mess as it is joy and order, too. I guess when you make yourself realize that you..start growing up - Boy's Life

And as she'd watched him stagger away Swan had realized that forgiveness crippled evil, drew the poison from it like lancing a boil.

Jesus Christ was as perfect as a human bein' can be, yet he got mad and fought and wept and had days of feelin' like he couldn't go on another step. Like when the lepers and the sick folks almost trampled him down, all of 'em beggin' for miracles and doggin' him till he was about miracled out. What I'm sayin', Mr. Mackenson, is that even Jesus Christ needed help sometimes, and he wasn't too proud to ask for it.

I couldn't picture heaven. How could a place be any good at all if it didn't have the things there you enjoyed doing? If there were no comic books, no monster movies, no bikes, and no country roads to ride them on? No swimming pools, no ice cream, no summer, or barbecue on the Fourth of July? No thunderstorms, and front porches on which to sit and watch them coming? Heaven sounded to me like a library that only held books about one certain subject, yet you had to spend eternity and eternity and eternity reading them. What was heaven without typewriter paper and a magic box?

Wearily, she sat up. Jesus was not coming today. She would have to die later, she decided. There was no use lying out here like a fool in the rain. One step, she thought. One step and then the next gets you where you're going.

I had discovered that being a writer gave you a lot of license to fiddle with the truth, but I'd better not get into the habit of it.

I never knew what hate really was until I thought of somebody wrapping up a bomb and putting it in a church on a Sunday morning to kill little girls.

No one ever grows up. They may look grown-up, but it's just the clay of time. Men and women are still children deep in their hearts. Mrs. Neville

What would describe it? What word in the English language would speak of youth and hope and freedom and desire, of sweet wanderlust and burning blood? What word describes the brotherhood of buddies, and the feeling that as long as the music plays, you are part of that tough, rambling breed who will inherit the earth?

I believe music is the language of youth, and the more you can accept as being valid, the younger your attitude gets.

This is where I think the writing started. The "righting," if you will. The righting of circumstances, the shaping of the world the way it should have been, had God not had crossed eyes and buck teeth. In the real world I had no power; in my world I was Hercules unchained.

Johnny ate encyclopedias like any other kid might eat Red Hots or Lemonheads.

You don't have to come here to see them, Cory. Or to see me, either. You really don't. You don't have to leave what is, to visit what was.

If you were my girlfriend I would give you a hundred lightning bugs in a green glass jar, so you could always see your way. I would give you a meadow full of wildflowers, where no two blooms would ever be alike. I would give you my bicycle, with its golden eye to protect you. I would write a story for you, and make you a princess who lived in a white marble castle. If you would only like me, I would give you magic. If you would only like me.

Johnny James was sitting on the front porch, sipping from a glass of gasoline in the December heat, when the doom-screamer came.

They say that somewhere in Africa the elephants have a secret grave where they go to lie down, unburden their wrinkled gray bodies, and soar away, light spirits at the end.

Yes, there was music after all. The sound of the swamp rose up to him. The sound of frogs and crickets, of birds and 'gators, of life in every puddle and pond and knothole and leaf. I Travel By Night