Silas From The Graveyard Book Quotes

We should do our best to satisfy your interests in stories and books and the world. There are libraries. ~ Neil Gaiman

Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry -
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.
And there's a story in a book about it:
Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels
The ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest,
The chisel work of an enormous Glacier
That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole.
You must not mind a certain coolness from him
Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain.
Nor need you mind the serial ordeal
Of being watched from forty cellar holes
As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins.
As for the woods' excitement over you
That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves,
Charge that to upstart inexperience.
Where were they all not twenty years ago?
They think too much of having shaded out
A few old pecker-fretted apple trees.
Make yourself up a cheering song of how
Someone's road home from work this once was,
Who may be just ahead of you on foot
Or creaking with a buggy load of grain.< ~ Robert Frost

There's a graveyard in northern France where all the dead boys from D-Day are buried. The white crosses reach from one horizon to the other. I remember looking it over and thinking it was a forest of graves. But the rows were like this, dizzying, diagonal, perfectly straight, so after all it wasn't a forest but an orchard of graves. Nothing to do with nature, unless you count human nature. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

The Sweat and the Furrow was Silas Weekley being earthly and spade-conscious all over seven hundred pages. The situation, to judge from the first paragraph, had not materially changed since Silas's last book: mother lying-in with her eleventh upstairs, father laid-out after his ninth downstairs, eldest son lying to the Government in the cow-shed, eldest daughter lying with her lover in the the hayloft, everyone else lying low in the barn. The rain dripped from the thatch, and the manure steamed in the midden. Silas never omitted the manure. It was not Silas's fault that its steam provided the only uprising element in the picture. If Silas could have discovered a brand of steam that steamed downwards, Silas would have introduced it. ~ Josephine Tey

A soft breeze settled around our shoulders as we walked into the cemetery. That same breeze made the world around us shiver a little bit. The slick green leaves of the tall trees rustled, and the long curtain of ivy dangling from the branches began to wave. When the ivy blows in the graveyard, it casts the prettiest lacelike shadows on the ground. They remind me of banners, rippling over the dearly departed in silent celebration. ~ Natalie Lloyd

I lost a piece of my heart and my soul with you. I buried the piece in the graveyard stretching from Yedikule to Edirnekapı where trees sustain the lives of the dead Istanbulites. Give love to love; love belongs to love. Remember in the times of roaming mortality on land and sea to take a bite of my apple when you let go of your fears. Scared humans are not alive; they inhibited their souls in the realm of the dead. Is it not funny that fear is supposed to help us survive, but it can make us stop living?! Is there a more dangerous threat than living, feeling alive, feeling full of life? Remember to keep the lines clear so you can have a piece of my apple and a cup of my coffee. ~ Rana Abdulfattah

So, did you see that community center I was talking about?"
"What? Where?"
"We walked right past it, just before that grocery store. I mentioned it on the way to the city? You just drop in and take classes. They've got all sorts of stuff. I bet you can get a student rate, even."
"But I'm not a student - "
"You're young enough that they'll assume - "
" - and how am I supposed to find the time to take dance classes, now that I'm the dessert?"
"I'm starting to really regret using that metaphor," Silas says, grinning. "And let me explain something, Rosie." He takes a swig of the coffee and presses his lips together, searching for words. "I'm from a long, long, long, long line of woodsmen. My brothers are all supertalented. They all built their own rooms. For god's sake, Lucas built a freaking wooden hot tub in his bedroom with wooden monkeys pouring water into it."
"Monkeys?"
"Don't ask. Anyway, I can do some woodworking. I know my way around the forest, I can handle an ax better than most, I can make a tree grow where nothing else will, I can live off berries and hunt for my food, and I've known about the Fenris since I could crawl. I'm a woodsman, for all intents and purposes. But that doesn't mean I live for it any more than the fact that you're good at hunting means you have to live for that. So maybe breaking out of the hunting lifestyle for a few hours here and there will help you figure out if it's really for you or not."
I shak ~ Jackson Pearce

Memory in these incomparable streets, in mosaics of pain and sweetness, was clear to me now, a unity at last. I remembered small and unimportant things from the past: the whispers of roommates during thunderstorms, the smell of brass polish on my fingertips, the first swim at Folly Beach in April, lightning over the Atlantic, shelling oysters at Bowen's Island during a rare Carolina snowstorm, pigeons strutting across the graveyard at St. Philip's, lawyers moving out of their offices to lunch on Broad Street, the darkness of reveille on cold winter mornings, regattas, the flash of bagpipers' tartans passing in review, blue herons on the marshes, the pressure of the chinstrap on my shako, brotherhood, shad roe at Henry's, camellias floating above water in a porcelain bowl, the scowl of Mark Santoro, and brotherhood again. ~ Pat Conroy

He had plans, but his hopes for higher education, like all his others, were built on "mights." He might go hang out somewhere, with someone. He might get a job and earn some money. He might go to college, a really old school with gray stone buildings and an enormous library. He was thinking of applying next year. Maybe the year after. He wasn't thinking about application deadlines. That sort of detail wasn't a part of his plan. Not at the moment. And why tell his mother about this anyway? It would rekindle her expectations, and she'd only start riding him again. Better to let it be. When his dad came home, they'd sort it out together. His mother retreated into her world, Silas into his. What a family, his mother would say, but until now, Silas had never realized that they weren't really much of one. The names of the days retreated from them both, and soon after the school term ended, Silas was no longer sure what day of the week it was. Every morning when he woke up, he missed his father more keenly than the night before, but the details and differences of each day blurred and eventually vanished. For Silas, the passage of time became a longing ache in his heart that grew daily worse. ~ Ari Berk

I'm so sorry we've kept this for such a long time," she said, pulling the watch from her skirt pocket. She unfolded Mother's handkerchief from around it, and offered it to Lord Bradford cradled in her hands. "We shouldn't have taken it in the first place."
Lord Bradford's eyebrows rose at the offering, and he opened his mouth, then closed it. He lowered his eyes to the books in his hands, then back to Azalea, and he managed a smile.
"When we first met," he said, "ages ago, you gave me a candy stick. Just like you did now, with your hands like that. Do you remember?"
Azalea raised an eyebrow.
"It happened when my father had just died," he said, quietly. "You came to the graveyard, licking a candy stick. You saw me. You put the stick in my hands, folded my fingers over it, and kissed my fingertips."
"That must have been sticky," said Azalea. ~ Heather Dixon

Even in name, he seems like a Victorian oddity. "Igor, fetch 'the Crouch' from the catacombs, we're going to the graveyard". ~ Russell Brand

Death is a convention, a certification to the end of pain, something for the vital statistics book, not binding upon anyone but the keepers of graveyard records. ~ Wallace Stegner

Silas nods and turns to back the car up, accidently brushing a hand against my shoulders as he does so.
"Sorry," he says under his breath, like he's whispering in church. I shake my head as Scarlett settles her long arms and legs in the backseat and uses her cloak as a blanket.
Still trying to lean somewhere between the door of death and Silas's shoulder, I stare out the window as we lumber out of town. The road is smooth, hypnotic, with the dotted lines vanishing rhythmically before us. I glance back at my sister. She's fallen asleep, and Screwtape is casting her dark looks, as if she's to blame for his predicament.
I looked toward Silas, trying to appear as if I'm just glancing out his window. Really, I want to study him intensely. He's wearing one of his many nearly threadbare T-shirts, jeans that are soft from washing, wavy hair . . . Everything about him begs to be touched . . .
"You're nervous," Silas says suddenly.
"What? No!" I answer sharply. Am I that obvious?
Silas raises an eyebrow and laughs.
"It makes sense. I mean, you and Lett have lived in Ellison forever." Right . . . right. He's talking about the trip, not my resisting the temptation to fall on him. We're silent for a moment, nearly tangible awkwardness floating around the front seats. Silas drums his fingers on the steering wheel. ~ Jackson Pearce

He seemed to weave, like the spider, from pure impulse, without reflection. Every man's work, pursued steadily, tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of life. Silas's hand satisfied itself with throwing the shuttle, and his eye with seeing the little squares in the cloth complete themselves under his effort. Then there were the calls of hunger; and Silas, in his solitude, had to provide his own breakfast, dinner, and supper, to fetch his own water from the well, and put his own kettle on the fire; and all these immediate promptings helped, along with the weaving, to reduce his life to the unquestioning activity of a spinning insect. He hated the thought of the past; there was nothing that called out his love and fellowship toward the strangers he had come amongst; and the future was all dark, for there was no Unseen Love that cared for him. Thought was arrested by utter bewilderment, not its old narrow pathway was closed, and affection seemed to have died under the bruise that had fallen on its keenest nerves. ~ George Eliot

Funnel

The family story tells, and it was told true,
of my great-grandfather who begat eight
genius children and bought twelve almost-new
grand pianos. He left a considerable estate
when he died. The children honored their
separate arts; two became moderately famous,
three married and fattened their delicate share
of wealth and brilliance. The sixth one was
a concert pianist. She had a notable career
and wore cropped hair and walked like a man,
or so I heard when prying a childhood car
into the hushed talk of the straight Maine clan.
One died a pinafore child, she stays her five
years forever. And here is one that wrote-
I sort his odd books and wonder his once alive
words and scratch out my short marginal notes
and finger my accounts.
back from that great-grandfather I have come
to tidy a country graveyard for his sake,
to chat with the custodian under a yearly sun
and touch a ghost sound where it lies awake.
I like best to think of that Bunyan man
slapping his thighs and trading the yankee sale
for one dozen grand pianos. it fit his plan
of culture to do it big. On this same scale
he built seven arking houses and they still stand.
One, five stories up, straight up like a square
box, still dominates its coastal edge of land.
It is rented cheap in the summer musted air
to sneaker-footed families who pad through
its ro ~ Anne Sexton

Live life with grace, there is no return from the grave. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Graciously live life. There is return from the grave. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Was Trakl a Christian? Yes, of course, at times he becomes a Christian, among a general confusion of becomings - becoming an animal, becoming a virus, becoming inorganic - just as he was also an antichrist, a poet, a pharmacist, an alcoholic, a drug addict, a psychotic, a leper, a suicide, an incestuous cannibal, a necrophiliac, a rodent, a vampire, and a werewolf. Just as he became his sister, and also a hermaphrodite. Trakl's texts are scrawled over by redemptionist monotheism, just as they are stained by narcotic fluidities, gnawed by rats, cratered by Russian artillery, charred and pitted by astronomical debris. Trakl was a Christian and an atheist and also a Satanist, when he wasn't simply undead, or in some other way inhuman. It is perhaps more precise to say that Trakl never existed, except as a battlefield, a reservoir of disease, the graveyard of a deconsecrated church, as something expiring from a massive cocaine overdose on the floor of a military hospital, cheated by lucidity by the searing onslaught of base difference. ~ Nick Land

You are so good. So good, you're always feeling so much. And sometimes it feels like you're gonna bust wide open from all the feeling, doesn't it? People like you are the best in the world, but you sure do suffer for it. ~ Silas House

And then there's its hair," Justin said, pushing the vegetables across to me. "Don't forget the hair. It's horrible."
"It's wearing a dead person's hair," Rafe informed me. "If you stick a pin in the doll, you can hear screaming coming from the graveyard. Try it."
"See what I mean?" Abby said, to me. "Wusses. It's got real hair. Why he thinks it's from a dead person - "
"Because your poppet was made in about 1890 and I can do subtraction. ~ Tana French

You know, Silas shouldn't have something so indecent like this lying about," Ann said. "One of the children might see it." She brightened. "I know! We should put some clothes on it! That would make it all right, don't you think?"
"Oh, by all means. Do clothe the woman," Louisa said, laughter bubbling up from the back of her throat.
Ann flitted around the room looking for something appropriate. "Ah, this'll be fine," she said, her back to Louisa. She fooled with the thing a bit, then turned and held it up for Louisa's approval.
It took Louisa a second to recognize what Ann had chosen to clothe the poor beleaguered fertility goddess in, but as soon as she did, she burst into laughter.
Silas's drawers. Ann had clothed the carving in Silas's dirty drawers.
After that, Louisa couldn't stop laughing. Ann had tied the legs around the carving's neck so that the back side of the unlaced drawers covered her front. It was truly a site to behold. And when Ann looked at her in all innocence, obviously unaware that the lady's clothing was as indecent as the lady herself, Louisa laughed so hard her sides hurt.
"Louisa, are you alright?" Ann asked as she went to her friend's side. "I swear, you're behaving strange today. Really strange."
Louisa couldn't even speak. All she could do was laugh and point at the carving.
"This?" Ann asked as she held the carving up. "What's wrong? Don't you like her fine woolen dress?"
Louisa erupted in more peals of ~ Sabrina Jeffries

A Note From Jase
I'm the second son of Phil and Kay Robertson. Si (Phil's youngest brother) named me on the riverbank. Si went to the river to tell Phil that Kay was having a baby. I've always heard that Phil's response was something to the effect of, "What do you want me to do about it?" Si asked him, "What do you want to name him?" Phil replied, "Name him after you." So I was given the name Jason Silas Robertson. Maybe that's why Si and I love to argue so much. My dad called me "Jase" about half the time, and somewhere through the years the name stuck. ~ Phil Robertson

Vibrations caused by powerful turbines stirred Kathy from a dream centered around a funeral. Her eyes flicked open, face dry, and she had no idea where she was. In her dream, she saw crystalline silver spiders again, weaving their way through the graveyard, leaving trails of silver webs over corpses, binding them for some unknown purpose in the cold dark earth. ~ Michael Offutt

He got to his feet and stumbled away from the stench of his vomit, making his way through this graveyard of old glories, heading for the darkest place he could find in which to hide his giddy head. ~ Clive Barker

Do we dust for fingerprints now?" I asked.
He swiveled his head back around until he was gazing at me. "Who do we look like? The Hardy Boys?"
Silas chuckled at us without looking up from the laptop screen.
Stone, C. L. (2014-01-19). Drop of Doubt: The Ghost Bird Series: #5 (Kindle Locations 945-947). Arcato Publishing. Kindle Edition. ~ C.L.Stone

My good friend the Governor said I could settle down at Port Stanley and take things quietly for a few weeks. The street of that port is about a mile and a half long. It has the slaughterhouse at one end and the graveyard at the other. The chief distraction is to walk from the slaughterhouse to the graveyard. For a change one may walk from the graveyard to the slaughterhouse. ~ Ernest Shackleton

Like blood out of a wound, a keening wail rose from the bottom of my heart and ripped through the graveyard. I lowered my face to Hadassah's shoulder and went quietly and thoroughly to pieces. ~ Angela Elwell Hunt

Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.

History says, don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term. ~ Seamus Heaney

I want to travel in Europe, Alyosha, I shall set off from here. And yet I know that I am only going to a graveyard, but it's a most precious graveyard, that's what it is! Precious are the dead that lie there, every stone over them speaks of such burning life in the past, of such passionate faith in their work, their truth, their struggle and their science, that I know I shall fall on the ground and kiss those stones and weep over them; though I'm convinced in my heart that it's long been nothing but a graveyard. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

While you're alive it's shameful to worm your way into
the Calendar of Saints.
Disbelief in yourself is more saintly.
It takes real talent not to dread being terrified
by your own agonizing lack of talent.

Disbelief in yourself is indispensable.
Indispensable to us is the loneliness
of being gripped in the vise,
so that in the darkest night the sky will enter you
and skin your temples with the stars,
so that streetcars will crash into the room,
wheels cutting across your face,
so the dangling rope, terrible and alive,
will float into the room and dance invitingly in the air.

Indispensable is any mangy ghost
in tattered, overplayed stage rags,
and if even the ghosts are capricious,
I swear, they are no more capricious than those who are alive.

Indispensable amidst babbling boredom
are the deadly fear of uttering the right words
and the fear of shaving, because across your cheekbone
graveyard grass already grows.

It is indispensable to be sleeplessly delirious,
to fail, to leap into emptiness.
Probably, only in despair is it possible
to speak all the truth to this age.

It is indispensable, after throwing out dirty drafts,
to explode yourself and crawl before ridicule,
to reassemble your shattered hands
from fingers that rolled under the dresser.

Indispensable is the cowardice to be cruel
an ~ Yevgeny Yevtushenko

He overheard the director talking to one of the cameramen. The cameraman was explaining that he couldn't get a good long shot on the exterior because someone had set up a fake graveyard right in the plaza.
"Kids just playing around, I guess, but it's morbid; we'll have to get rid of it, maybe bring in some sod to - "
"No," Albert said.
"We're almost ready for you," the director assured him.
"That's not a fake graveyard. Those aren't fake graves. No one was playing around."
"You're saying those . . . those are actually . . ."
"What do you think happened here?" Albert asked in a soft voice. "What do you think this was?" Absurdly, embarrassingly, he had started to cry. "Those are kids buried there. Some of them were torn apart, you know. By coyotes. By . . . by bad people. Shot. Crushed. Like that. Some of those kids in the ground there couldn't take it, the hunger and the fear . . . some of those kids out there had to be cut down from the ropes they used to hang themselves. Early on, when we still had any animals? I had a crew go out and hunt down cats. Cats and dogs and rats. Kill them. Other kids to skin them . . . cook them up."
There were a dozen crew people in the McDonald's. None spoke or moved.
Albert brushed away tears and sighed. "Yeah. So don't mess with the graves. Okay? Other than that, we're good to go. ~ Michael Grant

The following spring was a time of calving. Great icebergs calved from the vast glaciers which stretched down to our fjords from distant mountains. The heifers and cows of Kaupangen gave birth to over one hundred calves that spring. Most survived. Gudrod, the master shepherd, had seventy-five new lambkins skipping after their mothers. Ten sets of lamb twins were born in the city that year. Bitches had pups suckling at their breasts. The mountain goats that stood watch over the fjord, indifferently chewing on the wild grasses between the rocks, had kids following them on their steep paths. The residents of the city, too, gave birth. Twenty-one new healthy babies were born within thirty days of the spring equinox; boys and girls with thick blonde, brown, black, or red hair; others with smooth bald heads. Olaf, my third father, my king, had a son, stillborn. Olaf wept. Kenna wept. I wept as the boy was buried inside the casket with his mother in our graveyard by the church. ~ Jason Born

It was as if some people believed there was a divide between the books that you were permitted to enjoy and the books that were good for you, and I was expected to choose sides. We were all expected to choose sides. And I didn't believe it, and I still don't.
I was, and still am, on the side of books you love. ~ Neil Gaiman

Orin's special conscious horror, besides heights and the early morning, is roaches. There'd been parts of metro Boston near the Bay he'd refused to go to, as a child. Roaches give him the howling fantods. The parishes around N.O. had been having a spate or outbreak of a certain Latin-origin breed of sinister tropical flying roaches, that were small and timid but could fucking fly, and that kept being found swarming on New Orleans infants, at night, in their cribs, especially infants in like tenements or squalor, and that reportedly fed on the mucus in the babies' eyes, some special sort of optical-mucus - the stuff of fucking nightmares, mobile flying roaches that wanted to get at your eyes, as an infant - and were reportedly blinding them; parents'd come in in the ghastly A.M.-tenement light and find their infants blind, like a dozen blinded infants that last summer; and it was during this spate or nightmarish outbreak, plus July flooding that sent over a dozen nightmarish dead bodies from a hilltop graveyard sliding all gray-blue down the incline Orin and two teammates had their townhouse on, in suburban Chalmette, shedding limbs and innards all the way down the hillside's mud and one even one morning coming to rest against the post of their roadside mailbox, when Orin came out for the morning paper, that Orin had had his agent put out the trade feelers. ~ David Foster Wallace

I lost it in the bathroom. Sitting on the toilet, I started to panic when I noticed the graveyard of empty toilet paper rolls. The brown cylinders had ostensibly been placed vertically to form a half oval on top of the flat shiny surface of the stainless steel toilet paper holder. It was like some sort of miniature-recycled Stonehenge in the women's bathroom, a monument to the bowel movements of days past. Actually, it was sometime around 2:30 p.m. when my day exited the realm of country song bad and entered the neighboring territory of Aunt Ethel's annual Christmas letter bad. Last year Aunt Ethel wrote with steady, stalwart sincerity of Uncle Joe's gout and her one - no, make that two - car accidents, the new sinkhole in their backyard, their impending eviction from the trailer park, and Cousin Serena's divorce. To be fair, Cousin Serena got divorced every year, so that didn't really count toward the calamitous computation of yearly catastrophes. I ~ Penny Reid

I wanted to be with the men I admired rather than the Scottish Arts Council crowd, so I spent a lot of time in graveyards. You get less trouble from the dead. ~ Alexander Stoddart

I mean it," Gabriel said. "Do you know that girl that came after us nearly gave me a heart attack? She said Trouble's in trouble. Again. Second time in a week. And what do I see when we get to the hallway? Trouble jumping from the fucking second floor, does a barrel roll and hobbles up to get back in the fight. And you're on top of some motherfucker on top of Silas. Fucking beautiful. So that's like quadruple grounding because you went in twice. I swear if you go over that balcony again, I'm going to break your damn feet so you can't go anywhere near it. ~ C.L.Stone

Visit the graveyards sometimes and read the headstone epitaphs! There is much to learn from the dark face of the life! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

I'm through with you. Yes, I am going to put you down. From now on, I am my own God. I am going to live by the rules I se for myself. I'll discard everything I was once taught about you. Then I'll be you. I'll be my own God, living my life as I see fit. Not as Mr. Charlie says I should live it, or Mama or anybody else. I shall do as I want in this society that apparently wasn't meant for me and my kind. If you are getting angry because I am talking to you like this, then just kill me, leave me here in this graveyard dead. Maybe thats where all of us belong anyway. Maybe then we wouldn't have to suffer so much. At the rate we are being killed now, we'll all be soon dead anyway. ~ Anne Moody

Rosie flicks out her second knife and takes aim. It spins out of her hand like a star, straight at the Alpha's chest. But the Alpha knocks it away easily. He raises a clawed hand at my sister and I feel a scream erupting in my throat, recognizing the motion from seven years ago. The swing will take my sister's eye. I storm through the still-transforming Fenris, swinging my hatchet as if I'm hacking at tree limbs. Rosie's eyes widen in horror as the Alpha's claws being to descend. I grit my teeth and force my body forward, now ignoring the other wolves, desperate to reach her.
A roaring scream, all human but as fierce as any Fenris howl, echoes through the parking lot. My head snaps to see its source: Silas is running toward Rosie, hunting knives in one hand, axe aloft in the other. His eyes burn brighter than any hellfire. He swings out just as the Alpha's claws are about to reach Rosie's face, knocking the monster out of the way. ~ Jackson Pearce

It seems jolly on the page. But imagine poverty, violence, natural disasters, or political fear driving you away from everything you know. Imagine how bad things get to make you leave behind your family, your friends, your lovers; your home, as humble as it might be; your church, say. Let's take it further - you've said good-bye to the graveyard, the dog, the goat, the mountains where you hunted, your grade school, your state, your favorite spot on the river where you fished and took time to think. ~ Luis Alberto Urrea

Shadow inserted his coin. The drunk in the graveyard raised his bottle to his lips. One of the gravestones flipped over, revealing a grasping corpse; a headstone turned around, flowers replaced by a grinning skull. A wraith appeared on the right of the church, while on the left of the church something with a half-glimpsed, pointed, unsettlingly birdlike face, a pale, Boschian nightmare, glided smoothly from a headstone into the shadows and was gone. Then the church door opened, a priest came out, and the ghosts, haunts, and corpses vanished, and only the priest and the drunk were left alone in the graveyard. The priest looked down at the drunk disdainfully, and backed through the open door, which closed behind him, leaving the drunk on his own.

The clockwork story was deeply unsettling. Much more unsettling, thought Shadow, than clockwork has any right to be.

"You know why I show that to you?" asked Czernobog.

"No."

"That is the world as it is. That is the real world. It is there, in that box. ~ Neil Gaiman