“Even though it walked and talked, even though it was bigger than his house and could swallow him in one bite, the monster was still, at the end of the day, just a yew tree. Conor could even see more berries growing from the branches at its elbows.”
“The palms, trooping to the edge of the beach, were motionless in the night air. All the world seemed to hold its breath as this boy climbed up out of the sea.”
“There was something to be said about the quietness of night. About the stillness. Everything was tranquil and unmoving as though the world had come to a temporary stop in its rotation—ceased its constant spiral of madness.”
“Silence is the simple stillness of the individual under the Word of God… Silence is nothing else but waiting for God’s Word and coming from God’s Word with a blessing.”
“I have had high times. But the best times of all were afterward, just afterward, with the gun warm in my hand, the bite of smoke in my nose, the taste of death on my tongue, my heart high in my gullet, the danger past, and then the sweat, suddenly, and the nothingness, and the sweet clean feel of being born.”
“The elephants were standing absolutely still. Elmer had never seen them so serious before. The more he looked at the serious, silent, still, standing elephants, the more he wanted to laugh.”
“Sid Parker crouched on the floor, in front of a cage in which two mouse-like creatures had frozen into stillness on the instant. One had been working a little treadmill fastened to the inside of a cage wall. The other had been gnawing at one of the bars of the cage.”
“All that night the wind blew. Simon lay in the dark and listened: to the sirens in the roof, and the stealthy slither of the mat along his floor, and the crying of the pine outside the window. Now and then in the night he work and heard them still.”
“The stillness had become an expectant one; the house seemed to hold is breath; the darkness pressed up to him, pressing him with a question: Come on, Tom, the clock has struck thirteen- what are you going to do about it?”
“The three children stood looking at each other in the middle of the Australian desert. Motionless as the outcrops of granite they stared, and stared, and stared. Between them the distance was less than the spread of an outstretched arm, but more than a hundred thousand years.”