At some point, even the greatest misery begins to fade. Life, or what passes for life, plods on in it's own unending weary footsteps, and somehow we plod along with it, if we stay lucky.

Revenge: it's a dream of flames fueled by scorched remains that are lit to a torch and brought back upon the one who burned you.

When life is a horror....Don't look like a ghost!

Despite the horror, we survivors were endowed with a will to survive. Or instinct. Or maybe it was faith.

In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.

Bill suited the action to the word, getting up and leaning over the handlebars and pumping the pedals at a lunatic rate. Looking at Bill's back, which was amazingly broad for a boy of eleven-going-on-twelve, watching it work under the duffel coat, the shoulders slanting first one way and then the other as he shifted his weight from one pedal to the other, Richie suddenly became sure that they were invulnerable...they would live forever and ever.