One positive to deciding to end your life, it seemed, was no longer sweating the small stuff.

How smoothly the words rolled out of his mouth, almost as if they mattered. Henry talked, the man beside him listened with dumb admiration, and no one (certainly not Pete) could have surmised that he was thinking of the shotgun, the rope, the exhaust pipe, the pills. His head was full of tape-loops, that was all. And his tongue was the cassette player.

'You think, huh?' Pete looked crestfallen, and Henry felt a great wave of affection for him. He reached over and patted Pete's knee.
'Never fear,' he said. 'The world is full of strange things.'
If the world had really been full of strange things, Henry doubted he would have been so eager to leave it, but if there was one thing a psychiatrist knew how to do (other than write prescriptions for Prozac and Paxil and Amblen, that was), it was tell lies.

Пит из последних сил борется, чтобы не попасть в такую группу, но, похоже, проигрывает неравную битву. Он знает сложение, вычитание, умножение, деление и даже операции с дробями, хотя последние даются с великим трудом. Но теперь вдруг откуда-то возник икс. Пит не понимает и боится икса.

Какие бы кошмары там ни происходили, он все равно опоздал. Один из друзей мертв, один умирает, а один, храни его Боже, стал кинозвездой.

Трудно поверить, как особи этого вида еще не вымерли полностью. Создания, неспособные мыслить реально, просто маньяки - это аксиома, и спорить тут не о чем.
Ну а пока существо в странной непроницаемой, непробиваемой комнате не желает разговаривать.

- Выходи! Выходи и... - Он лихорадочно перебирал воспоминания Джоунси.
Многие хранились в коробках с надписью ФИЛЬМЫ, похоже, именно их Джоунси любил больше всего на свете, и мистер Грей выбрал фразу, которую посчитал наиболее действенной:
- Выходи и сразись, как мужчина!
Ничего.
Ах ты, ублюдок, подумал мистер Грей

Что-то происходит со мной, подумал мистер Грей, сознавая, что даже эта мысль принадлежала Джоунси. Я начинаю превращаться в человека.
И то открытие, что сама идея, казалось, не лишена некоторой привлекательности, наполнило мистера Грея ужасом.

несмотря на все старания не поддаваться эмоциям Джоунси, мистер Грей был так же бессилен устоять против желания выплеснуть злость, как алкоголик перед бочонком бренди.

More bullets spanged off the 'Cat's treads, its body. Henry sensed another of those buzzing, hustling presences in the cab, and suddenly the radio was silent. The distance between them and the shooters clustered around the Winnebago was getting longer, but it didn't seem to matter. As far as Henry was concerned, all those fuckers could shoot. It was only a matter of time before one of them took a hit . . . and yet Owen looked happy. It occurred to Henry that he had hooked up with someone even more suicidal than himself.

'Tell me again what we're going to do,' Owen said.
'Save the world.'
'And tell me what that makes us — I need to hear it.'
'It makes us heroes,' Henry said.

Mr Gray held the menu, looking at the lists of stuff — meatloaf, sliced beets, roast chicken, chocolate silk pie — with interest and an almost total lack of understanding. Jonesy realized it wasn't just not knowing how food tasted; Mr Gray didn't know what taste was. How could he?
When you cut to the chase, he was nothing but a mushroom with a high IQ.

***
Painful was one thing, uselessly painful another. He understood something now. The images he associated with his depression and his growing certainty of suicide — the trickle of milk on his father's chin, Barry Newman hustling his doublewide butt out of the office — had been hiding another, more potent, image all along: the dreamcatcher. Hadn't that been the real source of his despair? The grandiosity of the dreamcatcher concept coupled to the banality of the uses to which the concept had been put? Using Duddits to find Josie Rinkenhauer had been like discovering quantum physics and then using it to build a video game.
***
'I don't need a guilt-trip from someone who was planning to barbecue a few hundred civilians,'
Henry grumbled.
Owen stamped on the brake with both feet, throwing them forward into their harnesses again, this time hard enough to lock them. The Humvee skidded to a diagonal stop in the street.
'Shut the fuck up.'
Don't be talking shit you don't understand.
'I'm likely going to be a'
dead man because of
'you, so why don't you just keep all your fucking'
self-indulgent
(picture of a spoiled-looking kid with his lower lip stuck out)
'rationalizing bullshit'
to yourself.
Henry stared at him, shocked and stunned. When was the last time someone had talked to him that way? The answer was probably never.

Every dreamcatcher was also a trap.