Good Omens

Twenty-seven people were got out of bed in quick succession and they got another fifty-three out of bed, because if there is one thing a man wants to know when he’s woken up in a panic at 4.00 a.m., it’s that he’s not alone.

She was leaning against the doorframe, like an attractive yawn on legs.

But that was the future, and it lay at the other end of a long warm afternoon that contained planks and ropes and ponds. The future could wait.

You started to feel that if he was around, then everyone else, even the landscape, was just background.

A skeleton, even a walking one, is at least human; Death of a sort lurks inside every living creature.

And, on the other hand, you got people like Ligur and Hastur, who took such a dark delight in unpleasantness you might even have mistaken them for human.

Only Death hadn’t changed. Some things don’t.

She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful: something to be admired from a distance, not up close.