The Green Mile

It was the way you got them to go and be good about it, the way you saw them into the chair sitting at the end of the Green Mile with their sanity intact. I

Killing rats was what the state paid us for, after all.

I had hopes that maybe I had started to mend. Never was a hope more ill-founded.

There is a skull in every man, and I tell you there is a skull in the lives of all men. They saw it that day, those men—they saw what sometimes grins behind the smile.

But people love a hypocrite, you know—they recognize one of their own, and it always feels so good when someone gets caught with his pants down and his dick up and it isn't you.

There was only one time I ever had a question about the nature of my job. That, I reckon, is why I'm writing this.

The blood still ran in them, the muscles were still strong, but they were finished, all the same; they were never going to walk another country mile or dance with a girl at a barn-raising.

And the electric chair was there, too, of course.

beautiful as the sin you never had nerve enough to commit

way people always make jokes about things that frighten them but can't be gotten away from