Steve Hamilton > Quotes

“I didn't know that once you've proven yourself useful to the wrong people, you'll never be free again.”
― Steve Hamilton, The Lock Artist

“Somewhere in the ocean, a shark was missing its cold eyes because this man had them.”
― Steve Hamilton, The Lock Artist

“Leon, no offense, but you don't exactly look like a hockey player."

"I told 'em I was a goalie. That's where they put the guy who can't skate, right? Just like in baseball when they put the worst player at catcher.”
― Steve Hamilton, Winter of the Wolf Moon

“It was a lesson I had taken most of my life to learn. Sometimes you have to let things go.”
― Steve Hamilton, Blood is the Sky

“Whoever's job it was to keep the room clean was clearly not an overachiever.”
― Steve Hamilton, Winter of the Wolf Moon

“Once you freeze all the way through to your soul, you will never feel warm again.”
― Steve Hamilton, Winter of the Wolf Moon

“So there it was. My big lesson of the day, something I’d take with me and never forget. The whole legal system – if you think it’s just a big set of rules, you’re dead wrong. It’s really a bunch of people sitting around and talking to each other, deciding what they want to do with you. When they make their decision, then they pull out whatever rule they need to make it happen.”
― Steve Hamilton, The Lock Artist

“The greatest puzzle in the world, young man, the greatest challenge a man can face, is solving the riddle of a woman's heart.”
― Steve Hamilton, The Lock Artist

“I'm the undisputed champion of keeping my mouth shut and just sitting there like a piece of furniture.”
― Steve Hamilton, The Lock Artist

“This could be your big ticket,” he said. “You know what happens to you at art school?”

I shook my head.

“All that good natural technique you have? All that detail? They’ll beat it right out of you. They’ll be so threatened by it, they’ll make you start throwing paint at the canvas like a monkey. By the time you graduate, the only thing you’ll be able to do is teach art to high school kids.”

Okay, I thought. I’m glad he’s excited for me.

“On the plus side, you’ll probably get laid a lot.”

I gave him a nod and a quick thumbs-up. He patted me on the shoulder and then left me alone.”
― Steve Hamilton, The Lock Artist

“I’ve noticed how most people don’t know how to listen.”
― Steve Hamilton, The Lock Artist

“I felt like hell the next morning. My hands were sore, my arms were sore, my legs were sore, and my back was sore. Aside from that I was fine.”
― Steve Hamilton, Blood is the Sky

“It’s not nearly far enough if you’ve already become famous for something you want to forget forever.”
― Steve Hamilton, The Lock Artist

“I stood up. I took the ring box out of my jacket. I put it on her pillow. I did all of this for you, Amelia. And now I have to do one more thing.”
― Steve Hamilton, The Lock Artist

“He sounded like the king of guy who gets mad for a living.”
― Steve Hamilton, Blood is the Sky

“This isn’t freedom. This is mobility. Don’t get those two things confused.”
― Steve Hamilton, The Second Life of Nick Mason

“You couldn't have ironed her voice any flatter.”
― Steve Hamilton, Night Work

“said. “Now that he’s found me again. Or he’d come himself. . . .” “Maria, why don’t you just sign away the full partnership money? Tell him you’ll take the twenty percent and forfeit the rest?” She looked at me. “You could stop running,” I said. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe”
― Steve Hamilton, The Hunting Wind

“You touch a safe the way you touch a woman,” he”
― Steve Hamilton, The Lock Artist

“understand our situation.”
― Steve Hamilton, A Cold Day In Paradise

“Nobody is safe. Ever. Anywhere. I”
― Steve Hamilton, The Lock Artist

“When they turned on Clark Street, Mason was about to say something. You bring me all the way up to the North Side for what, pal? A Cubs game maybe? Good luck with that one. Mason hated the Cubs. He hated everything about the North Side. Everything it represented. When he was growing up, the North Side was everything he didn’t have. And never would have.”
― Steve Hamilton, The Second Life of Nick Mason

“You need to stop acting like this is some kind of cheap American action movie,”
― Steve Hamilton, An Honorable Assassin

“No patience. No skill. No intelligence. Just brute strength. They have to break something. It’s the only way they know.”
― Steve Hamilton, The Lock Artist

“And now Edwin was out there, somewhere at the bottom of all that cold water. The state would drag the lake near where the boat was found, I knew, but it would be hopeless. These waves would pull his body down to the deepest, coldest heart of Lake Superior, down where the crew of the Edmund Fitzgerald lay. All twenty-nine men would welcome him into their midst.”
― Steve Hamilton, A Cold Day In Paradise

“Halliday put up his hand to stop him. He’d been taught long ago to trust his own instincts, the same instincts that went all the way back to the brief time in his career when he’d worked with the agents who had invented a new way to track serial killers. These agents studied them; they interviewed them; they took them through every case, going over every detail. They got inside their heads, even if that was the last place you’d ever want to be.”
― Steve Hamilton, Dead Man Running

“He made that same turn down that same road. The train station loomed above us. Here's where time slows down for me. It stretches out like a long rubber band, and every single event is stretched out with it.”
― Steve Hamilton, Let it Burn

“I didn’t know any better. I didn’t know that once you’ve proven yourself useful to the wrong people, you’ll never be free again.”
― Steve Hamilton, The Lock Artist

“These are the methods of crude men. They can’t face the challenge that a safe presents to them. They can’t face the safe on its own terms. So they do what? Same thing men have been doing for thousands of years, right? They resort to violence.”

He grabbed the dolly and tucked it under the safe.

“No patience. No skill. No intelligence. Just brute strength. They have to break something. It’s the only way they know.”
― Steve Hamilton, The Lock Artist

“Unless you're a hairdresser, you can't have a ponytail and call yourself Kenny when you're forty. Not in Michigan, anyway.”
― Steve Hamilton, North of Nowhere