She Who Waits (Low Town Book 3)

by Daniel Polansky

most of us aren’t as bad as the worst things that we do, though it’s those things that define us all the same.

‘To live is to suffer disappointment.’

Never give notice that you’re going after someone. You plan on killing a man, you’d best aim for his back.

It is astonishing the degree to which people are not listening to you. I remember I’d known that even then. No one cares about your opinion, they’re just waiting for the opportunity to offer theirs. Once you understand that, it’s pretty easy to make someone like you – give them free reign to discuss themselves until they tire of it, and you’ve won a friend for life. It’s a simple enough trick to master. Mostly it demands nothing beyond your presence, and even then only physically. Should some encouragement be required, just repeat their last few words back at them in question form.

People get angry when they can’t buy new shit, and they start looking around for things to break, and listening to anyone who gives them a decent excuse to do so.’

Like I said – I should have known it looking at her. Because at the bottom, when it was just you pleading your case to logic, that cold, implacable and resolute force, women like her did not fall for men like me. Birds do not swim, nor fish fly. The sun gives heat, and the night steals it, and I would no more be loved than I would wake up one day to discover I’d grown a pair of eagle’s wings. Life is what it is – but by the Firstborn, sometimes you just want to pretend.

You don’t break a man by his vices, you break him where he’s the most decent. You find what he loves, and you kill him for it.

‘You’ll burn it all then?’ ‘We deserve to burn,’ I said. ‘You’re just going to go first.’