Dexter by Design (Dexter, #4)

by Jeff Lindsay

It was as if someone admitted they went through all the bother and mess of sex only in order to smoke a cigarette.

The honeymoon had strained my imitations of polite behavior beyond all their previous limits, and I was ready to slither back into the shadows and polish my fangs.

It was a lovely moment, and I am quite sure that somewhere music was playing.

maintaining our illusions is an important part of life’s work,

And as we should all know by now, anytime you predict failure you have an excellent chance of being right.

After all, I live here, and I know that logic does not.

Humans invented the idea of fairness to try to level the playing field and make things a little more challenging for the predators.

This society does not look with approval on emotions like “Need to Kill,” or “Enjoying Cutting,

I had done my job, taken a bad person out of the crawling frenzy of life, and hurried him into a cluster of garbage bags, where he belonged.

Isaac Newton didn’t reject gravity just because the apple had a low IQ.

clichés exist to comfort the feebleminded, not to provide any actual meaning.

Still, nothing worth doing is ever easy—another fascinatingly stupid cliché. After all, breathing is fairly easy, for the most part, and I think many scholars would agree it pays handsome dividends.

There are few things in the world that make me feel more clueless than a woman’s tears. I know that I am supposed to do something comforting and then go slay whatever dragon caused the crying fit, but it has been my experience, in my limited dealings with women, that the tears never come when they should, and they are never about what you might think, and consequently you are reduced to truly stupid options like patting her head and saying, “There there,” in the hopes that at some point she will let you in on what the display is actually about.

“Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.”

I have found that the faster you run from trouble, the quicker it catches you,

The very thought of committing honesty made me tremble in every leaf and branch—it went against everything I had ever stood for.

I have never really seen the point in self-mutilation—after all, life itself is on the job and doing really well at it.

from Walt Whitman—I still remembered the line, since it is so utterly human. “Do I contradict myself? Well then, I contradict myself. I

less he talked, the less I had to pretend I was interested, and it saved wear on my facial muscles.