Bob > Bob's Quotes

“I notice I am taking risks with my own security and losing my sensitivity to danger. I don't know it at the time, but the effects of war are reaching into me in unexpected ways, and I am being changed by them. I am surrounded by destruction and the randomness of death, which I cannot fathom. I have felt the closeness of death as tangibly as the whisper of a murderous seducer, and felt the richness, twinged by guilt, of having escaped its grasp. I have seen too often the numb lost look of men consumed by undiluted grief, and heard the howl of children as their mothers are pulled from the rubble of a rocket-blasted home, and I am coming to understand the long dark pain of those who silently endure what first seems unendurable.”
― Jason Elliot, The Network

“Knife fights are something that happen between the Sharks and the Jets, that's it. Everywhere else, it's not a fight, it's just someone trying to goddam kill you.”
― Greg Rucka, Walking Dead

“Contrary to popular belief, most detectives couldn't detect a heartbeat on a speed addict, but you never know when you might be up against the next Ellery Queen.”
― Simon Kernick, The Business of Dying

“The only difference was, you could play the music again and again; a life plays only once.”
― Peter Robinson, Before the Poison

“It had been a long while since I’d watched any television, and things had only gotten weirder. Beauty pageants for infants; ruddy men in trucker caps fighting over abandoned storage lockers; public shamings of compulsive hoarders and pre-diabetics; affluent suburban women made up like transvestite hookers, competing with each other in feats of coarseness and cruelty; barely literate pregnant teens with tattoos, unfocused eyes, and futures like wrecked cars; apoplectic crypto-fascists spitting bile and paranoia; a carnival midway of weight loss devices, hair growth creams, erectile dysfunction potions, and pottery from which herbs grew like green hair. It was like the day room of a surrealist mental hospital, or any big city ER on a summer Saturday night.”
― Peter Spiegelman, Dr. Knox

“She remembered asking, as they headed towards Newbury, if this was where Watership Down had been set. Jack had laughed – ‘European Capital of the Hunt’ he called it. ‘Wall-to-wall fascists’. Then he slipped seamlessly into one of his tirades against the ‘landed gentry’ and the hypocrisy which underpinned their supposed love of the countryside. All that was missing was the T-shirt: FUCK THE RABBITS!”
― G.J. Minett, The Hidden Legacy

“Some people are born to make great art and others are born to appreciate it. Don't you think? It is a kind of talent in itself, to be an audience, whether you are the spectator in the gallery or you are listening to the voice of the world's greatest soprano. Not everyone can be the artist. There have to be those who witness the art, who love and appreciate what they have been privileged to see.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“Abby had a little trick that she used any time Red acted like a cranky old codger. She reminded herself of the day she had fallen in love with him. “It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon,” she’d begin, and it would all come back to her—the newness of it, the whole new world magically opening before her at the moment when she first realized that this person that she’d barely noticed all these years was, in fact, a treasure. He was perfect, was how she’d put it to herself. And then that clear-eyed, calm-faced boy would shine forth from Red’s sags and wrinkles, from his crumpled eyelids and hollowed cheeks and the two deep crevices bracketing his mouth and just his general obtuseness, his stubbornness, his infuriating belief that simple cold logic could solve all of life’s problems, and she would feel unspeakably lucky to have ended up with him.”
― Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread

“Maybe everyone stays the same inside, even when their life looks nothing like what they once had, or even imagined.”
― Anna Quindlen, Miller's Valley

“A bullet in the head will fix an incipient asthma attack every time.”
― Adrian McKinty, Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly

“You don't whack someone upside the head with a poker unless you mean it.”
― Steve Brewer, End Run

“The past is always the highest peak, and the hardest to scale. But when you finally pull yourself to the top and peer over the edge, there’s nothing before you but the rest of your life.”
― Robert Dugoni, The 7th Canon