Geoff Smith > Geoff's Quotes

“letting myself be transported by her smile, the shape of her lips, the dimples in her cheeks, the astonishing mobility of her face. Looking at her, and feeling her knee against mine, gave me a chance not to think.”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos: Book One in the Marseilles Trilogy

“We’re slaves, not idiots. That’s all you have to understand.”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos: Book One in the Marseilles Trilogy

“After the love, I went back on the other side of my border. Back to the territory where I have my own rules, my own laws, my own code, and my own stupid obsessions. The territory where I lose my way, and where I lost the women who ventured onto”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos: Book One in the Marseilles Trilogy

“After the love, I went back on the other side of my border. Back to the territory where I have my own rules, my own laws, my own code, and my own stupid obsessions. The territory where I lose my way, and where I lost the women who ventured onto it.”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos: Book One in the Marseilles Trilogy

“That sense of some distant, unknown country from where she’d come and toward which she seemed to want to return.”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos: Book One in the Marseilles Trilogy

“Her fingers were burning hot. I felt as if she was branding me. For life.”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos: Book One in the Marseilles Trilogy

“Of course, every new caress would only have taken us closer to the inevitable: break-ups, tears, disillusionment, sadness, anguish, loathing. It wouldn’t have made the slightest difference to the mess that human beings make of this world.”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos: Book One in the Marseilles Trilogy

“Only the cicadas continued their whine, indifferent to human tragedies.”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos: Book One in the Marseilles Trilogy

“But poetry has never had an answer for anything. All it does is bear witness. To despair. And desperate lives.”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos: Book One in the Marseilles Trilogy

“Outside, it still smelled bad. I couldn’t do anything about that. Neither could anyone. It was called life: a cocktail of love and hate, strength and weakness, violence and passivity.”
― Jean-Claude Izzo, Total Chaos: Book One in the Marseilles Trilogy

“At the top of the Incline he looked back down at the houses and the sand and the sea. But they were all helpless now, lost in the fog.”
― Dorothy B. Hughes, In a Lonely Place

“She knew he was watching her and she didn’t care. She expected it.”
― Dorothy B. Hughes, In a Lonely Place

“She didn’t say yes or no; she said nothing in a rush of words. After she had rung off, it began. Slowly at first. Like fog wisping into his mind. Only a small doubt. He could, at first, brush it away. But it moved in thicker; tightening around the coils of his brain, blotting out reason.”
― Dorothy B. Hughes, In a Lonely Place

“He drove until emotional exhaustion left him empty as a gourd. Until no tears, no rage, no pity had meaning for him.”
― Dorothy B. Hughes, In a Lonely Place

“He’s a wonderful dancer,’ Laurel cooed. She didn’t know; she’d never danced with him. But as long as she didn’t act up any more than this, he was satisfied.”
― Dorothy B. Hughes, In a Lonely Place

“He didn’t consciously bring Brub to memory. It was one of those minnows of thought, darting through the unruffled pond of his thinking.”
― Dorothy B. Hughes, In a Lonely Place

“He’d always, all of his life, loved the sound of breaking water. Nothing that had happened had changed that. The crawling of water over sand, the hush of a word no … no … no … not even that had changed his love of the power of the sea.”
― Dorothy B. Hughes, In a Lonely Place

“The knife is important to me, Korede. It is all I have left of him.”
― Oyinkan Braithwaite, My Sister, the Serial Killer

“All those smiling parents and their newborns? Murderers and victims. Every one of them.”
― Oyinkan Braithwaite, My Sister, the Serial Killer

“Her slippers slapped the ground.”
― Steph Cha, Your House Will Pay

“For a second, she perked up, a Pavlovian response wired into her since childhood. The sound of the garage that meant Umma or Appa was home.”
― Steph Cha, Your House Will Pay

“She didn’t have the resources to compete with the kids who practiced for hours each day, the ones who’d been playing since they were five, with professional teachers, with parents to prod them and pay for their lessons.”
― Steph Cha, Your House Will Pay

“Grace had never seen her mother look so scared, and she felt pity for her for a moment, and a cruel, ecstatic thrill of power.”
― Steph Cha, Your House Will Pay

“Smoke rose in a pillar like something from the Bible, dark and alive and climbing, becoming one with the gray sky.”
― Steph Cha, Your House Will Pay