Mike Finn > Mike's Quotes

“Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“At the entrance there had been a painting or a mirror on a wall, and it's oval outline was visible against the wallpaper, like a lonesome fingerprint at the scene of a crime”
― Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Mexican Gothic

“Vice', Noemi thought and was reminded of the nuns who had overseen her education. She'd learned rebellion while muttering the roseary.”
― Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Mexican Gothic

“Don’t you ever make the mistake of thinking that mortals want to live in a golden age. They hate thinking.”
― Kage Baker, In the Garden of Iden: The First Company Novel

“But I was young then and had yet to appreciate the wisdom of Bogart, particularly as regards the problems of three little people not amounting to a hill of beans in this or any other crazy world.”
― Kage Baker, In the Garden of Iden: The First Company Novel

“My daily drinking is just a means to an end. I’m not sure what that end is, but I intend not to be sober when I meet it.”
― C.S. O’Cinneide, Starr Sign: The Candace Starr Series

“Friendship, much like family, seems to come with too many attachments — like a vacuum cleaner too complicated to use.”
― C.S. O’Cinneide, Starr Sign: The Candace Starr Series

“Luckily, the woman at the receptionist desk is also new. The bitch I dealt with last time treated me too much like the white trash criminal that I am. But when I give this new woman my name, she is either too bored or too clueless to acknowledge what kind of person I am. Then again, she might just be nice. I have trouble telling the difference.”
― C.S. O’Cinneide, Starr Sign: The Candace Starr Series

“Vegetarians are supposed to live longer, but I think it just feels that way to them because their life sucks so much without meat.”
― C.S. O’Cinneide, Starr Sign: The Candace Starr Series

“Something smells off in the barns. Even in this city of olfactory tragedy, this scent’s more pungent and desperate than anything I’ve encountered before.”
― T.L. Huchu, The Library of the Dead

“She nursed a second beer while she tried not to race through the last three chapters of The Lens and the Dapplegrim. Brand was a blur beyond her vision, and the noise piled up against the walls, leaving her alone in the center of a perfect sphere of story. Each word tumbled into the next, a rockslide of prose that would end in a dramatic confrontation between Investigator Beckett and the deliciously devious Aramy, with Leena’s life in the balance. At least that’s where she expected things to go. The book had a way of confounding her expectations, and every time it did, she experienced a thrill of delight.”
― Travis Baldree, Bookshops & Bonedust

“No human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house, and yet somehow a maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair, more frightening because the face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice. Almost any house, caught unexpectedly or at an odd angle, can turn a deeply humorous look on a watching person; even a mischievous little chimney, or a dormer like a dimple, can catch up a beholder with a sense of fellowship; but a house arrogant and hating, never off guard, can only be evil.”
― Shriley Jackson

“No Human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house, and yet somehow a maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair, more frightening because the face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice. Almost any house, caught unexpectedly or at an odd angle, can turn a deeply humorous look on a watching person; even a mischievous little chimney, or a dormer like a dimple, can catch up a beholder with a sense of fellowship; but a house arrogant and hating, never off guard, can only be evil.”
― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

“There hadn’t been a god for many years. Not the nightgownclad patriarch of Sunday school coloring books; not the sensitive young man with the inevitable auburn ringlets Anna had stared through in the stained-glass windows at Mass; not the many-armed and many-faceted deities of the Bhagavad Gita that she’d worshipped alongside hashish and Dustin Hoffman in her college days. Even the short but gratifying parade of earth goddesses that had taken her to their ample bosoms in her early thirties had gone, though she remembered them with more kindness than the rest.

God was dead. Let Him rest in peace. Now, finally, the earth was hers with no taint of Heaven.”
― Nevada Barr, Track of the Cat

“We are like books. Most people only see our cover, the minority read only the introduction, many people believe the critics. Few will know our content.”
― Émile Zola